But one sight deeply troubles him — the haggard look of the valley’s fabled Christmas trees. Some are bent like old men. The eye-popping green hue that makes people want to adorn them with ornaments had yellowed. A few were covered with hideous waxy balls, a telltale sign that they were under siege by the balsam woolly adelgid, a tiny insect with a notorious reputation among entomologists, who call it “the bug that ate Christmas.”
Along the southern Appalachian range, they are eating two of the nation’s most popular wild Christmas trees — Canaan and Fraser firs — to death.
People who buy Christmas trees at farms need not worry. Farmers who grow Christmas trees control the pest with a potent and costly insecticide, two-man crews spraying one to two acres a day. They work with agricultural extension agents to develop the most efficient pest management strategy because, said Rick Dungey of the National Christmas Tree Association, “it’s very expensive.”
But there’s no stopping adelgids in the wild, where applying chemicals might take out far more organisms than the target.