Welcome to the timber tour… Lessons learned where the chainsaw hits the bark
I love the smell of diesel fumes, pine pitch and chainsaw exhaust on a winter morning! It smells like… forestry.
Each winter, the Forest Society hosts public tours at our Forest Reservations where logging is taking place. Some people wonder why we’d invite neighbors and even potential critics to see the logging operations that create change and visual chaos – logs, stumps, limbs and slash.
The reason is that we’re proud of the professionalism and skill demonstrated by foresters and loggers working on our land. While timber tours provide many teachable moments, over the years, we’ve learned a few lessons ourselves.
From public roads, we follow a “haul road” which leads to the “landing” where logs are sorted into a range of products. But that’s where the timber harvest story ends and we want to start at the beginning. So we hike uphill, away from the landing to the back of the job where harvest boundaries and trees marked to be cut are delineated by blue paint squirted from the forester’s paint gun onto stems. Future “crop trees” are flagged with pink ribbon so loggers develop an eye for trees the forester is attempting to favor and “release” by removing competing trees. This glimpse of the “before the harvest” condition provides a nice contrast to areas that have been weeded and thinned.
Foresters and staff describe how a harvest plan includes property-specific forest management goals while enhancing the non-timber values including wildlife habitat, recreational trails, scenic vistas and protection of water quality, wetlands, steep slopes, fragile areas, designated ecological reserves and cultural or historical resources including stonewalls and cellar holes accompanied by old apple trees.
While we walk from the back of the timber harvest to the landing, we discuss the assembly of “hitches” of cut wood being removed and the layout and design of skid trails which lead down to the landing. We contrast “even-aged” patch cuts designed to regenerate sun-loving trees including white birch and white pine with “uneven-aged” single-tree selection and small group selection cuts designed to perpetuate favorable conditions to regenerate shade-tolerant beech, yellow birch, maple, hemlock and spruce.
We measure a standing white pine or red oak with a Biltmore stick to provide a good estimate of the timber volume measured by board feet in a single stem. A range of stumpage prices depending on log quality can be applied to arrive at an estimate of the dollar value for the tree. It’s almost always less than you might think! The experience provides the opportunities to explain the respective roles of the landowner, the consulting forester and logging contractors and how each are paid.
The “stump speech” includes the logging equipment: big, stunningly expensive machines. It isn’t often that the public has an opportunity to learn firsthand how logging crews operate their machinery, a complex choreography of the feller-buncher, grapple skidders, loading/crane, de-limber, slasher, chipper and transportation of products off site via log trucks and chip vans.
On the timber landing where tree boles and tops are sorted into various wood products, talk turns to wood markets. The wide range of prices paid for various wood products is based on species, volume and quality. We explain the units by which timber volume is measured: fuelwood chips by the ton for biomass energy markets, hardwood and softwood pulp by the cord for the pulp and paper industries, and hardwood or softwood sawlogs by increments of thousands of board feet for lumber.
Wood markets are complex. Merchandizing wood on the landing – cutting each tree to its highest value product - is where the role of available markets is most tangible. Trees are sorted into chip piles for wood biomass energy markets, hardwood pulp, softwood pulp, firewood, sawlogs for lumber and a range of specialty products including white ash for tool handles and a precious few veneer logs for high-end furniture and flooring.
In addition to skillful merchandizing of wood on the landing by loggers, foresters and loggers cooperate to arrange for trucking wood to reach various mills throughout New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont and New York. An average of 5,000 board feet per truckload of sawlogs, 40 tons of chips per tractor trailer load of chips and 20 tons per truckload of pulp can help people to visualize the wood volume they see traveling our State’s roadways.
Land conservation to permanently protect working forestland is important to the continuance of traditional forest products industries. Timber harvesting remains an important tool to ensure that owning private forestland remains economically viable. Sustainable timber harvesting allows private land to continue growing trees which provide green jobs and future revenue. Forest management income allows landowners to pay property taxes. Logging generates timber tax revenues to local communities. The forest products industry in New Hampshire provides 2.3 billion dollars in annual revenues and employs nearly 10,000 workers in forestry industries including logging, trucking, sawmills and pulp and paper industries.
Fact is: we live in one of the best wood-growing regions in the world and we all use wood, paper and cellulose products every single day. Those who would just rather not see any logging in New Hampshire forests are merely exporting their daily demand for forest products to some other region of the world - someplace we don’t necessarily ever see - where timber can be harvested without the forethought, care and environmental regulations we apply right in our own backyards.
The Forest Society owns 165 permanent forest reservations totaling nearly 50,000 acres statewide. The work done by skilled logging contractors working on Forest Society land is a testament to their professionalism, training and experience. We are proud to protect and manage our State’s forests while helping to perpetuate our State’s traditional natural resources economy
Naturalist Dave Anderson is Director of Education and Volunteer Services for The Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. His column appears every other week in the New Hampshire Sunday News. E-mail him at danderson@forestsociety.org or through the Forest Society's Web site: forestsociety.org.