cows on his family farm, and his son wants to become the fifth. But a recent decision by the Pennsylvania Game Commission may change Kilgore’s plans. The Airville, York County, farmer was recently notified by the agency that the approximately 70 acres he farms on two nearby state game land tracts (SGL 83 and SGL 181) will be changing, reverting from a primary use of active agriculture to a focus on wildlife habitat.
This is a pretty interesting video with lots of drone and other shots of manure injection directly into farm fields, helping to reduce manure run-off and pollution, while increasing the nutrients that help crops grow. Just watching this video smells very earthy, but in a good kind of pro-crop growth way.
In an unusual chain of events this spring, during which multiple failsafes were missed, ash trees potentially infested with emerald ash borers made their way from Maryland to Maine. They were sold at Lowe’s stores throughout the state. Now the state and the company are working to track those trees down.
Eighty trees were shipped to eight Lowe’s stores in Maine — all the chain’s stores in the state except the Presque Isle location — from a nursery in Connecticut. The Connecticut nursery had obtained the trees from a nursery in Maryland. Under federal and state quarantine invasive insect regulations, those trees never should have left Maryland or Connecticut, according to Maine agricultural officials.
This map shows how much of each county is delineated urban or rural.
The Census Bureau’s urban areas represent densely developed territory, and encompass residential, commercial, and other non-residential urban land uses. The Census Bureau delineates urban areas after each decennial census by applying specified criteria to decennial census and other data.
The Census Bureau identifies two types of urban areas:
- Urbanized Areas (UAs) of 50,000 or more people;
- Urban Clusters (UCs) of at least 2,500 and less than 50,000 people.
“Rural” encompasses all population, housing, and territory not included within an urban area.
This is unlikely. Woodpeckers feed on live, mature EAB larvae, mostly in late fall, winter and early spring. Many of these mature larvae overwinter in the nonliving, outer bark where they will not be exposed to systemic insecticides. Imidacloprid, dinotefuran, and emamectin benzoate are much more toxic to insects than to birds that have been tested, and insecticide concentrations that have been measured in treated trees are far below the levels known to be toxic to birds. An EAB larva that has been killed by insecticide will desiccate quickly and decompose. There is little evidence that woodpeckers will feed on larval cadavers. Furthermore, living larvae that are suitable prey for woodpeckers will not have been exposed to a lethal dose of insecticide, and these products do not bio-accumulate in animals in the way that fat-soluble insecticides such as DDT do. In Michigan and Ohio, where EAB has been established for several years, many ash trees have been treated with systemic insecticides. There have been no reported cases of woodpecker poisoning caused by insecticides applied for control of EAB.
The scourge of forests, the emerald ash borer, or EAB, is usually described with words like “destructive” and “pest.” A recent study based on data collected by citizen scientists suggests that one more adjective might apply, at least from a bird’s perspective: “delicious.”
In a study published this week in the journal Biological Invasions, U.S. Forest Service entomologist Andrew Liebhold and Cornell University scientist Walter Koenig and others document how an EAB invasion fueled a population boom for four species of birds in the Detroit area.
Driving back through rural Grafton earlier this evening around dusk, I got thinking how much I love the rural upcountry once it turns gray as November approaches. From the wild turkeys and deer along the road to the wood smoke to the old houses and shacks to the many shades of gray and brown in the hills around, I’m reminded this is truly God’s Country.
