After Terry Anderson bought an undeveloped parcel of forestland in Eagles Nest Township two decades ago, it didn’t take long to pick his building spot: a flat area midway up a hillside with a view of a little, pristine lake that looks like it belongs in the nearby Boundary Waters.
More than anything, he was drawn to the site by the trees.
“There was this beautiful thicket of balsam fir. It looked like a Christmas tree farm, so that’s where I built,” said Anderson, who lives in his off-grid, no plumbing one-room cabin in all but the coldest months.
Over the last few years, Anderson’s enthusiasm for his balsam firs has been tempered by an unwelcome visitor. The eastern spruce budworm — a native insect that feasts on the aromatic, fast-growing, and short-lived conifers — has exploded throughout much of northeast Minnesota.
In the years since the outbreak started, Anderson’s firs have been shedding needles and dying at an alarming rate. “At first, it was gradual,” he recalled. “You would notice the trees would get new, bright green buds in the spring. Then at a certain point they would all shrivel up and turn brown.” At mid-summer, he watched as the needle-eating caterpillars morphed into moths, forming dense clouds amid the defoliated treetops of his dying balsams.
In August 2021, a lightning strike ignited wildfire about 50 miles away, near the community of Isabella. The Greenwood Fire consumed about 27,000 acres, burned down 14 buildings and took six weeks to extinguish. The ferocity of the inferno was attributed to both severe drought and large stands of extremely flammable dead and dying balsam fir.
For Anderson, the scale of destruction drove home the point: He needed to get more of the dead trees off his land.
Since then, he has lost count of how many he’s felled. “If you include the little spindly ones, like eight feet tall, probably hundreds and hundreds,” he said. “I took down one stand near the lake that was about 50 feet by 50 feet. It was pure balsam.”
He is hardly alone in this Sisyphean struggle.
According to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources annual Forest Health Report, the current spruce budworm outbreak is the worst Minnesota has experienced since 1961.
Over the past four years, it has impacted over 2,000 square miles — or roughly 1.3 million acres — mainly in northeast Minnesota. That is roughly the equivalent of the surface area of Upper and Lower Red Lake, Mille Lacs, and Leech Lake combined. Last year alone, an estimated 712,000 acres were defoliated by the budworm.
Growing forest fire risk
The resulting death of balsam fir (and, to a lesser degree, white spruce) has many in the region worried about growing wildfire risk.
Last year, the Lessard Sams Outdoor Heritage Council doled out $900,000 to the DNR to diversify and regenerate budworm-impacted lands. In December, it recommended that the Legislature provide a $3.5 million grant to the nonprofit Nature Conservancy, which is spearheading planting and clearing programs to promote forest health across northern Minnesota.
Jim Manolis, the director of forest strategy and stewardship for the Nature Conservancy in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, said many of his organization’s efforts are aimed at spruce budworm. Last year, he said, the Conservancy, in partnership with landowners, planted about 2.3 million trees on 8,500 acres, mainly in the northeast.
Manolis said the Conservancy targets areas that are close to homes, along with sensitive natural places such as stream banks. When the firs that provide shade to streams die, he explained, the water heats more quickly, which endangers cold-water loving trout.
Still, Manolis acknowledged, the scale of the current outbreak is daunting. “To think we ‘re going to address a million acres, it’s not possible. We want to focus on priority areas,” he said.
So why is the current outbreak so severe?
While the budworm is native to Minnesota, the intensity of the outbreak is a consequence of human activities that have resulted in more balsam fir on the landscape. That began with the logging boom in the late 1800s.
After lumberjacks felled the old growth pine forests, balsam firs colonized many areas. Because of decades of fire suppression, those fir have grown into thick stands, where they are particularly vulnerable to the budworm, especially as they mature.
At the same time, Minnesota’s northern forests have become less diverse. In large part, this is because more fire-tolerant species, such as white pine, have struggled to regenerate. After the old growth was cut, whitetail deer, which favor a younger forest, moved into the Arrowhead. Deer don’t eat balsam fir but they feast upon white pine, white cedar, and other desirable trees.
In northeast Minnesota, budworm outbreaks occur on a 30-to-60-year cycle. The last large outbreak in Lake County happened in the 1990s, according to Eric Otto, the DNR’s forest health specialist in Grand Rapids
“Hopefully, we’re at the peak now,” said Otto.
In fir-rich Maine and the eastern provinces of Canada, forest managers have addressed the spruce budworm problem aggressively – and from above.
“They use an early intervention strategy, where they do intensive surveys of overwintering larvae to find the hotspots. Then they spray from air,” said Otto.
“Here in Minnesota, we are way past the point where that would make sense,” he added, noting that any such effort would be complicated by the mosaic of ownership in affected areas, as well as the sheer acreage.
Historically, spruce budworm outbreaks have occurred in the state for over a hundred years, with at least one outbreak detected every year since the 1950s. In 1923, a severe outbreak prompted the University of Minnesota’s Agricultural Extension to issue a special bulletin, warning that the budworm had done “inestimable damage.”
“Much of the balsam fir, and a part of the spruce, comprising a considerable portion of our northern forests, are dead or dying,” the bulletin reported. It wasn’t strictly an environmental concern. At the time, balsam fir was second only to the spruce as the tree most used in paper production in Minnesota.
Those days are long gone — and that has presented another major challenge for removing the dead firs from the landscape: The market is weak.
“The capacity to buy wood in our state is smaller than it used to be,” said Ray Higgins, vice president of the Minnesota Timber Producers Association. “In the middle 2000s, we used around four million cords of wood a year, now we use less than three million.”
The changing marketplace
The demand for balsam fir, in particular, has contracted dramatically. That began in 2008 when the Canadian company Ainsworth Lumber shuttered three northern Minnesota mills that used fir in the production of oriented strandboard. Another blow came in 2020 when Verso Paper, a major buyer, shuttered its bayfront mill in Duluth.
Higgins said the loss of Verso essentially eliminated the market for balsam fir in the northeast part of the state. Packaging Corporation of America, which bought the Boise Cascade paper mill in International Falls, doesn’t use fir in its manufacture of cardboard, Higgins said, which leaves UPM Blandin in Grand Rapids as the major fir buyer. Because Grand Rapids is a long way from many of the worst impacted areas, it isn’t an economically viable option for many Arrowhead-based loggers.
Still, Higgins holds out hope that Minnesota will develop new markets for balsam fir. One intriguing possibility: to use dead and dying trees as a feedstock for plant-based airplane fuel.
While research into sustainable aviation fuels, or SAF, is promising, Higgins said, it will be “at least five to ten years” before any markets could conceivably mature. Even then, he said, SAF is likely to be expensive and require significant subsidies.
Meanwhile, the dead and dying fir of Minnesota will continue to dry and the fire hazard will rise. Otto, of the DNR, said studies have shown that budworm-impacted stands reach peak flammability five to eight years after the trees die.
For people in the Arrowhead, that means the heightened fire hazard won’t be going away anytime soon.
At Eagles Nest Township, Terry Anderson said, his neighbors have become increasingly pro-active in clearing brush and various fire prevention efforts. For his part, Anderson has made it his custom to drag his felled balsam fir trees on to the lake ice, where he stacks them in a big pile. At the solstice, he invites neighbors for a raging bonfire.
Asked about his current fire anxiety, Anderson shrugged.
“Well, it should be higher than it is. I think the peak was three years ago, when we had that severe drought,” he said. “But I did make sure that my insurance coverage is still good.”
This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.