Oh no! My Trees are all dying!

At work, my job is to get baby trees planted and take care of them to make sure they survive and grow.  If we see trees dying we always want to check it out and figure out why so we can fix it when we plant more trees there.  There are a couple spots on the property that have recently caused people to come into our office to tell us that we have a big patch of dead trees.  The same spots have even caused some other employees in the company to search me out to tell me that a big patch of trees are all dying!  I am usually concerned about this, until they tell me where they saw this happening.  Here is what the spot looks like.

All the trees are dying, what's going on?

A close-up of all the yellow needles, that's a bad sign.

This would normally not be a good thing in our plantations.

There are two basic kinds of trees out there.  Conifers, which generally have needle shaped leaves and stay green all year long retaining a couple years of needles all the time.  The second kind of trees would be Deciduous trees.  They generally have leaf like leaves and the leaves fall off every year and new ones grow the next.  The most common tree we plant in the forest is a Douglas-fir.  It is a conifer and is green all year long.  That is what most people are used to seeing in the plantations out in the woods, so when they drive by a bunch of conifer looking trees that are all turning yellow and falling off, they think the Douglas-fir trees are all dying!  However, these particular trees happen to not be of the Douglas-fir variety.  They are Western Larch, which is one of the trees that caused me to say "generally" when talking about conifers and deciduous trees earlier in this post.  Western Larch is a conifer, but it acts like a deciduous tree in that it loses its needles every year.  So if you are driving around on the forest property I manage and you see a big patch of trees that are all losing their needles and looking dead it is likely to be a patch of Western Larch.  So there is no worries, they will be green again in the Spring. Just some more of the wonderful things that God created.