What The Woods Taught Me

You want the best for your woodlot, but how do you know what’s best? Should you thin, cut or abandon? Writer Cecily Ross discovers the hard way how to properly care for her trees.

By Cecily Ross

I love the woods. I love standing among the tall, patient trees feeling their grandeur. I put my head back and look up at the canopy as dense as a cathedral ceiling in places, in others open to the sky. I bend down and touch the ground, smell its cool peppery smell, feel the life-giving decay of leaves and old logs. I touch the rough trunks of the trees, lean into their strength. I count the varieties – maple, beech, cherry, ash. I note the height and circumference of each, the living, the dying, the dead, the old and young and in-between.

Sometimes I can hear the eerie, plaintive call of a red-tailed hawk, the rising melody of a rose-breasted grosbeak, the noisy queedle of a blue jay. I imagine the creatures I cannot see: the voles underfoot, the porcupine tucked into the fork of a basswood, the red squirrels and pileated woodpeckers nesting in cavities bored into a dying hemlock, the doe and her twin fawns hiding in the understorey.

I think about the trilliums and dog’s-tooth violets in spring. The emerald carpet of wild leeks, the magic of finding morels between the roots of an old beech. I consider the forest in winter, the brilliance, the bareness of it. The crisp stillness, the branches cracking in the cold.

If you love your woods as I love mine, you will cherish and care for them. You will not make the mistakes that I made out of ignorance and, yes, I admit it, greed.

My story begins on a brisk and sunny spring day in early May 2006. A latemodel silver pickup truck pulled into my driveway, and a pleasant young man presented me with his card and asked if he could look at my woodlot, saying he would mark the trees he was interested in buying and would quote a price for them.

My husband and I had moved from Toronto about a year earlier to this 39-hectare farm in Mulmur Township at the far northeast corner of Dufferin County. I had grown up in the country and longed to return to my roots. Most of the land (some 32 hectares) is open fields, but the far western end contains a small woodlot (about two hectares) that is part of a larger eight-hectare forest shared among four farms.

Since we moved in, in the middle of February 2005, I have walked, skied and snowshoed to our patch of hard maple, black cherry, ash and a smattering of hemlock with our two small terriers almost every day. I go for the peace and awe that I never fail to feel as I stand among the trees.

The logger marked 50 trees, most of them sugar maple, along with a few black cherry, and said he would give me $11,000 for them. He explained the importance of thinning a woodlot every 10 or 12 years, and mentioned a large maple with a hawk’s nest in it that he would not cut. He talked about leaving the beech trees because they’re a food source for wildlife and birds, and mentioned a patch of morels he had stumbled across. He also pointed out that my neighbour was allowing his cattle to graze in his woodlot, which adjoined ours, thereby destroying his understorey and the future of the lot. His assessment was convincing. Besides, there were so many trees – an estimated 2,500 to 3,000. What difference would 50 make? We accepted his offer, and within a week the trees were cut down and sold as veneer logs to be used in furniture making.

A newly harvested woodlot is not a pretty sight, even when done properly. We had sold only 50 trees, but they were the biggest ones in the woods. Without them the lot was noticeably sparser. Light poured onto the forest floor where the trilliums and wild leeks were just beginning to push up through a carpet of dead leaves. Huge tire tracks were gouged in the wet earth. The tops of cut trees lay where they had fallen, a messy tangle of broken limbs, their nascent buds already nibbled on by foraging deer.

That fall, we cut some of the logs left behind for firewood. In winter, when we snowshoed into the woods, we saw that the deep snow had softened the ravages of the chainsaw. The next spring, the morels were more plentiful than ever, and the wildflowers flourished. But so did the invasive garlic mustard, which, with its distinctive white flower, seemed to be spreading before our eyes.

This past summer as we waded through the waste-high weeds – mostly thistles, nettles and garlic mustard – I wondered if we had made a mistake. Had the logger destroyed our beloved woodlot? Would it ever recover? I called Jim Eccles, a forester at Lands & Forests Consulting in neighbouring Grey County, who used to work for the Ministry of Natural Resources, to assess what, if any, damage had been done to our woodlot.

Eccles, a ruddy-faced man in his forties, arrived on a hot, dry day in mid-August. It hadn’t rained for at least six weeks, and every living thing, from my brown front lawn to the tree seedlings we had planted down by the pond, was feeling the heat. As we rode in his air-conditioned pickup to the back of the farm, I commented on how healthy the woodlot looked from the outside, an undisturbed mass of solid green rising against the sky. Eccles nodded.

“Jobbers sometimes do that so the enquiring public doesn’t know what’s going on in the woodlot. We call them donuts,” he said. “Besides, edge trees are more likely to have lower branches on them, which decreases their value.” Eccles explained that loggers are looking for trees with tall, straight trunks uninterrupted by branches, knots or other blemishes, which can then be planed into beautiful uniform veneer boards. As they reach for the sun, the trees in the middle of a hardwood forest often rise 18 to 30 metres, as straight as ships’ masts, before branching out. Hardwoods like maple and cherry are prized in the furniture industry for their durability and beautiful wood grain. Species common to the Carolinian forests, such as black walnut, can sometimes command prices in the five-figure range for a single tree.

Most commercial loggers, Eccles continued, take only the biggest trees, what is called a diameter-limit cut. In other words, they take only trees over a certain size as specified in the tree bylaws that most jurisdictions have in place. For instance, Dufferin County, where I live, does not allow the harvesting of healthy trees that are less than 205 centimetres in circumference (measured 10 centimetres above the ground). Caroline Mach, Dufferin County forest manager, admits that the bylaw is a blunt instrument. “But it’s main purpose,” she says, “is to promote sustainable logging and discourage overharvesting.”

What And When To Cut

Gone, perhaps forever, are the white pines that in the early 1800s reached heights of 75 metres and diameters of about two metres. Gone, like the woolly mammoth, are behemoths like a walnut tree in Metcalf Township known as “the King of the Forest” that measured 11 metres in circumference, and a tulip tree reported to have yielded 6,000 board feet of lumber. By 1920, roughly 90 percent of southern Ontario’s woodlands had been cut to make room for agriculture and development. “We were turning southern Ontario into a desert,” says Natalie Helferty, Ontario Nature’s director of conservation policy.

While wooded areas have increased somewhat since then, Professor Andy Kenney of the Faculty of Forestry at the University of Toronto stresses the need to preserve what is left of the forest cover. “In some parts of southern Ontario,” he says, “woodlots are the only forest cover there is left.” This is particularly true in the province’s Carolinian or oak-hickory forests stretching roughly from Toronto to Sarnia, where, says Kenney, woodlots tend to be small and scattered, resulting in a loss of habitat. “When you have isolated patches of forest,” he says, “the function of the forest changes.”

Caring for your trees has other benefits for the planet. The decline of Ontario’s small woodlots holds dire consequences for the environment. Healthy forests not only absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, they are “carbon sinks” because carbon is “fixed” in trees. Cut a tree down and burn it and you are releasing carbon (which contributes to global warming) into the atmosphere. If it falls down and decays, it also releases carbon, albeit much more slowly. (But if you cut it down and make a chair or a chest of drawers, the carbon remains fixed until the piece of furniture is destroyed.)

My woodlot, located in the St. Lawrence River–Great Lakes region, an area that stretches roughly from Ottawa to Georgian Bay (also known as the Northern Hardwood Forest), consists almost entirely of hard maple. The other trees are a mixture of black cherry, white ash, beech, basswood and some hemlock.

Here, the golden rule is, take the worst first. The judicious thinning of farm woodlots is vital to their health. Trees need sunlight to reach their full growth potential, and an overcrowded woodlot will contain too many undernourished, underdeveloped trees. Overcrowding also puts trees under stress as they compete for light, water and nutrients, resulting in trees that are more susceptible to disease.

The trouble is that almost all the big trees (more than 64 centimetres in diameter) in my woodlot are gone now. What remains are hundreds and hundreds of mediumsized trees (about 25 to 38 centimetres in diameter).

“All these trees here,” says Eccles as he surveys the scene, “are 50 to 60 years old. By taking only the big trees, your logger has reduced the number of generations in the forest to two. Ideally, you should have five generations of hardwood co-existing in your woodlot.” Then as the old trees die off, new ones replace them in a continuous cycle.

An experienced tree marker like Eccles considers the forest as a whole and sizes up which trees should be cut and which should stay. He will calculate the “basal area” (the amount of solid wood per hectare of the cross-section of all the trees measured 1.3 metres above ground). This tells him whether the forest is under- or overstocked.

“Trees that are weak or diseased should have been removed,” says Eccles. “Because they are under stress, they are susceptible to disease. A healthy tree, however, will resist most disease.” Stress, he explains, can be caused by drought, overharvesting or overcrowding.

“The drawback to taking the biggest and the best,” says Kenney, “is that you are removing the genes of those trees from the lot; they are no longer there to pass on their strong qualities to the next generation.” The result, he explains, is a loss in both the ecological and the economic benefit of the woodlot. What’s left behind – weedy species such as Scotch pine and genetically inferior or disease-prone trees – will continue to decline over the years. Overcrowding will diminish the forest floor’s suitability as habitat for wildlife.

Pests And Invasives

The commercial logger I used chose not to remove a tree with a round growth on its trunk about six metres above the ground. “That,” Eccles tells me, “is a cobra canker, a contagious disease that can spread from tree to tree by spores.” The canker fungus weakens the tree, making it susceptible to damage caused by wind, ice or snow. The fungus kills the bark and can eventually kill the tree itself. Other diseases to watch for in hardwood forests include Armillaria root rot, oak wilt, Dutch elm disease and beech bark disease (see “Hardwood tree diseases,” page 23).

Neither has the logger taken a youngish tree with a split trunk, a possible genetic flaw, says Eccles. “It’s not hurting anything now, but in 10 years, it will come down on its own and bring others with it.”

Eccles points out another maple with a thin black scar running straight up the length of its trunk. He says the tree was struck by lightning probably two or three years ago. Beside the scar he notices a fuzzy brown patch about the size of a quarter.

“That’s a gypsy moth egg mass,” he says. About three metres higher is another one, and sure enough, a large white female moth clings to the bark above it. The gypsy moth lays its eggs on the bark of healthy hardwood trees. When the larvae emerge in the spring, they eat the leaves; a heavy infestation can defoliate a tree. The moths were imported to North America in the 1860s in a misguided – and ultimately doomed – attempt to start a silk industry here. Now they are a major pest in the eastern part of the continent. Eccles says that I only need to worry about egg masses close to the ground. Any that are higher than a metre up the trunk will be too exposed and unlikely to survive the winter in my woodlot.

Garlic mustard is just one of many non-native plants that have found their way into Ontario forests, where it is now widespread. The seeds are imported on car and at v tires, or even people’s shoes. Because this species has no natural control agents here, it has a competitive edge over native plants and eventually dominates a site. In Ontario’s Carolinian forests, species such as tulip tree, white oak and hickory are especially vulnerable to being displaced by the wily and persistent plants. Other common invasives include dog-strangling vine, common buckthorn, dame’s rocket and barberry (see “Alien invasions,” page 21).

The Price Of Wood

The value of stumpage (standing trees) varies wildly from region to region across the province and fluctuates according to the markets. That spring the demand for hardwood was high; this year, the market is depressed and prices have dropped. The value of logs also depends on the species, the quality of the wood and the grade. Wade Knight, executive director of the Ontario Woodlot Association (OWA), says the best way for landowners to make sure they are getting a fair price for their logs is to put them out for tender and get into the competitive bidding process. “It may not be the price you want, but it will reflect the market value,” he says. (The OWA also publishes A Landowner’s Guide to Selling Standing Timber, available at the OWA website, www.ont-woodlot-assoc.org.)

Owners of hardwood lots generally have little trouble finding buyers for the trees they harvest, the exception being white ash. Normally prized as a shock-resistant wood used to make everything from baseball bats to boats, quantities of ash have flooded the market recently as loggers rush to harvest the trees before they are destroyed by the emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle that has, to date, killed more than 20 million ash trees in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana and has already made its way as far north as London. Now there is so much ash on the market that the price has dropped markedly. The only really big trees left in our woodlot happened to be the tall white ash.

A sustainable, well-managed forest will produce on-going revenue. A woodlot of tolerant hardwoods in Eastern Ontario, for instance, could realize an additional 120,000 board feet of lumber (assuming the woodlot was approximately 40 hectares in size) over a 20-year period by removing low-quality trees and retaining an optimal number of saw-log-quality trees, according to the OWA.

Tax Relief

Recently, incentive programs have been implemented to encourage landowners to look after their trees. The Managed Forest Tax Incentive Program (MFTIP) gives property tax relief to landowners who develop a management plan, or blueprint, of their forest that includes a complete inventory of the trees and species and an outline of the activities, such as harvesting and thinning, that will take place every five to 10 years. Cheryl MacLaurin and her husband, Eric, hired a consultant to draw up a forest management plan when they bought their 11-hectare property in Clearview Township on the Niagara Escarpment in 1993. Now, almost 15 years later, the 8.5 hectares under forest – mostly red and white pine – is almost due for a commercial thinning, says MacLaurin.

“We had all these woods and we didn’t know anything about it, being city folk,” says MacLaurin, who admits that she is not a romantic when it comes to trees. Their property, located on high rolling hills with deep gullies, is prized for its spectacular views. The tax break was the couple’s main reason for taking advantage of the MFTIP program. “I’m a real estate agent, and around here people want to cut their trees because they block the views,” she says.

MacLaurin has, however, come to realize the important role her woods play as a habitat for the abundant wildlife – deer, wild turkey, raccoons, skunks – that share the property with them. “All those piles of brush that I thought we should clean up turn out to be great for wildlife,” she says.

According to Eccles, I have been fortunate. Although most of the biggest trees are gone, there is a minimum of collateral damage caused by falling trees and heavy logging equipment. (The best time to log is in early spring or late fall when the ground is frozen, before or after birds have raised their young.)

The harvest has opened up the canopy of my woodlot, and light can now reach the young saplings, some of which were likely near death, says Eccles. And the logger did not overharvest the lot either. Indeed, Eccles estimates that another 100 trees should still come out. In a few years, the understorey will surge with new and invigorated growth. The light will also help the mid-sized trees reach maximum heights of about 30 metres, at which time growth in diameter will accelerate.

Because the logger left behind most of the beech, basswood and white ash, the diversity of the forest increased. Also still standing are a few dead hemlocks and beech whose trunks are pockmarked with small cavities. “There are a lot of mammals and birds that live in tree cavities,” says Eccles. “So you want six or seven nice cavity trees per hectare.” Basswood and hemlock, because they are relatively soft woods, are important for the preservation of habitat. The soft wood is easier for woodpeckers to notch out nest holes where they can raise their young. Chickadees and nuthatches also make their own cavities in soft or dying trees. After the holes are abandoned, other birds and mammals – saw-whet owls, wood ducks, eastern bluebirds, flycatchers and flying squirrels – will move in to raise their young. Many species of birds and mammals hibernate or overwinter in cavity trees. Winter birds use small cavities for shelter from the elements, as do deer mice and weasels.

Eccles says that despite the diameter- limit cut, for the most part the trees left in our woodlot are straight and tall and relatively disease free. “Good quality trees,” he says, “they have a lot of vigour in them.” But he estimates it will take about three 15-year harvesting cycles before the woodlot is restored to optimal condition – a long time.

I look down at the forest floor. It is covered with small maple seedlings: a new generation of trees – about 37,000 of them for every hectare – struggling to survive. In 45 years, with proper management, they will number 1,250 per hectare, and some of the 60-yearold trees now towering above them will be a century old.

It will take more than my bad judgment to destroy this woodlot. Nevertheless, I am still grieving for the big trees that are gone. I will do things differently next time. I will hire a consultant. I will have a plan. “Don’t worry,” says Eccles, “your forest isn’t going anywhere. Trees have time.”

Cecily Ross is a senior editor at The Globe and Mail. Her last article for ON Nature was “The magic of mushrooms” (Autumn 2007).