Steamboat Daisies and Redkill

Alpine sunflowers and native pine bark beetle redkill, Steamboat Springs Lake State Park, Colorado. The mountain pine beetle, dendroctonus ponderosae, had never before crossed the continental divide in a single attack, the mountains were just too high. They had never before attacked species that were not pines. Until climate change changed our world. The beetles have now done all of the above travelling three-hundred miles on the winds of a single massive thunderstorm across the continental divide, and attacking not only pines, but fir and spruce as well.