Like a pile of dead elephants: On the loss of our great beech trees
By Jess Piskor
Sun contributor
Second in a two-part series. “Once more unto the Beech: Beech trees, Passenger pigeons and the struggle to survive in Northern Michigan” published in our April 10 edition.
It feels inviting to approach a beech maple forest on an early spring day when the snow is just thinning. Each beech tree has a ring of open forest floor around it, as the trees radiate the sun’s heat—islands of open earth in a snowy landscape. The forest floor is newly exposed and gives off the faintest scent of life returning.
Part of the forest is actively dying now, full of disease. There are the obvious fallen giants. The dead beeches rest in shattered grey tangled masses, like a pile of dead elephants. A few healthy-looking crowns have snapped off, 30 feet up—trunks weakened with disease. The branches show swollen pointed buds, as if the tree would leaf out one last time. It won’t. Many still stand, but are holed by woodpeckers. Shelf fungus grows up the sides, dropped limbs catch the foot. Here and there a few giants still look, dare I say, okay? At least one more year then, old friends. Let me gather your nuts.
It’s just the kind of day when the pigeons would have started to arrive, although it’s March instead of April. Scratching under the matted brown leaves, there are burred beechnut husks by the handful. Most are empty, and the few that have the triangular nut are moldy. A few wild ramp bulbs are just under their leaf blanket, poised. A little white worm wiggles, unhappy to feel the sun.
Stirring up the leaf litter sounds dirty. Pulling back the skirt of leaves from around the trunk and rooting around in there sounds filthy. Putting my face in this moist mesic beech maple forest and really smelling—well, that’s just raunchy. It’s a familiar smell to anyone who’s grown up in the woods, the organic matter sweet and alive. If you don’t know this smell, you will remember it once you smell it. It’s deeply lodged in our souls. Be brave. Taste it.
I’m here to visit the stump of a tree we cut down last spring. It’s as big as any in this forest. Three feet across, we’d seen the hanging widow-makers caught 60-feet overhead. The bark was cracked and the tree was dying. This tree should have outlived me. This time I’m not here with a chainsaw, but a chisel. I make a fresh groove across the grain and count the exposed rings. One hundred fifty years or so. The very heart is rotted out and I’m not being too scientific. The last year the pigeons were seen in numbers was in 1880. The nut that grew into this tree, this tree we reduced to firewood and is now heating my house, was passed over by the pigeons.
I know they were here. Early settler accounts tell of the birds arriving in 1880 in a swarm from over the Manitou’s arriving in a days-long stream at 60 mph. When they descended to feed, it was described as akin to standing under Niagara Falls, with the roaring a cacophony of flapping wings. Many of the early setters had in fact seen those great American falls on their journey west to wrest this land from the Anishnaabe. When the pigeons fed in the forest it was as a rolling avalanche that ate everything in its path.
There were beeches here then too, in far greater numbers. Today, the largest trees I can find are about 150 years old, middle aged by the standard of the trees. Beeches are very slow-growing and shade tolerant. Able to survive decades in understory, they bide time waiting for an opening in the canopy. The tree doesn’t even begin producing nuts until its forties. Twice as long as a maple; white pines need just five years.
That slow-growing nature makes it a prized hardwood for furniture and flooring and the durable wood turns into great tool handles. Hard yet workable, it has a pleasant light tan to pinkish color. Rift sawn planks align the slightly twisted grain pattern, exposing tan flecks and long medullary rays that travel from the heartwood out to the sapwood. Its thick branches, unsuitable for lumber, make desirable firewood.
All wood splits differently. Ash is like a bundle of straws loosely held together, practically falling apart when cleaved. Softwoods absorb the axe and a weak blow sticks. Maple is usually alright; elm is just a snarl.
Beech’s grain is slightly twisted and bound in tension. When split, it resists, and almost turns the axe, until something gives and the two pieces spring apart with a pop. The immediacy of the destruction overcomes what took centuries to grow together.
It’s easy to imagine these trees as inhabiting this region before people arrived, but people predate the trees here. As the glaciers retreated from this land, human societies far predating Anishinaabe culture followed the newly exposed tundra and meltwater valleys that became the Great Lakes. It was freshly-exposed land, changing from tundra, not yet covered in hardwoods but instead, mastodons and caribou.
The beeches, meanwhile, were ensconced in a small southern forest, living as a minor species among oak and magnolia. As the climate warmed, some trees like the beech practically flew northward, sometimes literally. The beech moved northward at a steady clip of 80 meters a year, which is fast for a tree species. A U.S. Forest Service history of the beech tree’s spread links the Passenger Pigeon to its rapid northern advance. Trees with heavy seeds and nuts are often spread by nut eating animals and the beech’s arrival across bodies of water suggest an avian arrival.
The birds and the beech are coiled together like fibers of the tree. The birds helped bring the trees north. With the beech forests then established, the range of the pigeons expanded to include all of the eastern United States and Canada. The only areas not dominated by beech maple forests had forests full of acorns or chestnuts, their other favorite foods. When the birds came for their last feast from these trees in 1880, what twisted irony to be clubbed to death with beech staves, packed in beechwood barrels and shipped down to Chicago on a propeller steamship whose boilers were fed with beech cordwood.
Without the birds to spread nuts from distant forests, a vital piece went missing. So, too, diminished the peregrine falcons and Cooper’s hawks that also feasted on the pigeons. The small mammalian predators had already been killed for their fur—now the balance shifted in favor of squirrels and year-round nut eaters. The forest ecosystem frayed but hung on, like an abandoned spiderweb blowing in the wind. The beeches have now been in decline for more than a century.
A declining forest was of little concern to the early white settlers. Many saw the giant trees as a nuisance and were often just as willing to burn them than bother selling them as lumber. The air was always thick with smoke as they burned to get to the soil underneath. Beech always grew on, or more accurately, helped create the best soil and was sought after for pioneer gardens. That fertility was in part from the pigeons whose nesting areas covered square miles and left the ground white with a 2-inch-thick crust of guano that killed vegetation and small trees, but reset the forest floor and was said to fertilize the area for decades afterward.
The American Beech Fagus grandifolia is a large hardwood tree that grows throughout the eastern United States and Canada and at one time comprised nearly one-fifth of the forest in many places. Its smooth silver bark is distinctive, and in parks and urban settings, is the bark of choice for lover’s initials. Deep in the woods there are no graven images but the bark is damaged in far worse ways.
Today, standing in this second-growth beech maple forest, the canopy is reduced, not by the birds, or the lumberjacks, or fire, but by an invasive species and home-growth threat. Beech Bark disease, a complex syndrome from Europe, has spread inexorably from Nova Scotia and after a century, has reached our forest.
While research is ongoing and we are just now understanding its complex causes, funding for invasive species research and control is uncertain with cuts to the U.S. Forest Service. While the beech bark disease is fatal to the trees it infects, it doesn’t appear to be fatal to the forest. That is reserved for a new invasive, this time a tiny nematode that causes Beech Leaf disease. First identified in the Ohio heart of the beech’s range in 2012, in just 13 years it has proven nearly overwhelmingly fatal. Detected in southern Michigan three years ago, its spread is uncontained, and once present in a forest, ineradicable.
It is an incomprehensible loss. And perhaps one nearly inevitable once we destroyed its partner in life, the now extinct Passenger Pigeon. There are tantalizing clues that these birds and trees had a much closer, verging on symbiotic, relationship than commonly realized. It’s a relationship that played out right here in Northern Michigan. It’s almost a forgotten part of our history, but to read old settler accounts of the region, beeches and pigeons are written of together and as a vital resource. How much resilience was cut down and sacrificed to the god of progress? What was it all for?
The town of Copemish in Manistee County was founded in 1891 as a lumbering town. The word copemish means “Beech tree” in Anishinaabemowin and under the copemish there, native people held councils. But by the time of the town’s founding, white settlers had taken possession of the land and were already finding the forest in retreat. Some wondered at the reckless clearcutting, but the prevailing businessmen were optimistic. Arch Cameron, who ran the Hannah & Lay Mercantile in Traverse City and later an eponymous mercantile in Central Lake, provided what he felt was ample justification in 1905:
“Well, the end is in sight—we can see through the woods. In 1866 … a small clearing of any kind was called an improvement, and was taxed as such. The timberland was looked on as of no value. Some mourn the disappearance of our forests, but we should remember that we could not have the forest and at the same time the people, and when all our timber has disappeared we will only have arrived at the point that the early settlers prayed and worked for – to get the land in shape for white people to live on.”
In just a few years the forests in Copemish were gone for pickle farms, although the street names remained. In 2025, I could find no beech trees along Beech Street, no elms on Elm, no cedar on Cedar, no ash on Ash. The pickle farms are gone along with two rail lines that met in this crossroad town. Is this the future the setters prayed and worked for?
Some can look back and want to make America great again. Now there are men in charge of our country who look fondly back to some golden age. They don’t see the forest or the trees, but the right of conquest and domination.
From the legend of a mother bear seeking refuge from fire, to lush landscapes and ships finding safe harbor in our bays, to present day discussions about climate refuges, this land to the lee of the Manitou Islands promises safety. But as the drowned bear cubs, the numerous shipwrecks and the murder of the passenger pigeons attest, perhaps this safety is more like the siren’s call than we want to admit. One hundred fifty years after the last pigeons, the last of the beeches, these pillars of the forest that seemed to hold up the canopy, are falling.
And what made America great? Partly it was our natural bounty, a bounty we still seem primarily interested in using up. And the other thing? What of the American spirit? Some would look to men like Arch Cameron and their ideas of dominion for the white man. Maybe. Maybe what makes us great is that Etta Boizard, 13, knew to gather beechnuts to get through a hard winter. And she survived because a neighbor lent a stovepipe, her mom sold a quilt for food and to pass time in that long cold winter, they went and visited friends.
The bonds holding us together as a nation are strong. The fibers that bind us to our neighbors are resilient. Make our relationships with our neighbors strong, or we split. If we don’t, we’ll be cleaved in two like the beech log I wish I never had to burn, crackling in my woodstove.
