The Red Oak Borer Strikes Again!

There was a telltale sign sitting at the base of the big water oak tree in the pasture.  A big branch had broken off and fallen to the ground.

I looked up and saw more limbs without leaves on them!  Water oak trees without leaves in the middle of summer is a bad sign.

Looking over the canopy of the tree, there were leaves, but they were turning brown.  Not a good sign at all.

I walked around the tree and could see bark falling off the big tree in big sheets.  This tree is not dying.  It's dead.

At the very base of the tree, I could see holes.  This is evidence like you would find at a crime scene.  The holes are the fingerprint of the killer.  The borer beetle!  He strikes again.  He's killed several trees in our side pasture.

To give you an idea of the size of this tree, it measures 3 feet across.

This tree has some sentimental value.  Seventeen years ago when we moved into this house, we built a tree house around the tree using the wood from a pine tree from mom & dad's house that had been struck by lightning.  We fastened a cable around the tree about 15 feet up.  You can see that the tree has grown around the cable in places.

The cable runs down in a southward direction toward the barn.

It meets a horizontal crossbeam and there is a pulley and a handle that is our zip line.  Our kids, their friends and the neighbor kids have spent countless hours playing on the zip line, laughing, screaming, and enjoying themselves.

Here is a look from the bottom of the zip line back up to the dead tree.

The tree at the bottom of the zip line has completely grown around the landscape timber crossbeam behind the tubing of an old John Deere plow.

I'll have to call someone to take this tree down.  It is just too large for us to try to do it ourselves.  Bringing it down will be a sad time in many ways as I'll think about all the good times had under the shade of that old tree.  We'll get a lot of firewood from the tree, but we already have a pretty good inventory of firewood thanks to the work of the borer beetle on other water oaks we had!

Looking on the bright side, we were looking for a place to plant our Anniversary Live Oak.  I told Tricia when we take the old water oak down, we'll plant our Anniversary Live Oak right near where the old water oak stood.  Perhaps it can provide shade and fun for our future grandchildren and great-grandchildren one day.