“The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind, etc”
How many times have we walked down the stairs to the sidewalk and past our front yard in the past 40 years? Who would keep track, and why would they even want to bother? Figuring one event per day comes out to over fourteen thousand such passages, either out the front door and down the front steps, or exiting from the basement and down past the side of the house to the steps underneath the magnolia. Figure several or sometimes many times a day and you get a dizzying number.
Given the changes in the seasons, it’s an ever changing landscape out there, somewhat barren in the colder months but the rest of the year a mix of leafy and floral splendor, courtesy of the passionate energy and gardening skills of one of us on the second floor, and you know of whom I speak, or you should.
Given that passion, it should come as no surprise that this person keeps careful track of goings on out there, under that magnolia, as well she should. Are her precious charges healthy, getting the right amount of water, respecting one another’s space and not crowding others out? Any new flowers? Any leafage getting chewed up indiscriminately by unseen predators? Any disgusting reminder that an irresponsible dog owner has passed by and not done his or her due diligence? Curse them!
Chances are she’s seen something amiss now and then over all these years, but nothing not readily explained and immediately dealt with.
So imagine what it was like to take that stroll out to the sidewalk for maybe the millionth time (a number within the realm of possibility, says I) and to notice something really strange. As in, all the plants covering the ground, there under the tree, were weirdly shiny, the sidewalk and the bricks topping the wall smudged in black. And where it was shiny, it was also sticky, which included the railing on the front stairs under the tree, which was truly gross.
What the hell was going on?
The requisite web inquiry and inspection of the tree (not necessarily in that order) revealed branches covered with fuzzy sticky brown blotches, lots of them, and what it is is scale, and it’s hard to say which is more gross, the general appearance of these things, or their adhesive qualities. And isn’t “scale” a really odd name for a bug? Wait, it gets odder and odder!
The female scale has no limbs! At least not when she reaches maturity, when she has crawled to her chosen place on the tree and starts sucking the sap, to such excess that she secretes the sticky stuff to the point where it starts raining down on everything below. Like, how gross can this get? She’s also covered with scales and extrudes a waxy substance that makes her impervious to insecticides! Is that not impressive, ingenious, and diabolical?
Male scale are a bit more comprehensible, resembling tiny flies, only it turns out they’re lousy fliers and tend to walk, most of the time.
Despite these shortcomings, fossils have been found showing that this class of bugs dates back to the Jurassic. Scale are a huge threat to the citrus industry, and have wreaked havoc to the tune of billions of dollars of crop losses over the years.
So how the heck did they end up on our tree, a magnolia given to us as a wedding present and put in the ground 40 years ago, when we bought the house? Two things: first, they are a warm weather order of insects, and climate change has facilitated their kind moving further and further north over the years, with the new normal of warmer winters, so it was only a matter of time; second, they were either carried here on the backs of various unsuspecting creatures on the move, or the answer is they blew in on northerly breezes, far more likely.
The tree guy, who should know, tells us they’ve probably been stealthily collecting up there for a couple of years now, also that there are ways they can be dealt with, though the time to begin is now, before it’s too late. Unlike the tree, our marriage of 40 years does not appear to currently be under threat of any kind, be it from the south or any other compass point you can name, which is no small consolation.
Those not living under a rock are well aware by now of how climate change has brought northward scads of new phenomena long common to more southerly places, like tropical storms and floods, incredibly prolific invasive plants and more new bugs than you can count, with any number of these primed to spread all manner of unfortunate disease.
From the glass half-full perspective, it has also brought us cardinals and red-bellied woodpeckers and Carolina wrens, and most recently, swallow-tailed kites, that appear to be nesting on Cape Cod this summer, for the first time in history. Now that’s pretty cool, and not gross at all.
