Identification: Reddish pine tree, Montana: Sick or natural color?

This pine tree was photographed in the Custer National Forest in Montana. I actually think that the reddish hue is very pretty but I was wondering if this is its natural color or if the tree is sick?

In any case, can you please help me identify the tree and subspecies?

Thank you.

 

Whitebark Pine Pinus albicaulis.

It's not so much sick, as somewhat damaged by winter exposure - that's why some of the needles are brown. The brown needles are dead and won't recover; the green needles, including the new growth from this spring, are OK. The bright red blobs are male (pollen) cones.

 

Thank you so much. Damaged or not, it is a beautiful tree in my opinion. Thank you for letting me know more about it.

 

How about pine beetle damage? It is epidemic in western N.A..

 

That would not show healthy new growth - the new shoots would be either drooping/dying (pine shoot beetles) or browning with the rest of the foliage fairly uniformly (pine bark beetles).

 

@abgardener,

No, the pine beetle damage typically leaves entire mountainsides quite reddish; not the brownish colour we see here.

—Of greater significance (albeit off-topic; apologies) is the fact that logging companies over the past half-century have increasingly dictated their own profit-and-loss economics on so-called "foresty" courses at many universities. Students in forestry are learning the company line, rather than the botanical science of forest ecology. This prime example of oligarchic hegemony would leave people thinking that the pine beetle scourge is a bad thing. It is a bad thing within the capitalist interests of logging industries, and the governments that support them (such as "my" BC government). But this is not science, and it is not botany, and it is not ecology. It is all about money. The pine beetles, in truth, evolved with the pines, and through the millennia have been, together with lightning fires, important limiters to the trees' cycles of more or less 40 years. Pine trees can live much longer than 40 years, but instead they play a rejuvenation role, their fire-resistant cones opening while the ground is still smouldering.

The logging companies, and, through their interests, the universities, have attempted very successfully to paint logging as something sustainable and scientific. For a long time they ignored the importance, for example, of the 40-year alder cycle replenishing the forest soils with nitrogen. Here in BC, I've lived all my life hearing logging propaganda, even while this "sustainable" industry systematically "harvested" primary forests and came closer and closer to boundaries of protected areas. But 2,000 year old trees are really not replaceable in 20 years or 200 years. So the pine beetles are indeed the scourge of the logging industries, and get very much in the way of their profits. But the pine beetles are as natural as the trees, and the logging companies have never been very much keen to take nature much into consideration. As I said, the real damage is the fact that we have multitudes of university graduates preaching the gospel according to corporate profits, without even knowing it.

 

I interact with a number of exceptional forest ecologists here at UBC, and have not had those sort of experiences (though I have heard stories of that being the way it used to be). I would suggest that there are other factors at play, including who gets hired and who gets promoted re: the development of forest management policies and practices as well as the fact that many of the decision-makers in the past decades were taught the old way. I suspect it will shift to a more sensible approach, but it's too late for much of the province (particularly as it pertains to old-growth).

 

Also important to bear in mind that the frequency and severity of Dendroctonus outbreaks has increased significantly in recent decades due to human-caused climate change. So while the importance of dead trees in the ecology of the forest needs to be recognised, so too does the importance of controlling bark beetle outbreaks. 2,000 year old trees won't be produced in commercial forests, but neither will they be produced if every pine is killed by bark beetles when it is 40 years old. Bark beetle outbreaks on that level of frequency may be enough to eliminate pines from the ecosystem substantially (or even outright), as seed production by that age may not be adequate to repopulate the forests.