Winnetka man may be able to save trees from ash borer
October 26, 2006
By IRV LEAVITT Staff Writer
A Winnetka man says he may be able to save the Chicago area from losing millions of ash trees to the ravages of emerald ash borers, identified in Kane County and North Shore trees this year. He says he's got a machine that can stop the pests without poisoning them, swatting them or even touching them.
"The field tuner, once it's turned on in an area, confuses bugs and beetles, and they no longer look for trees as a source of food or housing," Rick Day said of the electronic device to which he and Chicagoan Bill Thornton have purchased Illinois rights.
"It sounds a little Star Trekkie, but that's okay. That's the way it is."
Day and Thornton want a government agency or a private corporation to fund a test of the device next spring, when adult borers are expected to gnaw their way through the bark of ash trees, mate, then look for other trees to land upon and lay eggs. The men say the tuner, a product of Tainio Technology & Technique, may not work on the ash borers, but they bet it will.
After weeks of calls to local, state and federal officials, looking for sponsors, few have even called back, however, Day says. And none have been very encouraging.
Thornton says more people should listen to him and his partner, instead of heading toward the Michigan method of controlling the emerald ash borer: chopping down all the trees within a certain distance of borer sightings.
"It's like curing a disease of the finger by cutting the whole arm off," said Thornton, of Chicago's Irving Park neighborhood.
Marc Tainio, son of Bruce Tainio, the Washington state inventor of the tuner system and other "natural agricultural" products, agreed last week. He said that pests usually pick on ailing trees, and a healthy tree "naturally gives off a signal to leave it alone. An insect will just walk away and not notice what it's on is food."
The field tuner, he said, works by generating a frequency that doesn't hurt humans or other creatures, but convinces bugs that a wide swath of territory contains no trees suitable for dinner.
Tom Hall, an Alaska golf course owner, said Friday that he's a believer. He said eight or ten years ago, he installed a Tainio field tuner on the state's big Kenai peninsula, with the intent of putting a dent in the scourge of the spruce bark beetle there.
"I put it on my property, on my own, and within six months, all of a sudden an article comes out in the paper that the spruce beetle (infestation) is over," Hall said.
"Do I understand it? No. It's hard to understand how you can stop something from eating when its mouth ain't full."
Michael Fastabend, Alaska's spruce bark beetle coordinator for the Kenai peninsula, said Friday that the last big infestation apparently peaked around 1998 because 95 percent of the spruces were gone.
"In most areas the beetles simply took out all the spruce," he said. "They simply ran out of breeding material."
Hall maintains there are more spruces left than experts claim, who ignore him because he lacks a college degree.
"Pretty much the whole peninsula was infested, and all of a sudden it happened to turn around as soon as the tuner went in?" he asked.
Fastabend said he's not entirely discounting Hall's claims.
"Even in areas of tremendous beetle activity, where you may lose 99 out of 100 trees, there are trees that survive," the forester said. "Some trees may have developed some sort of response so beetles are not attracted to them. I just don't know if it has anything to do with noise.
"My understanding of (beetles) is they really have a complex communications system when they're attacking trees," he added. He noted that both spruce bark beetles and adult emerald ash borers seem attracted by volatile compounds exuded by sick trees. And the Alaskan beetles also release compounds that seem to signal each other to congregate or disperse.
Day, a self-described "technology freak," owns Stand-Up MRI of Deerfield, a three-year-old firm that provides a different angle on magnetic resonance imaging, so doctors can understand conditions not evident when patients are horizontal.
In addition to rights to the tuner, the men say their firm, The Natural Edge, also controls local sales of Tainio's other products. Day says, for less than $20 twice a year, an ash tree can be so invigorated that the Emerald Ash Borer Beetle will pass it by.

This article was featured in the Winnetka Talk, a local weekly newspaper on October 26th,2006. The article was also featured as the lead story on the internet for the Pioneer Press.