THE GREAT OUTDOORS;A Dose of Smelly Chemicals Keeps Tree Poachers Away
SOUTH BRUNSWICK— Crime is down again in New Jersey, the FBI reported last Monday. The car theft rate is falling. Murder is going out of style. Lost in all these encouraging statistics, however, is a minor but seasonally significant triumph of crime prevention: the theft of Tannenbaum-sized evergreens from the waysides and berms and embankments of the state's highways has all but ceased.
No one is sure exactly why this is. It may be linked to the drop in Christmas-tree prices over the past decade. It probably has a lot to do with highway agencies' well-publicized practice of spraying a repellent on trees that causes them to stink mightily at living-room temperatures.
Whatever the causes, officials, while they have no hard numbers to support their observations, report that Christmas-tree poaching, a fourth-degree misdemeanor, is just about under control.
"Eight or nine years ago, we were really getting hit," said George Schoener, the assistant landscaping foreman for the central section of the New Jersey Turnpike. "But it's come down, and now people don't steal them to sell anymore.
Officials in the Department of Transportation and the New Jersey Highway Authority said they had sharply scaled back their tree-spraying programs. But for the odd spur-of-the-moment tree shopper who happens to be carrying a chainsaw in the trunk, the turnpike still sprays several strategic stretches of roadside.
And so it was that seven days before Christmas, a couple of miles south of the Joyce Kilmer Service Area (named for New Jersey's poet laureate of tree preservation), a Turnpike Authority landscaper walked alongside a pickup truck outfitted with a power pump and a hose and misted a stand of recently planted Norway spruces with a deer repellent called Hinder.
The active ingredient in Hinder is common ammonia. Until three years ago, road crews sprayed a potion made from essence of bone tar oil, which packed a truly repulsive, gamy wallop but had the undesired side effect of nauseating nearby residents on warm winter days.
"There are people who live near the highway who don't want to smell bone tar oil," Mr. Schoener said. "We had complaints from schools."
After treating the cluster of about three dozen perfectly tapered seven-foot spruces, the crew moved a mile up the road and hit a grove of long-needled white pines.
Mr. Schoener said the saplings, planted along the side of a road-widening project, would cost more $100 apiece to replace. Why tempt the poachers and plant Christmas-type trees at all, then?
Two reasons. "For one thing," Mr. Schoener said, "we like diversity out here. The Turnpike Authority plants more than 80 species of trees and shrubs along the side of the road." The other reason, which might have troubled Joyce Kilmer, is that pines, with their low-hanging branches covered with impact-absorbing foliage, make good guard rails.
"If a car runs off the road and hits a bare-trunk tree, the car will wrap around that tree," Mr. Schoener said. "A pine tree will slow the car down and cause a lot less damage." He noted that evergreens, unlike trees that drop their leaves, also provide year-round sound barriers.
As his crew hosed down one last clump of spruces around the base of an overpass, Mr. Schoener revealed that some of those "Evergreen Trees Treated With Noxious Spray" signs are there just for show.
"It's impossible for us to hit every tree along the whole road," he said. "But it's like that sign that says, 'This house protected with a shotgun four days a week -- you try to guess which four.' "
Photo: Poachers beware: A turnpike maintenance worker sprayed treeslast week. (Dith Pran/The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/24/n...melly-chemicals-keeps-tree-poachers-away.html