If you've driven down the Sauble Parkway lately, you may have noticed an alarming sight just north-west of Amabel-Sauble Community School: several acres of pine forest are now cleared to rubble, with logs stacked high everywhere ...

What happened? No, it's not development, and while the recent winds did take a toll on many old trees, what's going on is some hard preventitive medicine --- I ran into Mark Wunderlich today and learned these woods had become infested with a nasty parasite, and to save the rest of our woods, the forest authority (MNR?) has decided these lots have to go. Mark believes the lumber cut will need to be destroyed.

Before you ask, no, it's apparently not the hardwood Asian Longhorn that is making the Toronto news; Mark didn't offer the exact details, but the trees I saw today, what was left of them, were pines, perhaps fallen to the deadly Pine Shoot Beetle, but that's just a wild guess -- the Town Site's news is silent on the issue.

The pine forests in Sauble were planted by the County to replace trees lost when the great fire of 1906 that burned most of the peninsula's old-growth forests to the ground.