If CAA had been in Chicago, as planned, rather than on line, I'd be there now, and not going for an early morning walk on the eastern fringes of Griffith Park, where the Department of Water and Power has a very elderly flag pole outside a small pumping station. It's fringed by trees - probably dying trees, because the pines in Griffith Park, like elsewhere, are drought stressed, and vulnerable, and are being chewed to death by beetle larvae. I'm not quite sure what kind of pines these are (maybe Canary Island pines?) - to know that would be to know their predators (Canary Pines are especially vulnerable to Hylurgus ligniperda, or the Redhaired Pine Beetle - the CP memorial pine planted in Griffith Park in memory of George Harrison was killed by this species).
I've read a huge amount about pine beetles over the last month or so - pine beetles being a terrible scourge, and proliferating not just because trees are weakened by climate change, but because less cold winters, less severe frosts, don't kill off larvae as they used to (obviously this was never true of LA, but still ...). I'll be talking about pine beetles - and Suze Woolf's amazing wood books made from beetle damaged wood; and about my old friend the woolly adelgid beetle (which attacks Eastern Hemlocks) in my CAA paper on Friday, relating Woolf's work to Thomas Moran, and Jean Shin's Fallen to Thomas Cole and Frederic Church - so, for all you CAA types, that will be at 7.00 a.m. (!!) PST on Friday morning. Oh, and my copy of Sibley's Guide to Trees should arrive tomorrow - I find my inability to distinguish between pine trees and fir trees increasingly infuriating.
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