HOKAH, MINN. -- Walking the rails, roadsides and riverbanks of southeastern Minnesota, Andy David and his crew looked like they might have fallen off a boxcar. Two carried paper bags. One wore a white flannel Tyrolean hat and carried a sheaf of long yellow poles over his shoulder.
The four were actually on the front end of an effort -- part yard work and part science fiction -- to preserve one of the nation's most besieged natural species: the ash tree.
Poking into the branches of trees, stripping clumps of seed into bags and cataloging each sample, the group was one of dozens across the United States and Canada collecting ash seeds to restore the species after the emerald ash borer destroys much of the ash standing today. At risk in Minnesota are nearly 1 billion trees, roughly 6.4 percent of Minnesota's urban and wild forest.
"If we can store them for 20 years, we're basically buying time," David said. "Once the entomologists figure out a way to control emerald ash borer, we can then reintroduce that species into areas where we know it historically existed."
David is in his third season collecting ash seeds under the University of Minnesota's Rapid Agricultural Response Fund. Since 2002, when the ash borer was discovered to be the reason why ash were dying in Michigan, foresters have known that the insect would eventually make its way to Minnesota.
But the gathering has a new urgency this year. The bug was found in May in St. Paul, where its first 68 victim trees were quickly removed. Agriculture and forestry experts, and even private property owners, are now watching and waiting to see where else the bug might turn up next spring when the larvae burrow out of trees. They're trying to limit the destruction by removing infested trees, restricting the transport of ash brush and lumber, and injecting pesticides into particularly prized trees.
But it's widely assumed that the pest, which arrived in the United States in packing crates from China in the 1990s, will destroy hundreds of millions of the state's ash trees. It has killed 30 million trees in Michigan alone, and has been identified in 12 other states and two Canadian provinces.
One tree at a time