Saltcedar, Once Freely Planted,
Now Recognized As Curse On Land

SAN ANTONIO, N.M. —(AP)— Officials at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge are having a hard time getting rid of salt cedar — the water-swilling shrubs that have infested every river system in the Southwest since being brought to the United States nearly 200 years ago.

Bulldozers have scraped the shrubs from the prime riverside refuge, but thousands of blue-green shoots are popping back up through the sand

``They're a curse. I call them the evil influence,'' said refuge manager Phil Norton.

He has a plan to kill the troublesome shrubs. It's one of the most promising tactics in the war against this Old World invader. It involves complicated, carefully timed combination of herbicides, fire and flood.

Salt cedar was brought to the United States beginning in the early 1800s from its Eurasian home. During the early part of the century, the federal government planted the scaly leafed shrub to help shore up stream banks from erosion.

Others planted it because they though it was pretty or they planted it as a windbreak.

But once released in the West, salt cedar proliferated along rivers and streams.

Scientists have estimated that it exploded from about 10,000 acres in 1920 to about 1.3 million acres by 1970.

``We don't have a river system in the West that doesn't have it,'' said Keith Duncan, a New Mexico State University range scientist.

Today, ongoing studies at Bosque del Apache are proving that the salt cedar, in addition to being an enemy to species' diversity, is a water hog.

``It's one of the worst ecological disasters ever to hit the western riparian areas,'' said C. Jack DeLoach, USDA entomologist in Texas who is bringing salt cedar-eating bugs from central Asia to combat the trees.

Salt cedar's tiny, pollen-sized seeds spread year-round so that it so that it does not — like cottonwoods — require seasonal flooding to germinate. It grows in dense thickets and sheds salt onto the ground around it, making it difficult for salt-intolerant plants to grow.

Cottonwoods and willows, two of the main plant species along the Rio Grande, require that their roots be in contact with groundwater. But salt cedar dries the plants out by hogging the water, and the native species are losing ground.

``We've created a hell of a mess,'' Norton said. ``We know it. Everybody knows it. But we don't know how to solve it.''

In recent weeks, DeLoach and his colleagues have been placing imported salt cedar leaf beetles on caged shrubs in six states throughout the West, not including New Mexico. The beetles will keep the shrubs in check, DeLoach said.

DeLoach hopes to get permission to release the bugs in salt cedar thickets around the West. And he hopes that in five to 10 years the beetles will have killed enough salt cedar that the shrub will be contained.

``I don't think this one will be a solution by itself,'' he said. ``It's going to take four or five species.''

He added that the beetle will not become an ecological pest here because it eats nothing but salt cedar.

The other tool range mangers can use is an arsenal of herbicides that are nontoxic to animals but deadly for the salt cedar.

At Bosque del Apache, Norton is fine-tuning his battle plan.

The best and cheapest way to battle the shrubs, he said, is to spray salt cedar with herbicides, wait a few years until the plant is dead and then burn it. He recommended then scoring the ground to make it easier for cottonwood seeds to find a bed and germinate.