Hemlocks are dying near Paradise Bay. The Lake George cove is lined with their lacy branches dangling dark green above the water. Steps from the shore and into the forest, the canopy thins. Brown needles have fallen from branches leaving behind brittle skeletons. Nibs of lime green, the sign of new growth, cannot be found.
Mark Whitmore looks up.
Then he looks down to forage mushrooms, disappearing for a while. There must be some good news in a place called Paradise. Alas, on this October day, he comes back mushroom-less. Instead, the entomologist is holding a hemlock limb dotted with white puffs. These are the tree killers.
Whitmore is the principal investigator of Cornell University’s New York State Hemlock Initiative. He has studied tree-eating insects for over three decades. The hemlock woolly adelgid has become his specialty. The bug is native to the Pacific Northwest, China and Japan. Scientists believe woolly adelgid was brought to the eastern U.S. on Japanese ornamental plants in the early 1900s.
The invasive insect, so tiny it spreads on the wind, was first spotted in the Adirondacks in 2017 on Prospect Mountain in Lake George. Insecticides tamped them down, but in 2020, a camper found a sample on the eastern lakeshore at Glen Island Campground. Jason Denham, forester with the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s Bureau of Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health, said surveys now show adelgids are on hundreds of acres. The discovery was particularly alarming to state and local researchers because hemlocks are one of the
