It’s also a Nebraska native. The eastern black walnut can be found as far west as the Niobrara River Valley in Cherry County. Trees can grow up to 60 feet, with a canopy that spreads up to 50.

“It will take 100 years for some of the walnut trees to get big,” Wagner said. “Eliminating that in a forest is huge. It’s huge.”

But it’s not new. Other states, including Iowa, have been plagued by tree thieves for years. In 2017, two men were charged with felony theft after nine trees disappeared from a state forest north of Council Bluffs, Iowa. A few years before that, another went to prison for taking 32 trees from federal land — including a single specimen later valued at $10,000.

“The market’s hot,” said Steve Griebel, an officer with Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources. “Walnut is what everyone wants.”

Griebel takes the black market for black walnut personally. He grew up in a logging family, and the thieves are casting a shadow on the legitimate industry. “They give the good guys a bad name,” he said.

But he also approaches it professionally. Taking a century-old trophy tree is like poaching a 200-inch-class white-tail buck, he told NebraskaLand magazine. It robs the future, because it eliminates some of a species’ best reproductive genetics.