The bronze birch borer Agrilus anxius is a wood-boring Buprestid beetle native to North America, more numerous in warmer parts of the continent and rare in the north. It is a serious pest on birch trees (Betula), frequently killing them. The River Birch Betula nigra is the most resistant species, other American birches less so, while the European and Asian birches have no resistance to it at all and are effectively impossible to grow in the eastern United States as a result.
It is closely related to the emerald ash borer.
Famous quotes containing the words bronze and/or birch:
“Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The birch stripped of its bark, or the charred stump where a tree has been burned down to be made into a canoe,—these are the only traces of man, a fabulous wild man to us. On either side, the primeval forest stretches away uninterrupted to Canada, or to the “South Sea”; to the white man a drear and howling wilderness, but to the Indian a home, adapted to his nature, and cheerful as the smile of the Great Spirit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)