What causes it:
Beetles, CLEVELAND — aphids, viruses and fungi are marching into Ohio, attacking the majestic trees that fill our forests, line our streets and grace our yards.
Premier among these agricultural menaces is the emerald ash borer, which has already devastated most of the ash trees in the state.
The latest scourge is the oak wilt virus, which is infecting the stately century trees of the Rockefeller Estate in Cleveland Heights and East Cleveland, where the blight spread “from five trees to 50 trees virtually overnight,” said Jane Goodman, who heads the Cuyahoga ReLeaf program of the Cuyahoga River Restoration group.
Oak wilt also has invaded woodlands in Akron, Cuyahoga Falls and Strongsville.
Conifers, meanwhile, are under attack from pernicious insects, whose bites are turning them brown and ultimately killing them. Southern pine beetle, Asian longhorned beetle and Hemlock woolly adelgid are the primary culprits.
In some cases, vaccinations or fungicidal treatments are available to protect the trees from these invaders. But the treatments can be expensive. The cost typically ranges from $100 to $1,000. And if the trees aren’t injected before the symptoms appear, it’s usually too late, said Domenic Liberatore, a certified arborist from Shaker Heights.
“We’ve been frustrated by the lack of communication in spreading the word about these diseases,” Liberatore said. “They’re so destructive and there is so little awareness. The faster we can get the word out the more trees we can save.”
Goodman said the potential loss of oaks would be devastating to Northeast Ohio.
“Oaks are at the core of our native forests, the biggest and oldest and shadiest of our trees,” Goodman said. “We cannot replace these big old trees fast enough to overcome all of the diseases and pests that are killing them.”
Here’s what you need to know about these tree blights, and how you can stop them:
What causes it:
A fungus enters the tree through wounds in the bark, plugging the flow of water and sap. It spreads via non-sterilized chainsaws, roots, squirrels, beetles, cicadas, even birds.
Leaves begin to wither and turn brown, eventually falling from the tree. Death to the tree can occur as quickly as a few weeks.
What to look for: Where is it happening:
It’s been reported in nearly all of Ohio’s 88 counties, with outbreaks in Cleveland Heights, East Cleveland, Akron, Cuyahoga Falls, and Strongsville.
What you can do to stop it:
Avoid pruning oaks during the growing season in the warm weather months. If a wound occurs, patch the open bark with latex. An injection of a vaccination is another option, but it must be administered by a certified arborist.
What causes it:
The adelgid is a tiny aphid-like insect that inserts its straw-like mouthparts into the base of hemlock needles, where it feeds on sugars stored in the foliage. The insect may also inject a toxin while feeding. The resulting desiccation causes the tree to lose needles and not produce new growth.
What to look for:
Balls of adelgids in a stricken hemlock can be found on the undersides of needles from October through May, when they produce a white, woolly covering. Stricken Hemlocks frequently turn grayish-green. Death typically occurs four to 10 years after infestation.
Where is it happening:
The adelgid, native to Asia, has infested hemlock forests throughout much of the Appalachian Mountains and the Eastern U.S., including the Eastern third of Ohio. This past summer, it was discovered on about three dozen trees on Little Mountain just outside the Holden Arboretum in Lake County, said Roger Gettig, the arboretum’s vice president of horticulture and conservation. “It’s horrible, but was probably inevitable,” he said.
What you can do to stop it:
Hemlock woolly adelgid infestations were discovered in Cuyahoga and Summit counties in 2008-2009, according to the Ohio Department of Agriculture. The infested trees were cut and burned. Foliage insecticide sprays can be effective, but are expensive. Biological controls such as adelgid-eating beetles are being tested in Southern Ohio, and have had some success, Gettig said.
What causes it:
These tiny beetles are considered the most aggressive tree-killing insect on Earth. The beetles must kill their host pines to reproduce, and attack trees en masse, boring into the bark and laying their eggs. The larvae feed for a month or more, constructing feeding tunnels and eventually killing the tree.
What to look for:
Huge swaths of dying pine trees, with brown needles and bare limbs.
Where is it happening:
Originally limited to the Southeastern U.S., the range of the pine beetle is expanding
The beetles arrived from China about 20 years ago, and attack a variety of trees, including maple, elm, horse chestnut, sycamore, birch and willow. “They’re not picky,” said Gettig, “which makes them very scary.”
What to look for:
The beetles are large and gaudy. They drill dime-sized holes into their target trees, burrow deep inside to lay their eggs, and essentially eat the tree from the inside out. They leave piles of sawdust at the base of the tree.
Where is it happening:
The beetles have infested swaths of hardwood forests in Southwest Ohio, New York and Canada. “They spread as far as they can fly,” Gettig said. “And they try to kill everything in the vicinity that they can find.”
What you can do to stop it:
The only way to stop this virulent beetle is to cut down and destroy their nesting trees. Eliminating an infestation usually takes at least a decade.
It involves finding every infested tree, removing it and searching the remaining trees to make sure the beetle is not there.
Should you spot Hemlock Woolly Adelgid, Southern Pine Beetle or the Asian Longhorned Beetle, alert the Ohio Department of Agriculture at 614-322-4700.
When Ohio State opens its home season Saturday against Oklahoma, John Crawford won’t be in the seats for the first time since World War II.
“We were making arrangements to bring him any way we could — wheelchair, anything,” said Jon Orr, his sonin-law.
But the 86-year-old Crawford succumbed Wednesday night to a fast-moving blood disorder, diagnosed a few months earlier through a routine physical. He was in hospice care when he died.
Crawford’s home-game streak spanning 74 years brought him much attention, but it wasn’t all that defined him, said his wife, Harriet.
“He was more than a football lover. He was a fine human being.”
Harriet had four daughters when she wed Crawford 44 years ago. He liked to say he married a whole family.
“He told me on our anniversary, which was one of the last days he was able to communicate, that his life started when he married us,” she said.
She appreciated the sentiment but said her husband was underestimating his bachelorhood.
Crawford worked in local theater and television and later became a teacher of radio and TV production at Fort Hayes High School in Columbus. After retirement, he volunteered at Riverside Methodist Hospital, escorting departing patients.
“He loved tucking the new babies into the car,” Orr said.
The streak that brought him fame began when Crawford, then 12, saw Ohio State beat Illinois on Nov. 13, 1943.
As a teenager, he became an Ohio Stadium vendor and, after enrolling at the university, an OSU cheerleader. For a while, he had an apartment on the second floor of the Varsity Club, the Buckeye-centric bar on Lane Avenue.
He was at the blizzardy “Snow Bowl” against Michigan in 1950 and traveled by train to the 1955 Rose Bowl against the University of Southern California. In 1992, he managed to attend a day game and still fly to a nephew’s evening wedding in New Jersey (with the help of a postgame helicopter ride to the airport).
He wore the same pair of lucky socks to every game for years and, even into his 80s, belted out “Carmen Ohio” in a strong voice.
If fate had to decree that the 2016 season be his last, it at least granted a stirring climax: the double-overtime win against Michigan.
Crawford’s finale as a fan, Orr said, came as the game neared its conclusion and the tense crowd had fallen quiet.
“I said, ‘Crawford, you gotta start a cheer.’ So he started ‘OH,’ and it picked up and went around and that’s when everything took off.
“So I credit him with that win.”