Not WPBR for sure. Did you see any bright yellow spores on the stems this spring?

No, I didn't notice any yellow spores earlier, but I didn't even notice the dead branches until this week. What do you think it is? I suspected early stage of WPBR because there is some of Ribes growing around here.

It's so close to the others that you might as well thin it out anyway. There's only space for one tree there!

Resin

Resin makes a salient point there; In the final analysis, it's amount of tree that matters, not number of trees. If the picture indicates what I think it indicates, there're three individual plants there within a space easily colonized by one large-grower like white pine happens to be. Kind of reminds me of what happened in places last spring when we planted our 6000 seedlings....in that at times, whoever was riding the planting machine perhaps got a little carried away with too-tight spacing between seedlings. Up there, we've got the remedy for that though. It's called thinning cut, and will happen some time in the next twenty years or so!

Not sure if any of that relates to what you're trying to accomplish, but regardless of all that, it does look like you've got one and maybe two extra white pines in that little area!

+oM

I was growing it as a clump on purpose, like a birch clump. I was careful to trim out the inward growing branches as it grew so they would not rub, but now if I lose 1/3 of the clump it will leave a hole. I saw a large natural White pine clump up North many years ago and I thought it looked pretty cool.