Vienna, 27 June 2024
My wife and I recently completed our annual hike in the Dolomites. We returned to old stamping grounds this year, to the Val di Fassa, in the autonomous province of Trento. This was where we started our annual pilgrimages to the Dolomites five years ago. That year, however, our carefully constructed six-day hike was thrown into chaos and confusion by two mega-meteorological events. The first was a hugely powerful windstorm, Vaia, which swept through the Italian Alps in late October of 2018 and brought millions of trees crashing to the ground – the official tally talks of 8 million cubic metres of trees being downed.
The second was a monster snowfall in May of 2019, a mere month before we were meant to start our hike.
As we saw over and over again during our severely modified hike, the Val di Fassa was badly hit by Vaia.
A good number of the trails we were meant to take were blocked off over long sections by downed trees. The local tourism authorities had planned to use the month of May to clear the trails, but the monster snowfall of that month put paid to their plan. On top of it, that unexpectedly heavy snowfall meant that a good number of the huts we were meant to spend nights at, and the trails leading into them and out from them, were still blocked with snow when we arrived in the Val di Fassa.
Five years on, the weather behaved better in the preceding months, and we were able to do a good number of the trails blocked to us back in 2019. We got off to an iffy start, hiking in fog so thick that we could have been in a park in Milan during the month of November.
But after that, the weather cleared and glorious sights awaited us!
It wasn’t just towering mountains and emerald valleys far below us that left us breathless (although some of the breathlessness was also due to our climbing hundreds of metres of steep slopes). It was also the streams and small lakes we passed by.
Or the wild flowers that greeted us along the paths we passed along.
Even the smallest beings we came across had the power to enchant us.
There were shadows among all this wonderfulnness, though, notably the clusters of dead European spruce trees we saw dotting the woods that clothed the steep flanks of the valleys.
All was not right. There hadn’t been so many standing dead trees in 2019. What was going on? A massive infestation by another beetle was what was going on. A beetle not nearly as cute-looking as the other beetles we had seen and photographed.
A beetle which goes by the name of European spruce bark beetle in English and bostrico tipografo in Italian. The English name is rather prosaic, merely confirming the beetle’s preferred victim to be the European spruce. The Italian name is much more interesting. The second part of the name rather colourfully indicates the type of intriguing “calligraphy” which the beetle and its offspring create in the tree as they burrow into it – and kill it.
The first part of the Italian name also harks back to the elegant whorl-shaped channels which other members of this family of wood-burrowing beetle creates. It is an italianization of the name that Aristotle gave to the family, βόστρυχος, which is the Greek word for “curl”.
I hope my readers will excuse this little riff on the etymology of the beetle’s name, but I feel that often the origin of words tells us a lot about how our ancestors perceived the world around them. In any event, for all its intriguingly shaped burrows, this beetle kills the European spruces (and other trees) which it infects, and it kills them quite quickly, within a few months. The trees first look peeky, their crown wilting and turning rust-coloured, then they start massively losing their needles, then they dry out, at which point, to borrow – with the necessary adaptations – John Cleese’s speech about the dead Norwegian parrot, the trees are no more, they have ceased to be, they’re expired and gone to meet their maker, they are late trees, bereft of life they rest in peace, they’ve rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible: they are ex-trees.
Under normal circumstances, healthy European spruce can beat off the nefarious beetle’s attacks, which usually only burrows into dead trees or trees that are already dying. The infestations are endemic but under control. But after huge destructions of trees which massive storms like Vaia bring about, there is suddenly vast amounts of dead and dying trees available for the beetle to feast on. Worse, the trees which have remained standing are – unsurprisingly – stressed and unable to defend themselves effectively, so the beetle also merrily attacks apparently healthy standing trees. The result: an uncontrolled epidemic of the beetle, with huge increases in its population, and the large patches of dead trees we were seeing everywhere.
Locals grimly told us that it could be five years or more before the situation rights itself and beetle populations drop back down to endemic levels again. By then, perhaps as many trees will have been killed off as were brought down by Vaia. I fear that if we come back to Val di Fassa in the coming years, we’ll find valleys which look like they have a bad case of the mange, with big, bald patches speckling the hillsides.
I don’t want to sound smugly virtuous, but the people who manage these forests haven’t done a very good job. Anxious to maximise profits, they have planted monocultures of European spruce and trees all of the same age, to make it easy to clear cut any particular patch of forest. If instead they had planted a mix of different species and ensured a mix of trees with different ages, they might have made less profits short-term but they would have been better able to weather big disruptions like those caused by Vaia. This is especially urgent since with climate change massive, intense storms like Vaia (wind velocities of over 200 km/hr were recorded) are going to happen more frequently.
But who is listening to old farts like me? I fear that on our future hikes, my wife and I will be mournful witnesses to ever more examples of short-term thinking: downed trees, dead trees, bad erosion, flooding, desertification, and on and on. I despair sometimes at the world we are leaving our little grandson and any other grandchildren who may soon come along.
the heart thrills 