What do we have here?

In some respects, a golf course is a war zone. Superintendents working to maintain healthy turf must battle powerful forces that wreak havoc if left unchecked.

Weather is an issue, but it is somewhat predictable and not an inherently destructive force. The twin issues of pests and turf disease are another matter entirely. Unfettered, they can devastate a golf facility.

Superintendents are experts at dealing with turf issues, but many have faced new challenges in recent years as pests migrate from one region of the country to another.

The annual bluegrass weevil has been the scourge of American golf course superintendents for decades. This pest thrives on Poa annua, which explains why it has been so prevalent in the Mid-Atlantic, where Poa greens prevail.

In recent years, however, the ABW has been detected elsewhere, to the west in Ohio and farther south in Virginia, West Virginia and the Carolinas.

Tracy Mathis is the director of golf course operations at Lu Lu Country Club outside of Philadelphia. She took over the position in March, just as the ABW was making its appearance. Combating the pest was difficult this past spring due to a harsh winter in the Northeast and prolonged snow cover.

“We just didn’t get any winterkill,” Mathis says. “They were basically protected and insulated underneath the snow. Once the snow lifted, if you hadn’t applied something already, you were going to be in trouble most of the summer and we’ve been dealing with them for that reason.”

Prior to arriving at Lu Lu, Mathis spent nearly two decades working in the Carolinas, including nearly 14 years as the superintendent at Sapphire National Golf Club in Sapphire, N.C., in the western part of the state near the South Carolina border. She first encountered the pest during the last few years of her tenure at Sapphire.

“We just started seeing the ABW in the Carolinas probably five years ago,” she says. “They’ve been dominant (in the Mid-Atlantic states) for many, many, many years, for decades in fact. They’re pretty in tune up here with timing and using different products. They’ve always been more of a northern issue.”

But with Poa greens becoming more prevalent in the South, the ABW is on the move. Rick Brandenburg is a turfgrass entomologist by profession. From his post at North Carolina State University, he receives reports of the ABW moving through the South like an advancing enemy force.

“It’s not an easy problem,” he says. “It takes a lot of energy and thought to be effective at controlling it. And further to the south and in the Appalachian Mountains, where you continue to have cool-season turf, the environment is not only good for the turf, but it’s good for the pest. It’s kind of scaring superintendents to death because they see the challenges superintendents further to the north have faced and all of a sudden it’s down here and we really don’t know yet what to expect out of it.”

Another pest that has created issues for superintendents is the European crane fly, which first appeared in North America along the St. Lawrence Seaway in and around Buffalo, Detroit and Ontario. In all likelihood, the pest arrived here via the ballast of European ships passing through the seaway.

It was first detected in British Columbia in the early 1960s and spread to Washington and Oregon. By the mid-1990s, it had migrated as far south as Central California. And it is still on the move, says Dr. Ben McGraw, an associate professor of turfgrass science at Penn State.

“There are two species,” he says. “One is further dispersed than the other because of its ability to fly. The ability to fly greater distances has caused that species to show up in a lot of places. We confirmed for the first time in 2014 that it was in Utah. We think it’s been there for a couple years.”

The pest tends to thrive in moist, damp climates and not surprisingly has thrived in the Pacific Northwest. Dr. Gwen Stahnke of Washington State University is intimately familiar with it.

The larval stage stays in the ground, she says, and “feeds on the roots and crowns of the grass plants. In western Washington, where it doesn’t normally freeze, that means they are feeding from September or October when they hatch from the eggs until May or June when they pupate (go into a cocoon in the ground) and emerge as adults in August or September to lay eggs and repeat the cycle.”

Stahnke points out that the pest can be difficult to detect. “It wasn’t until I started having reports of European crane fly larvae chewing around the edges of aerification holes on greens that it became any kind of problem for golf course superintendents,” she says. “This happened in late November and early December when we had a warmer fall. Superintendents that hadn’t dealt with crane fly before just had to get used to the life cycle and when to treat for the larvae. Many times they will have had the larvae present, but if the grass didn’t get stressed, or it wasn’t mowed at 1⁄8 inch, they wouldn’t see the damage.”

In a circumstance where a disease or pest is new to a particular region, superintendents must spend time and effort learning what treatment protocols and/or products are most effective. And more often than not they need to find answers quickly to deal with an existing issue.

That’s where someone like Dr. Jim Kerns comes in. Kerns is an assistant professor in the department of plant pathology at North Carolina State University, his alma mater and home to the North Carolina State Turf Diagnostic Lab.

In recent years, many superintendents in his part of the country have converted their putting surfaces from creeping bentgrass to ultradwarf Bermudagrass, which features shorter rhizomes and is intended to produce faster, bentgrass-type putting speeds.

Ultradwarf Bermuda was first introduced in the South roughly a decade ago and has become much more prevalent in the past two to three years. But it has been susceptible to certain diseases.

“Because Bermudagrass grows better in the summer (ultradwarf greens) were pushed hard as being disease resistant,” Kerns says. “As it turns out, they’re not.”

In fact, ultradwarf putting surfaces have proven vulnerable to such maladies as pythium blight, leaf spot, cream leaf blight, and leaf and sheath blight, which is also known in some circles as mini-ring.

“While some of these diseases are not necessarily new, they’re diseases these superintendents haven’t really faced,” Kerns says, “so I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on characterizing these diseases. The beauty of it is most of them have been fairly easy to manage, but they’re very challenging to diagnose. The dogma they knew before does not exist when you’re talking about a new grass.”

All turf diseases mentioned above are treatable with fungicides. But superintendents confronting them for the first time need to find the right product for a given situation or a particular set of circumstances. And that’s not always easy.

“They really have a hard time keeping them all straight,” Kerns says. “And many times they may not be applying the right product for the right situation. That’s why, in my opinion, if you see something new, the first step is to call the local university. They may have seen this, but, more important, they’ll know very quickly what fungicide or what insecticide or what herbicide might be most effective, even though they may not have much experience with that weed or insect or fungus.”

Sometimes it’s not a question of what to apply, but when to apply it. Brandenburg says that when confronting a pest such as the ABW it’s essential that superintendents take an aggressive approach.

“To be effective, you’ve got to be proactive,” he says. “If you see damage, you’ve lost the battle for that year. You can go in and do some things to keep the situation from getting much worse, but you’ve got what you’ve got … It’s not going recover during the middle of the summer.”

Sometimes there are weather-related circumstances beyond a superintendent’s control. Mathis, like many of her peers in the East, was forced to delay treating for the ABW this past spring because the ground was covered with snow until late March. By the time she could treat for the pest, she had, in Bradenburg’s words, “lost the battle” for the season.

“A lot of people got caught off guard as to their spring applications, myself included,” she says. “To me it was too early to apply it, but then it looked like it was a little too late. So we were behind the eight-ball so to speak trying to control it.”

Mathis says it’s important for superintendents to have the financial and personnel resources on hand to deal with an unexpected pest. “It’s not something that’s going to go away,” she says. “It’s something you have to treat, much as if you were treating dollar spot or trying to protect against pythium diseases. It’s something you have to incorporate into your budget.”

Rick Woelfel is a Philadelphia-based writer and frequent GCI contributor.