Dead Trees - CenLa

Yeah, it's actually pretty crazy, tons of the older oaks around my house are just dead. Have had two giant oaks that have fallen in the road and they had to call us at the FD to come clear the road. Pretty crazy and I never thought about it but now that you point it out.

-CENLA

Where is this? CRP/wrp?

Cow oak and nuttall natural range have very limited overlap.

Bottomland hardwoods south of alec. We have some cow oak on the higher benches but the majority of the trees are nutall, willow and water oaks with a ton of hackberry and sweet gum mixed in. Cypress, willow, privet and winged elm in the sloughs and bayou.

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I’m in SW MS and between Ida in 2021 (it was still a cat 1 here), drought in 2023 and pine beetles, it’s taken a severe toll. Thankfully my pines were adequately thinned which mitigated beetle damage, then I clear cut half and thinned the other half in 2024 and 2025. Oaks and other hardwoods are still dying in 2025 due to the stress of the 2023 drought. Constant clearing of roads, plots etc. It’s been so bad that I took a loss on taxes for my timber LLC which owns the land.

I was in central Ms last week and it looked like 90% of water oaks are dead or dying.


Woodpeckers finna eat

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home of the does and button bucks

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I am JUST getting back into it, was stationed out in GA but that is what I hear from EVERYONE that I talked to. My brother got a SOLID 8 point back in 2020 out here though. Was on deployment, so pissed :rotflmao:

Haven’t had many oaks die on my family property here in Grant parish but did have quite a few pines die,mostly younger ones.
There is a bunch of dead pines on Hwy 71.especially in the vicinity of the horse farm,many of which are going to fall on the highway.A few days ago I was going to town and one had fallen across the N bound lane.
Called DOTD,they ignored me.I went to State Police Troop E headquarters abiout the dead pines,asked if they could put pressure on DOTD.They couldn’t have cared less.
A few months ago DOTD did come take down some of them but there are still quite a few.
Somebody is going to get killed or seriously injured.

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I was in central Ms last week and it looked like 90% of water oaks are dead or dying.


Woodpeckers finna eat

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I have a bottomland hardwood tract in that region of mature water, willow and nuttall oaks that is almost 100% dead. A mix of stressors initiated it and a 1000 year flood event in June kept water on it for almost 2 weeks and that finished the job. Absolutely devastating damage.

I was talking to a silvicultarist for the USFS and he said there's early concern that we might have a blight that has jumped to oak and other hardwood species, which would be absolutely apocalyptic to biodiversity and our ecology. We already have a bad pine blight that is adding stress on trees.

To add insult to injury, they just confirmed that MS now has the emerald ash borer.

All the virtue signalers in our capitals are hollering about climate change, but they're completely silent about the real ecological disaster that is already here: invasives. We could mitigate for further damage in one fell swoop by implementing laws that ban nurseries and garden centers from selling invasives and put people in jail with crippling fines if they're caught owning, selling or possessing invasive animals in the pet trade. We also need a one or two day training regimen for right of way mowers to be able to identify and mark for reporting of obvious invasives like kudzu and cogongrass. I personally am sick and tired of paying taxes to have right of way mowers drive through a kudzu patch or cogongrass patch that's in full bloom and have them spread it a mile down the road to my property and then having to treat it. It's such a simple, practical mitigation measure.

A forester for the USFS did a thesis on cogongrass spread in MS and found that right of way mowing was spreading cogongrass grass at a rate of 20+ miles per day. Whenever they stop for the day they clean their equipment off and now you have a new point source for further spread. I've talked with our state plant burea who is responsible for invasives and they have no intent to address the problem with practical measures.

But addressing it makes too much sense for the bureaucrats. It might require too much extra work for a little while to implement change. There's no money to be made or virtues to pronounce. Between kudzu, cogongrass and Japanese stiltgrass (which is absolutely deadly for young chicks and poults), it's a wonder any quail chicks and turkey poults survive to adulthood. Add in woody stem invasives and the animal invasives and it's a wonder we have any wildlife at all. I implore outdoorsmen and conservationist to become adept at identifying invasives in your area and be proactive. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure (the cure is oftentimes financially impossible once the cat is out of the bag), and we can start by managing the habitat correctly and not mowing down native cover every year in prime nesting and fawning season.

You will see a lot of dead trees in an area that due to whatever was normally a "wet" area and due to that the root structure of the trees was very shallow since they did not have go deep to find water. Along comes an extended drought and the shallow root structure cannot find enough water...tree dies.

Good example is the area within the south circle at Ellick. That area was normally "wet" due to the highway built up around it. Along comes the major drought of 23 and shallow root systems can't gather enough water for the tree in a very crowded area and now you see several dead or dying.