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The term “Select Cut” gets used and abused quite a bit.

In this video, I’m using the results of a current Timber Stand Improvement (TSI) project to explain the difference between selecting the right trees and the wrong trees during a timber harvest.

This management strategy applies in a typical even-aged stand in the southern Missouri Ozarks and the broader central hardwoods region.

Making sure you are selecting the proper trees during a timber harvest or timber thinning is critical to providing long term forest health for you and the wildlife that use it.

Reasons for Hack & Squirt

I use the hack and squirt method of woods thinning for specific reasons:

• When re-sprouting of the tree is not necessary or not desired
  • control sprouting of trees for longer periods of open understory
  • control undesirable species in the stand.
  • shifting species composition in the stand
• When the timber stand is at a stage where it is overstocked with smaller diameter stems and
  • Advance regeneration of desirable species is not needed for many years
  • felling the trees proves difficult because of high stocking rate.
• When renovating a glade or woodland and felling the small trees would add too much fuel to the ground increasing fire risk or damage to remaining standing trees.

Here is the Hack & Squirt method of thinning in action!

 

Open Woodlands and Glades

Recently, we spent time renovating a high quality Open Woodland and Glade habitat.  This particular site in Shannon County Missouri is unique because it is one of the most western locations of the rhyolite bedrock that extruded up through the earth to form the St Francois Mountains many years ago.

Igneous Glades

Rhyolite is an igneous form of granite that has an attractive purple tint in the eastern Ozarks. The rocks make for some very rugged terrain, making management activities a bit more of a challenge. Because the rock is so close to the surface on these sites, the soil is thin, and tree growth is fairly limited.

Trees take a long time to grow, and don’t grow very tall, but lots of native grasses, wildflowers, and legumes that were created to withstand these harsh environments thrive when given plenty of sunlight.

 

Prescribed Fire

Many of these sites which are valuable for wildlife are fewer and further between because of our need to control widespread wildfires that once shaped the vegetation of our landscape and kept open woodlands and glades fairly open.

Prescribed fire is a useful tool, but has become more and more of a challenge to use in today’s society, so other tactics that help reduce woody encroachment on these sites for just a little bit longer between wider fire intervals will help.

 

This is where Hack and Squirt comes in:

 

In this video, I explain some of our objectives for using the hack and squirt method of thinning, and in the next installment I will show the actual process in action. Stay tuned!

 

 

Turns out my picture is in the list of bing pictures when you do a search for ( Missouri timber stand improvement ). The picture is from my Missouri Department of Conservation days, and was used for the “Call before you cut” program, which connected landowners wishing to have a timber sale to a professional consulting forester.

What’s a “Resto-mod” ?

Another interest outside of the conservation, forestry, and agriculture world, I have always had interest in machines, older machines particularly. I used to be primarily interested in old “go fast” machines, muscle cars from the 60’s and early 70’s, but then it branched out into old trucks and International Scouts and tractors, as my interests took me from the streets, more and more to the woods and the fields.

I say all this to give you some background to some of my lingo here. “Overhaulin” is taking what you’ve got, and freshening it up like new and “Resto-mod” has always been somewhat referred to as doing a restoration with modifications and upgrades to make it more usable or improved in some way to meet desires.  A true “Restoration”, is taking something back to a specific point in time, like the day it was new.

Project Philosophy

In the natural world, a restoration is somewhat of a misnomer, because one cant always exactly go back to a specific time and place, or harder yet, the day it was new. Quite frankly, I don’t think its in the plans, nor possible to go back to the day it was new. We must move forward in a responsible way.  Some folks like to talk about restoring something back to “pre-settlement” times, as if “pre-settlement” times weren’t always changing then, and I think its a little bit of a reach to say we know exactly what things were like in “pre-settlement” times. Are we talking 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years “pre-settlement” ?

My approach to things is often more like a “Resto-mod” where I like to make some assumptions about the way things may have been (and we can get some good ideas, from carefully studying the created order), and apply many of the benefits and processes of the natural world, and then apply those processes related to animals and plants in today’s natural world to make them more usable and beneficial to our situations today.

 

The native Americans of days gone by did the very same thing, studying the world, making observations,  manipulating the landscape with fire, and other agricultural tools they had to manipulate the landscape to their benefit. I think we can learn some things there.

Project Action

So, I’m in the process of embarking into a project of converting a former fescue pasture with some small patches of johnson grass into a stand of native warm season grass and forbs for agriculture and wildlife purposes. There will also be places on this farm dedicated to bobwhite quail habitat, and pollinator habitat.

I want to share with you my step by step process here as I move along the way.  I will warn you though, this process to be done correctly is going to take a year to get to the establishment phase, and then at least another year to really see the rewards of a job well done. But, as the old saying goes, “if its worth doing, its worth doing right”.

The first step was taken the other evening by completing a prescribed burn on the old fescue field to consume all of the old thatch. The black ground will now soak up all the solar energy form the sun and cause the fescue and other plants to make good use of the newly available nutrients and grow like gangbusters. This field will be the greenest field around in a few weeks.  Of course, the fescue doesn’t know it,  but we are just trying to fatten it up so we can spray it and get a good first kill on it in another month or so.

Bear with us, and stay tuned as we look forward to sharing the next step of this field  Resto-mod  with you!

 

Preference vs. Tolerance

Different trees have different environmental requirements or conditions they prefer, and when they have those conditions, they have a competitive advantage. This principle is not to be confused with another concept  that different trees will tolerate certain environmental conditions better than others, and that tolerance gives them an advantage to grow and thrive.

If you plant a sugar maple and a bald cypress in your yard, generally they will both do fine, grow and produce a beautiful shade tree. If you took a sugar maple and a bald cypress and plant them in a swamp, the bald cypress will thrive, and the sugar maple will most likely wither away. The reason for this is the bald cypress is better designed to grow in the difficult soggy conditions of a swamp.

Shade Tolerance vs. Shade Intolerance

Some trees behave the same way with light availability. Oak trees are in a group of trees called “shade intolerant” trees, as opposed to trees that are “shade tolerant” such as maple, dogwood, etc.  Because of this characteristic, oak trees being shade intolerant, an oak tree must have a lot of sunlight to reach the forest canopy from an acorn to a seedling to a sapling, to a big tall tree.

An oak must have enough sunlight at important stages in growth. If it doesn’t, it will either not grow at all or remain severely stunted until the end of its term.  If a small seedling or sapling persists in the shade for many years, it seems to establish a habitually poor growth pattern that doesn’t change much.

Thankfully, oaks and some other species have been designed to stump sprout, which can be a tremendous advantage in gaining a new start when the timing is right. This design abandons the old established stunted growth pattern if the top happens to be damaged by fire, windfall, deer rub, chainsaw or any manner of disturbance, thereby giving the stump sprout a new start. If this happens when new available light is provided, the new stem has the big advantages of more light and an already well established root system.

So when I’m in the woods doing timber stand improvement (TSI), I attempt not only to cut out the poorly formed and suppressed trees, creating more light for the big trees to use, but also to cut the little stunted oak saplings that have been persisting in the understory for years, giving them a fresh, new start on life in the big woods.

 

 

I enjoy teaching. While doing TSI today and thinking through the process, I imagined a question someone might pose, and now I want to work through an answer that might make sense to an average forest landowner. I’ll attempt to explain what I do as a forester to help along a natural but fairly ordered forest system to produce in ways that meets that landowners objectives.

The question often asked:  “Why are you cutting that young tree? If you leave it, won’t it grow big enough to harvest some day?”

So with this post I want to tackle some underlying assumptions held by many in order to answer this question. The false assumption often held is that small trees = young trees. Small trees CAN be young trees, but not ALL small trees are young trees.

All trees have a lifespan, and the objective for a landowner that wants to grow and harvest the most good quality trees during a managed timber sale, is to get as many of his trees as big as possible within that lifespan. The art and science of forestry is to help the best trees gain access and maintain access to sunlight within a limited growing space.

So, today, I DID cut down that smaller tree not too far from the bigger tree, and hopefully my on the fly investigative reporting will shed some light on why. I didn’t have anything to measure with, but I did have a smartphone and an ashtray with a few gate keys and four or five .22 long rifle rounds. A quick google search revealed what I suspected. A .22 long rifle bullet is one inch long, and a perfect scale object. Off we go down the hill to take some pictures.