Dolgeville
For decades the Rawlings Adirondack baseball bat factory has turned out bats for the major leagues using only one type of wood – white ash, prized for being both light and strong. But now the plant also uses maple as owners eye the possibility that ash may vanish to a voracious Chinese beetle that is spreading through the state.
”That day is probably inevitable, but we are hoping for it to be a long time before the ash is wiped out,” said Robert Johnson, who buy logs for and manages the Rawlings sawmill next to its bat factory, which for about 60 years has been turning out baseball bats.
The plant already has mixed in maple wood to its production, starting in 2007. That was not because of the emerald ash borer, which has killed tens of millions of ash trees since arriving a decade ago in the Great Lakes and reached New York three summers ago.
Rather, said Johnson, maple got added to the Rawlings line after slugger Barry Bonds broke the all-time home run record in 2007 using bats made from maple. Other players followed suit, creating a demand for maple bats.
But ash, being lighter for the same strength, remains the preferred bat in Major League Baseball, and the Dolgeville sawmill still uses ash for about 90 percent of the 1.2 million board feet it cuts each year, said Johnson.
Should ash in New York eventually disappear, like it has in Michigan, where the bright green ash borer first appeared in 2002, the Rawlings mill could be forced to switch completely to maple, he said. “There has been some talk about using other species,” he added.
The Herkimer County mill is in the middle of two large areas to the west and east where ash borers have been found, and the state prohibits ash from being moved in a bid to prevent beetles from being inadvertently spread.
Johnson said there are about 16 workers at the mill and another two dozen employees at the nearby plant were the wooden billets — a tubular piece of wood that has been dried in a high-temperature kiln — are turned on lathes to make finished bats. About 400,000 finished bats a year emerge from the facility, he said.
Continued spread of the beetle in New York threatens the state’s 900 million ash trees, which make up about 7 percent of the state’s forests.
In March, Albany County became the latest county in the state to be added to a growing list of counties under the quarantine, when the state Department of Agriculture and Markets restricted the movement of ash logs or wood, nursery stock and all firewood.
Last fall, a single adult emerald ash borer was found inside an insect trap near the Selkirk rail yard in Bethlehem, about eight miles south of the city of Albany. State wildlife officials have scattered thousand of the purple traps throughout the state to track the insect’s advance.
The beetles were found for the first time on the east side of the Hudson River in March, when beetles were found in a state trap in Dutchess County, according to the state Agriculture and Markets. That county has not yet been added to the quarantine list.
So far, 20 of the state’s 52 counties, including Greene, Ulster and Orange counties in the Hudson Valley, are under quarantine, imposed by the state Department of Environmental Conservation, the federal Agriculture Department or state Agriculture Department.
It is still too early to know whether tests done in Greene County and elsewhere last summer with Chinese wasps, which are native to forest home of the borer and feed on its larval form, were effective, said John Vandenberg, a research entomologist with the U.S. Agriculture Department Research Service
The wasps lay eggs on the larvae or eggs of the beetle, and the wasp larvae consume the host. Vandenberg said trees around wasp release sites will be tested to see if the wasp larvae are present.
Since appearing near Detroit in 2002, likely carried in on shipping pallets from China, the beetle has spread unchecked by any natural predators; the first beetle in New York was found in June 2009 in rural Randolph, Cattaraugus County.
As the beetle approached the state, officials banned transport of untreated firewood to 50 miles or less.
The beetles have spread to 14 states, including Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Ontario, Pennsylvania, Quebec, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin; and two neighboring Canadian provinces.
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