AUTUMN ’13

A NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT THE FOREST

The Great Hurricane of 1938 Who Pays for Fish and Wildlife Funding? Life in Your Logs The Dirt on Buck Scrapes Fir Blisters, Trout Spots, Autumn Olive Pie, and much more

$5.95

21913_WOOD_AUT13_COVERS.indd 3 8/16/13 12:23:50 PM 21913_WOOD_AUT13_COVERS.indd 4 8/16/13 12:23:57 PM on the web WWW.NORTHERNWOODLANDS.ORG

THE OUTSIDE STORY Each week we publish a new nature story on topics ranging from rattlesnake fungus to ants in the sugar bowl.

EDITOR’S BLOG Step 3 was to conscript child labor. Tess, here, panoplied in OSHA-approved safety glasses and steel-toed Moon Boots, works for Cheerios.

WHAT IN THE WOODS IS THAT? We show you a photo; if you guess what it is, you’ll be eligible to win a prize. Reader Judy Brook Cover Photo by James Volosin took this picture of a 10-inch- Photographer James Volosin captured this image of Hammond Pond in the Adirondacks on a photo wide colonial bryozoan. shoot that didn’t go according to plan. “I arrived at the trail head an hour before sunrise,” said Volosin. “And after much deliberation, took the wrong trail.” After realizing his mistake, he compensated Sign up on the website to get our bi-weekly with some “undignified sprinting” and a “chicken dance” at water’s edge, racing the rising sun. newsletter delivered free to your inbox. “The fog held the sun back just long enough for me to get into the pond and stand motionless, so For daily news and information, the reeds would come out sharp and static.” FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK

VOLUME 20 I NUMBER 3 REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS CENTER FOR NORTHERN WOODLANDS EDUCATION, INC. AUTUMN 2013 Virginia Barlow Copyright 2013 Jim Block Northern Woodlands Magazine (ISSN 1525-7932) is published Elise Tillinghast Madeline Bodin quarterly by the Center for Northern Woodlands Education, Inc., magazine Executive Director/Publisher Marian Cawley Tovar Cerulli 1776 Center Road, P.O. Box 471, Corinth, VT 05039-0471 Dave Mance III Andrew Crosier Tel (802) 439-6292 Editor Carl Demrow Fax (802) 368-1053 Amy Peberdy Steve Faccio [email protected] Operations Manager Giom www.northernwoodlands.org Bernd Heinrich Emily Rowe Subscription rates are $21.50 for one year and $39 for two years. Canadian Robert Kimber Operations Coordinator/ and foreign subscriptions by surface mail are $26.50 US for one year. Stephen Long POSTMASTER: Send address corrections to Northern Woodlands Magazine, Web Manager Todd McLeish P.O. Box 471, Corinth, VT 05039-0471 or to [email protected]. Jim Schley Susan C. Morse Periodical postage paid at Corinth, Vermont, and at additional mailing offices. Poetry Editor Bryan Pfeiffer Published on the first day of March, June, September, and December. Joe Rankin All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without the written Michael Snyder consent of the publisher is prohibited. The editors assume no responsibility Adelaide Tyrol for unsolicited manuscripts or photographs. Return postage should accompany all submissions. Printed in USA. Chuck Wooster For subscription information call (800) 290-5232. DESIGN Northern Woodlands is printed on paper with 10 percent post-consumer Liquid Studio / Lisa Cadieux recycled content.

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Center for Northern from the enter Woodlands Education C

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

President Earlier this year, we decided to experiment with the “NPR funding model,” Julia Emlen Julia S. Emlen Associates seeking underwriting support from organizations that share our educational Seekonk, MA mission. The results of that decision appear in this issue. On page 50 is the first of four “Field Work” articles. Supported by Wagner Forest Management, Vice President Marcia McKeague this series depicts the variety of ways people make their livelihoods from Katahdin Timberlands the Northeast’s forests. A second series, supported by the Northern Forest Millinocket, ME Center – see page 58 – profiles manufacturers in the Northeast that use regionally sourced timber. Treasurer/Secretary Tom Ciardelli Both of these series celebrate the connections between people and the woods, and thereby Biochemist, Outdoorsman promote awareness that forests are not only good for bugs, birds, and photogenic fuzzy Hanover, NH creatures, but also benefit individuals and communities. Si Balch We’re grateful to Wagner Forest Management and the Northern Forest Center for helping Consulting Forester us to fund these stories. Brooklin, ME Also starting this fall is a new partnership in Massachusetts between Northern Woodlands Sarah R. Bogdanovitch and the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR). On September 28, the Paul Smith’s College DCR, Massachusetts Forest Alliance, Bay State Forestry Service, and U.S. Forest Service Paul Smiths, NY will be hosting a conference celebrating “100 Years of Town Forests.” In conjunction with Richard G. Carbonetti this event, Northern Woodlands is providing educational materials through the DCR and Landvest, Inc. magazine subscriptions to Massachusetts conservation commissions. Town forests offer Newport, VT many benefits across our region, serving as hands-on nature classrooms, recreational centers, Starling Childs MFS water and habitat reserves, and renewable sources of local wood. Sounds like a reason to Ecological and Environmental celebrate to me! Consulting Services Finally, as school starts up this fall, please note that we have expanded our fundraising Norfolk, CT program for schools and environmental education groups to serve all of New England and Esther Cowles New York. If you are struggling to find funding for nature education, we may be able to help Fernwood Consulting, LLC you. Visit our web site at http://northernwoodlands.org/programs/subscribe-support or give Hopkinton, NH us a call. Dicken Crane Holiday Brook Farm Dalton, MA Elise Tillinghast, Executive Director, Publisher Timothy Fritzinger Alta Advisors London, UK Sydney Lea Writer, Vermont Poet Laureate Newbury, VT Bob Saul Wood Creek Capital Management Amherst, MA Peter Silberfarb Dartmouth Medical School Lebanon, NH Ed Wright W.J. Cox Associates Clarence, NY

The Center for Northern Woodlands The mission of the Center for Northern Education, Inc., is a 501(c)(3) public Woodlands Education is to advance benefit educational organization. Programs include Northern Woodlands a culture of forest stewardship in the magazine, Northern Woodlands Goes Northeast and to increase understanding to School, The Outside Story, The of and appreciation for the natural Place You Call Home series, and wonders, economic productivity, and www.northernwoodlands.org. ecological integrity of the region’s forests.

2 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 2 8/16/13 11:41:12 AM in this ISSUE

features 22 One for the Ages: The Hurricane of 1938 Battered New England’s Woods 75 Years Ago STEPHEN LONG 34 Life in Your Logs ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH 42 Paying for State Wildlife Conservation TOVAR CERULLI 52 Getting to the Bottom of the Scrape SUSAN C. MORSE 58 The Multiplier Effect: Rebuilding the Wood Product Manufacturing Base in the Northeast DAVE MANCE III

departments

58 2 From the Center 22 52 4 Calendar 5 Editor’s Note 6 Letters to the Editors 7 1,000 Words 9 Birds in Focus: Hawkwatching Confidential BRYAN PFEIFFER 11 Woods Whys: What are those Blisters on the Bark of Balsam Firs? MICHAEL SNYDER 13 Tracking Tips: Red Squirrel Stashes and Caches SUSAN C. MORSE 14 Knots and Bolts 42 50 Field Work: At Work Cutting Wood with Paul “Butch” Reed JOE RANKIN 64 Discoveries TODD MC LEISH 66 The Overstory: Red Oak VIRGINIA BARLOW 71 Tricks of the Trade CARL DEMROW 72 WoodLit 75 Upcountry ROBERT KIMBER 79 Outdoor Palette ADELAIDE TYROL 80 A Place in Mind 34 TOD CHENEY

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 3 8/16/13 11:41:16 AM CALENDAR

A Look at the Season’s Main Events

By Virginia Barlow September October November FIRST WEEK Woodchucks are working hard to pack Ospreys reach their winter quarters, usually Common snipe are cold tolerant and in the extra pounds needed to get them in South America. Juveniles won’t return will often stay in meadows until hard through the winter. Being fat and wobbly for two or sometimes three years / Lots of freezes force them to fly south / Below earlier in the year would have put them sparrows are looking for seeds to fuel their the year’s first ice, eastern newts are at the mercy of their many predators / migrations / It’s not just deciduous trees swimming around in ponds / Better get The chatty song of the Carolina wren that shed their leaves. Half the needles that garlic planted before the ground (tea-kettle, tea-kettle) is being heard on white pines are falling now. The other freezes / Beavers become more active more often here as this bird has moved half will stay for another year / Fall color in the afternoon as winter approaches / north over the last few decades / Some for red maples is at its peak. Many other You may have some new, uninvited insect yearling white-tailed bucks leave their trees are still bright green, providing guests as western conifer seed bugs move home territories, settling many miles intense contrast. Drive carefully. indoors for the winter. They don’t sting or from where they were born bite but are noisy when flying

SECOND WEEK Bears are eagerly looking for food as they More mice move indoors / Migrating Porcupines have resumed their low need to build up food reserves for a long geese make the same sounds they made nutrient winter diet, mostly sugar maple winter’s sleep / Queen Anne’s lace flowers in spring, but in autumn it sounds sad bark and the buds and needles of have gone to seed and the flower heads and haunting; in the spring it sounds hemlock. They’ll spend more time up in are curled up, now shaped like tiny bird eager and happy / Red-osier fruits are trees from now on / The greenness of nests / Tiny new shoots are forming on being eaten by black ducks, mallards, some mosses, ferns, and clubmosses cattail rhizomes. They will be dormant all wood ducks, ruffed grouse, woodpeckers, now stands out among brown-leaved or winter and form new shoots in spring / kingbirds, catbirds, waxwings, and leafless plants / On warmish nights males The prickly, inflated pods of wild cucumber cardinals – to name but a few / Fattened of the fall cankerworm moth (Alsophila have ripened. The vines drape over shrubs on fruits, this year’s cedar waxwings are pometaria) may be flying. The grayish and climb trees, especially in moist areas heading south. The parent birds have brown forewings have jagged white and been gone for three or four weeks dark lines. The females are wingless

THIRD WEEK Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) is very Jack-o’lantern mushrooms (Omphalotus Deer mice store seeds in the funniest poisonous to humans, but its purple fruits olearius) fruit at this time of year. They places – in boots in the mudroom, are a favorite food of American robins and smell and look delicious but are quite bumblebee nests, old bird nests, and tin many other native animals / Day length is poisonous. The gills glow eerily in the cans of nails in the shed / Long-tailed the same now as in the spring, and spring dark with a luminescence that may last weasels, ermines, and snowshoe hare are peepers, the odd wood frog, and some for two days after they are picked / Garter wearing their white winter coats. They will birds will have a go at singing, especially snakes may still be basking on warm, be easily seen by predators if there’s no if the weather is warm / Turkey chicks are sunny days but soon they will go under- snow / Pileated woodpeckers may be still with their mothers, sometimes with ground; often many snakes will share the eating both wild and cultivated grapes / groups of hens. The chicks are about same winter home / Last woodcocks head Raccoons are settling into their winter three-quarters as big as their mothers south as the ground freezes and worms quarters in a hollow tree, woodchuck become unavailable burrow, or abandoned building

FOURTH WEEK Wood ducks are leaving New England to A few dragonfly species may still be flying: November 28 – Comet ISON’s closest winter in the southern coastal states / the autumn meadowhawk, common green approach to the Sun. If this newly discovered The berries of common juniper take two to darner, and spotted spreadwing / Ruffed comet survives its encounter with the Sun, three years to mature. Now they are being grouse are growing their “snowshoes” – it could be one of the brightest in recent eaten by grouse, bobwhite, many songbird seasonal horny fringes on their toes that memory, perhaps visible during the day. species, and moose / The larva of a small will allow them to walk on top of the snow / Comets don’t always live up to expectations, fly causes goldenrod ball gall. The larva of Crab apples hold their fruit. Look for pine but if this one does, it will be glorious / It a moth causes elliptical goldenrod gall. grosbeaks and Bohemian waxwings picking gets dark and cold in November. At the end Both are obvious now that the leaves have apart the tiny apples later in the year / Oak of the month the days are an hour shorter fallen / Praying mantises are depositing and beech hold on to their leaves and are than at the beginning and on average it’s their styrofoam-like egg masses around twigs easily recognizable at this time of year more than 10 degrees F colder

These listings are from observations and reports in our home territory at about 1,000 feet in elevation in central Vermont and are approximate. Events may occur earlier or later, depending on your latitude, elevation – and the weather.

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 4 8/16/13 11:41:16 AM EDITOR’S note

By Dave Mance III

I went to Northeastern Wyoming a few weeks back; vague childhood memories of Devil’s Tower and Yellowstone did nothing to prepare me for just how different the landscape is out there. There are next to no trees. You drive for miles through rolling hills and bluffs carpeted in sage green – thinning vegetative hair on a brown, rocky scalp. The land wears the weather; the sandstone eroded by wind and rain and time; the hills coming together and disintegrating into washed out seams that end in pale green puddles of foxtail barley – the only hint that water exists. We lasted for a day in 105-degree heat, then sought refuge in the nearby Bighorn Mountains, where there are trees and it is low-whistle beautiful. The Bighorns are a relatively small mountain range by western standards, but big enough. We drove up a corkscrew road for about half an hour and then out into a mix of rolling high alpine meadows and forested hillsides, all framed by snow-capped peaks. I caught my breath and wished I had a pack horse, a canvas wall tent, and time to disappear into the Cloud Peak Wilderness for a month. There are clear lines between forest and field in the high country, based on soil type (unlike in the Northeast, where the forest would take over everything if we let it). On sedimentary substrates, forest cover is less than 50 percent and dominated by Engelmann spruce and sub-alpine fir. More granitic substrates favor lodgepole pine. When I was there, the meadows were full of alpine flowers, including many circumboreal species that you’ll find on the top of New England’s highest peaks (or, for that matter, mountains in Norway or Siberia). We camped in the 1,105,325 acre Bighorn National Forest, a jag of land that’s almost twice the size of Rhode Island. Like many national forests, it’s managed for both recreation and wood, though the management looks very different than it does back east. Out there, from what I saw, they’re cutting all softwood, using mostly clearcuts and shelterwood prescriptions. Tree planting is required on about 30 percent of the job sites, and growing conditions seem marginal, at best. One forest-grown pine we saw was about 10 inches in diameter and roughly 150 years old. Post-harvest, I’m sure some of this wood makes its way into the local community – maybe as one of those giant, staple-shaped gates the ranchers frame their driveway with, or as a railroad tie that supports the hundred-plus-car coal trains that rumble through the Powder River Basin. But they don’t have the value-added opportunities for the wood that we do in the Northeast. Our high-value hardwood grows prolifically in our temperate climate and doubles in value when it’s turned into lumber; if the boards can then be converted into a wood product by a local manufacturer, the positive economic ripples continue. On page 58 of this issue, we give an overview of secondary wood product manufacturing in the region. The idea is to shine a spotlight on the link between our working forestland and the manufacturing base in our rural towns. One of the fascinating aspects of Western forest management is fire suppression. We saw one job out there where a logging crew was using at least $600/hour worth of beautiful equipment to thin pine poles in a forest surrounding a gated development. Those skeptical of preemptive management argue that big fires are part of the land’s cycle of natural disturbance, and that what really needs to happen is people need to stop building houses in fire-prone areas. The data show that thinning and clearcuts (which act as fire breaks) can lower the chance of a massive fire, but won’t prevent small or medium-sized fires. Those doing the work argue that a general lack of management and fire suppression has led to a forest that’s overloaded with fuel, and $1 million spent to prevent a $1 billion fire (like the 1.2 million-acre conflagration they had in Yellowstone in 1988) is a bargain. They say that thinning is a natural disturbance regime; that left to its own devices, a lodgepole forest will flare up and self-thin regularly, the fire killing some trees but sparing others. In absorbing these perspectives, I felt lucky not to have a dog in this fight. We don’t have fires here like they do out west, but we’re not immune to large scale disturbance events – you can read about one of our most famous on page 22. In Northern New York and New England, experts say we can expect a stand-replacing disturbance on the scale of thousands of acres once every 1,000-7,500 years. In the Bighorns, they expect one every 39-350 years. The fact that the acreage burned by western fires has more than doubled in the past 50 years, despite improved firefighting techniques, suggests their numbers may be

conservative. Of course, as the climate continues to change, ours may be too. NW

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 5 8/16/13 11:41:16 AM letters to the EDITORS

At Most, Small Gaps Celebrating Diversity Nothing Wasted in Nature To the Editors: To the Editors: To the Editors: I enjoyed reading the most recent issue of The summer 2013 article on historical Maine Inspired by Drum from a Hide (Winter 2011), this Northern Woodlands. Once again, it was full of forests mentioned finding “26 different tree past winter I made my first deer-hide drum. informative and thought provoking articles. I do species!” (exclamation mark in the original) in the In late June, while moving firewood stacked want to bring to your attention a conceptual if Big Reed Forest Preserve’s 5,000 acres. That set under our back porch, I discovered an empty not factual error in your Editor’s note regarding me to wondering how many tree species there bird’s nest. The nest was fringed with deer hair, the purpose and objectives of Audubon Vermont’s are on our 65 acres in Poultney, Vermont. I came presumably gathered from the nearby spot where Forest Bird Initiative. In your editorial you state up with 27. I didn’t count the fruit and nut trees I scraped the hide late last year. that Audubon’s Birder’s Dozen Campaign “links we planted, but I included non-natives such as The nest strikes me as a beautiful example declining young forest habitat to recognizable the apples, black locusts, and catalpa. It provided of nature’s constant recycling. I imagine that the songbirds.” This leads the reader to link the nice support to our bias that we own a pretty artistic nest-builder was an eastern phoebe. She objectives of our Forest Bird Initiative to the efforts special piece of land. All the more reason for us to and I each made use of the deer in our own ways. to create young forest habitat for the New England manage it for species diversity. T C , M , VT Cottontail. I understand the point you were making T M-P , P, VT that linking management strategies to a species We love to hear from our readers. Letters intended or suite of species is a good way to engage land- for publication in the Winter 2013 issue should be owners and land managers. However, this leaves Top-Shelf Firewood sent in by October 1. Please limit letters to 400 the impression that our Forest Bird Initiative and To the Editors: words. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. our related Foresters for the Birds project is all I enjoy reading your tree species profile (Overstory) TOVAR about creating early-successional habitat. in each issue. The piece on black locust in the

In fact, the thrust of our Forest Bird Initiative summer issue was interesting and informative as CERULLI and the Foresters for the Birds project is primarily usual, but failed to mention one of the important focused on improving breeding habitat conditions characteristics of this species – its value as fire- for birds that breed in a mature forest. The silvi- wood. It is easy to split and has a BTU rating in cultural options developed from the project and the top 10 percent of any species for this purpose, now available as an NRCS conservation practice over twice as much as poplar and exceeding both are designed to improve the structural complexity hard maple and red oak. of an interior forest. These practices create at D O , S, OH most small gaps (< two acres) to promote regen- eration in the forest understory. The gaps created by these treatments may benefit gap-dependent forest birds like the chestnut-sided warbler in the early stages of regeneration, but the ultimate goal is to create understory vegetation. For many reasons, this component is often missing in our even-aged forests, and yet this is the vegetation most used by our forest breeding birds. There may be places where openings larger than two acres in the forest matrix serve a purpose. However, Audubon Vermont believes it is important to balance young and mature forest across the landscape in ways that best mimic our natural disturbance regimes. J  S, C   P  D , A V TOVAR CERULLI

Cerulli’s homemade drum; phoebe nest with deer hair.

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 6 8/16/13 11:41:22 AM 1,000 words

Photographer Frank Kaczmarek took this photo on a dew-laden, early autumn morning. “One of my favorite web-building spiders is the black and yellow argiope (Argiope aurantia), said Kaczmarek, “a large spider commonly found in meadows, gardens, and riparian woodlands throughout the Northeast. To photograph this specimen, I arrived before sunrise at a favorite meadow. As the sun rose, I placed the tripod-mounted camera in position, framed the sun and spider, and took the shot.”

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 8 8/16/13 11:41:29 AM BIRDS in focus

Story by Bryan Pfeiffer Hawkwatching Confidential

Pack a lunch, climb a mountain, and witness thousands of hawks us a flapping silhouette in the sky, and we’ll put a name on it. gliding south over hills blazing with fall foliage. If only this After all, immature red-tailed hawks don’t have red tails and romanticized rite of autumn were so easy. If only migrating immature bald eagles don’t have bald heads. In the same way hawks didn’t appear like specks of pepper cast to the winds, we use shape to separate pointy-winged falcons from broader- the birds of prey preying on a birder’s self-confidence. So here’s winged hawks in flight, practiced hawkwatchers use subtler some advice for fledgling fall hawkwatchers. differences to separate similar species. Once you know the The climb-a-mountain part is true. You’ ll want a high perch shape and flap of a broadwing, for example, you may more from which to see lots of sky. But not just any mountain will do. easily discover red-shouldered hawks by their slightly longer Go to established hawk-watching sites (more on those later), wings with more squared tips. (You won’t see red shoulders.) where the topography conspires to funnel southbound hawks in The same goes for eagles – and Rule Number Three: It’s not a large numbers. Up there, you’ll also find birders willing to share golden eagle. Okay, it might be. But golden eagles are rare in the their hawkwatching wisdom. east. Many a golden eagle report is actually of an immature bald Next, check the forecast for a classic fall day. Cool north eagle, which has a huge head and beak that project well forward winds and full or partial sun are the fuel for hawk migration. By of the wings, more so than on a smaller-headed golden eagle. late morning, sunshine warms the valleys, releasing thermals Bald eagles, which are regulars at fall hawkwatching sites, often with hawks along for the lift. At least that’s the idea; even on hold their wings flat or slightly drooped; golden eagles mostly perfect days sometimes the hawks don’t cooperate. hold theirs in a slight but noticeable dihedral. But when they do, it often goes like this: You finally spot your Until the weather’s right and you get yourself up a mountain, first hawk...then another, and another, then three more, and as you here’s some homework: Consult the Hawk Migration Association brush your binoculars back and forth, up and down across the sky, of North America’s web site (www.hmana.org) to locate a hawk- you’ve discovered a kettle – hundreds of hawks, specks of pepper funneling mountain near you and download free guides to hawk to be sure, but some of them drifting close enough to identify. identification. Augment your own field guides with Hawks at a Identification Rule Number One: It’s a broadwing. The Distance, by Jerry Liguori. broad-winged hawk is the most abundant and reliable fall hawk Finally, Rule Number Four: Be skeptical of generalizations in the Northeast. Small, stocky, and circling on flat, pointed (including mine). You may encounter migrating hawks away wings, broadwings are themselves an event. Although they from mountains, even over cities. And hawks won’t always be move south from late August into November, their numbers so distant. Now and then they glide low overhead, exposing often surge from September 10-20, when broadwings constitute their classic field marks (so use them when you see them), the vast majority of hawks we see in the Northeast. Here is along with grace, force, and intensity, producing some of the your opportunity to learn and enjoy broad-winged hawks from best “ooh-ahh” moments in all birding. But even when they every angle. And from that blizzard of broadwings, your next don’t, or even when hawks don’t show up at all – hey, at least challenge is to find birds that are not broadwings. you’re on top of a mountain. Which brings me to Rule Number Two: Abandon plumage. Skilled hawkwatchers can distinguish every eastern hawk, Bryan Pfeiffer is an author, wildlife photographer, guide, and consulting naturalist who eagle, or falcon species by shape and style of flight alone. Give specializes in birds and insects. He lives in Montpelier, Vermont. STEVE BYLAND STEVE BYLAND B RYAN P FEIFFER

Red-shouldered hawk Broad-winged hawk Red-tailed hawk (without red tail)

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 9 8/16/13 11:41:30 AM Money does grown on trees, let us show you how! E-mail us at foreconinc.com to request the 2013 Woodland News www.FORECONinc.com

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 10 8/16/13 11:41:36 AM woods WHYS

By Michael Snyder

What are those Blisters on the Bark of Balsam Firs?

Those bulging cysts on the otherwise very smooth, gray-brown bark are a distinguishing characteristic of balsam fir trees. They’re all over most fir stems. Aside from the really young and the oldest rough-barked trees, bark blisters are found on pretty much all balsam firs. They are as abundant and normal as needles and thought to be helpful in the tree’s system of defenses – especially against insects and pathogens. And people have made use of them for a very long time. Inside each fir blister is a fragrant (impossible not to think Christmas), viscous, sticky, clear resin, also called pitch. It is not sap, which conifers also produce. Sap is mostly water with sugars, vitamins, hormones, and enzymes. It serves a nutritive function in the tree. Resin is very different. It is more like turpentine than sap. At this point we could discuss diterpenoids and oleoresins and the like, but let’s leave our comparison to sap at this: nobody makes delectable syrup from conifer resin, and archeology fans everywhere know resin in its hardened, fossilized form as amber. All of our native and common conifers produce such resins, though how and where in the tree they are produced varies by groups of species. Resin in pines, spruces, and larches, for example, exists in resin canals – elongated, tubular spaces – within wood tissues. Fir resin, like that in hemlock and cedars, is found in the bark and only rarely – in response to traumatic injury – within

the wood. In fact, the absence of resin ducts in the wood of fir is CROSIER ANDREW used in identifying and sorting fir boards from spruce. But despite their great abundance, fir blisters still stir some scientific debate about their function. Whereas some researchers have classified conifer resin as a hydrocarbon compound of cellular waste products, others deem it a useful secretion, Many a northern woodsman has started a fire and sealed a pointing to mounting evidence of its role in a range of protective wound with it – and no small amount of gear has been similarly functions. Evidently, these wastes defend the tree against a wide patched. It has been used in dental procedures and cough range of birds, mammals, insects, and pathogens. For example, syrups, as a vapor to ease headaches, and as an ingestible, to ease insects attempting to pierce the bark of a balsam fir to feed on stomach aches. In a pinch, it’ll even do as crude chapstick. the sweet sap in the wood inside are thwarted by that sticky goo. Of course, now we have synthetics for most of these things, Not only does it physically trap insects and impede their inward but they can’t take the fun of ingenuity away, and balsam resin progress, it has some toxicity as well. It has also been speculated delivers good entertainment. Sure, there’s the traditional thumb- that the highly antiseptic qualities of resin help prevent wood press resulting in a sticky squirt aimed at your little brother. But decay. there’s more. Poke a fir blister with a small dead twig and get a Whatever debate remains about the mechanisms of resin’s little gob of fir resin on the end. Now, drop that twig in a pool of benefits to trees, there is a long list of the ways that people made water and be amazed at that quiet little “resin rocket motorboat.” good use of balsam resin. Owing to its optical properties – it has The twig is propelled by the water-avoiding chemistry of the a refractive index similar to ordinary glass – balsam was used as balsam resin. Who knew science could be so much fun? a medium for mounting microscope specimens and as a cement for optical systems like lenses and gun sights. For centuries it was used as a fixative and glossing agent on oil paintings and to Michael Snyder, a forester, is Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Forests, waterproof pottery. Parks and Recreation.

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 11 8/16/13 11:41:38 AM Forest information. Professional assistance. And practical advice for your Woodlands. from the Maine Forest Service 1-800-367-0223 toll-free in ME or 207-287-2791 www.maineforestservice.gov

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 12 8/16/13 11:41:48 AM TRACKING tips

Story and photos by Susan C. Morse

Red Squirrel Stashes and Caches

The Latin name for the red squirrel, Tamiasciurus hudsonicus, gives us more than a hint about the summer and fall foraging behaviors of this bold and busy creature. Tamias apparently has a variety of meanings in Greek, including distributor, storer, and steward. Every outdoor enthusiast has seen what goes on out there: once cones are mature, red squirrels clip them from the trees and carry them to caches throughout the forest. Small cone-bearing nip twigs can be found on the ground, and a hand lens will often reveal the tiny grooves caused by squirrel incisors, as well as the angled cuts indicative of how these small rodents remove the twigs from the tree. From the top: Red squirrel; a Norway spruce Unlike the scatter hoarding behaviors of cone cache next to a large log. Within the the gray squirrel, where individual nuts and midden one finds cone scales that are bitten or other foods are cached in numerous shallow torn off, occasional winged seeds, and stripped burials, the red squirrel is a larder hoarder. cone cores. If you look closely, you can see the Conifer seeds are its chief winter food, so imprints of paired seed and seed wings on the hundreds of cones may be clipped from the inside surface of each scale. These are removed trees and cached in central locations. The and eaten by the squirrels. most conspicuous sign is of a midden – a large accumulation of cone seeds, scales, and stripped cone cores, as well as some stored cones whose seeds have yet to be extracted and eaten. The cones of some conifer species, such as red pine, have scales that must be cut off in order to access the seeds. By contrast, hemlock, spruce, and fir have thinner scales that can be stripped off the cone axis. Heirloom middens may be several feet in diameter, and more than a few feet thick. Midden sites are often deliberately established beside streams or seepage areas, or under moist logs, large leaning stumps, or root wads. The accumulated Winged seed midden refuse, coupled with the site’s moist environment, helps keep the cones closed and preserves the seeds longer. Everyone is familiar with the red squirrel’s “squirrely” behavior – the nervous running about, the scolding, and the fierce defense of its territory. There’s good reason for this. Squirrel researcher Fritz Gerhardt discovered that the feisty squirrels constantly stole cones from each other’s caches. Gerhardt color-marked each individual cache’s cones and found that 25 percent of them Norway spruce cone axis changed ownership, and nearly 100 percent of the squirrels in Cone scales his study participated in pilfering. Last year was a cone mast bust. The many squirrels living around my cabin really struggled to find enough to eat and As a wildlife photographer, I have succeeded in getting grand store for the winter. For the first time in nearly 40 years, some pictures of grizzlies, wolves, lynxes, and bobcats. What I dream squirrels insisted on moving into my place. They terrorized my about, though, is the opportunity to capture a clear image of what house cats. One squirrel perched on my cook stove, eating from I have seen so many times. Picture a red squirrel descending a box of Triscuits. It scolded me when I drew near and told me in a white spruce trunk. With sap-stained lips, the squirrel is vociferous squirrel language to “get the #$!& out of my kitchen!” carrying the long cone on end in its mouth which looks for all Squatters’ rights indeed! They even clipped and cached the red, the world like a fine Havana cigar. cone-shaped LED Christmas lights that surrounded the frame of my front door – 42 in all. Susan C. Morse is founder and program director of Keeping Track in Huntington, Vermont.

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 13

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 13 8/16/13 11:41:50 AM KNOTS & BOLTS

[ FORAGING ]

Untold Abundance: The Autumn Olive

Wild plants do not surrender their treasures as berry of the autumn olive (Elaeagnus umbellata) fruit first, however, as the flavor varies greatly easily as their cultivated cousins. Wild berries tend is an exception to this rule. The autumn olive from shrub to shrub and over the course of its to be small, seedy, and scattered widely across dominates whole landscapes. Its berries can long season (all of September and October). I find the landscape. Anyone who has spent an hour weigh branches to the ground. It is impossible that berries grown in full sun tend to be sweetest, gathering a cup or two of wild strawberries will to over-harvest. Its flavor is almost universally and I have a slight preference for late season tell you that their sweetness is hard-won. But the liked. And, best of all, hardly anyone knows it is fruit. Autumn olive berries taste like nothing else – edible. Learn to recognize it, and you can have sweet, tart, and pleasantly astringent. this bounty practically to yourself. Once you’ve harvested, you can enjoy the fruits Autumn Olive Tart This remarkable fruiting shrub is not an olive at both raw and cooked. I love them raw, but I take CRUST 1 cup all-purpose flour all. You can spot its silvery leaves along highways care to spit the seeds into a container rather than 1/3 cup sugar and in disturbed sites where conservationists on the ground to avoid inadvertently spreading 1/8 tsp. salt planted it to provide wildlife habitat and control the plants. To cook with them, I mash the berries 1/3 cup finely ground hazelnuts erosion. Conservationists now frown upon this through a colander to separate the flesh from the 1 egg practice because autumn olive, an Asian native, seeds. As in tomatoes, the red color of the berries 1 stick butter competes aggressively with our native species. comes from lycopene, which is not water soluble, As an ecologist, I am careful not to spread this so the pulp separates into two parts – a clear juice PUREE 2 cups of fruit pulp invasive plant. But as a forager, I am tempted by and a thick red solid. These can be decanted and 1/2–1 cup sugar (to taste) its juicy, red, speckled fruit. used separately, but I am not usually so ambitious. 3 tbsp. flour Gathering autumn olives pays great rewards for A good place to start cooking with autumn olives very little time invested. The fruits occur in such is to replace the fruit in a recipe that calls for Preheat oven to 400°F. Cut the butter into quantity that I simply hold a container under a raspberries, which is where this recipe got its the dry ingredients to pea-sized chunks. Beat laden branch and run my fingers along it, allowing inspiration. Benjamin Lord in the egg and press dough into an 11-inch the fruit to fall in. I’m always careful to taste the buttered tart pan. Bake the crust until golden brown, about 12 minutes. Press autumn olive berries through a strainer or colander to collect fruit pulp. Add sugar to taste. Add the flour, which will thicken the puree and somewhat slow the separation of the juices. Pour the berry puree over the crust. Bake until puree bubbles (about 10 minutes), cool, and serve.

14 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 14 8/16/13 11:41:53 AM [ THE O U T SIDE STORY ]

How the Trout Got Its Spots

When I was ten, I carried a tin can of worms and a battered fishing rod to the wild shores of Brickyard Pond, in the woods behind our subdivision. We caught mostly scrappy sunfish and white perch, with the occasional bass thrown in. As for the pretty trout that came from the hatchery truck, I never caught one. The fish I caught were mostly round, dark green or gray, and mottled like the mud and sand bottom of the pond. Then one day a friend’s older brother, a real fisherman with a green fishing vest, caught a large brown trout. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The fish, shaped like a torpedo, was a yellowish gold and it had big red spots on its sides. Years later, I caught my first brook trout on a fly rod at Shoal Pond in the White Mountains. Again, I was mesmerized by the intense colors: the yellow and red spots, some with bluish halos, the fins that were bright red with white and black trim. It all begs the question: why the trout’s fancy colors when so many other fish are dishwater dull? Part of the answer can be found in the biological record. Trout are part of the salmon family, which diverged from other bony fishes at the end of the Oligocene, about 30 million years ago. This was a time of global cooling, which suited the trout just fine. They were coldwater pioneers who pushed into higher elevation watersheds to spawn and sometimes reside. Where the water is clear and cold, bright colors can be seen. There is an advantage to this. Trout are territorial, and males and females aggressively defend feeding stations. They flash their colors in lateral and frontal threat displays, and if that doesn’t work to push off an intruder, they nip and chase each other to defend their position in a stream. Color and pigment patterns seem to matter during fall spawning, too. The fins and bellies of brook trout, like the maple leaves above, turn orange in the fall. While shortened day length triggers spawning behavior, it’s the trout’s heightened color that brings on the aggression as males vie for the opportunity to be closest to an egg-laying female. The largest, most brightly colored males will most effectively fend off the peripheral males. These males are not just rivals, they also cannibalize the eggs. Bright color can be a disadvantage, of course, especially to an animal that must be constantly wary of predation from above. So trout have evolved a two-toned skin. The bright threatening flash of their silvery sides – in rainbow trout the silver is superimposed by a brushwork of red – contrasts with a dark back, engraved with ornate markings called vermiculations. These speckled patterns break up reflected light, merging trout with the gravely substrate below. In moving water, trout are nearly invisible from above. Environmental factors also influence a trout’s colors. Food supply, for example, can have a major effect. Whether a brook trout has a pale or a pink belly is partly a function of how many crustaceans – small crayfish and shrimp – it eats. Brook trout that spend part of the year in the ocean take on a bluish hue, while trout living in the acidified waters of isolated beaver ponds are often deep yellow, closer to the tannin leachates that turn such waters brown. Chemical pollution may influence trout pigmentation, too. Chemicals found in certain anti-fouling boat bottom paint turn rainbow trout paler. Hybridization adds to the puzzle of fish pigmentation. The High Sierra’s golden trout, arguably the prettiest trout in the world, hybridize with west slope cutthroats to make a fish that fishermen call “cutgolds.” The fact that we’ve been busy introducing trout to waters everywhere since the 1850s muddies the color palette even more. Looks can be deceiving, and maybe we put too much stock in beauty. But there’s an ecological lesson in a trout’s good looks. These fish are decked out in sky, sunshine, and the multi-hued gravels of the places they call home. They’re a sentinel species: as goes the cold, clean water, so go the trout. T  T

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 15

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 15 8/16/13 11:41:56 AM KNOTS & B OLTS

[ E XOT IC PEST UPDAT E ]

To Quarantine or Not to Quarantine

Ever since the emerald ash borer (EAB) was largely on past experiences in the Midwest where considered cost-prohibitive to mills). discovered in Michigan in 2002, many have spec- infestations turned out to be much larger than After a brief period of being cut off from mar- ulated about its potential effects on forests in the anticipated. EAB is notoriously difficult to detect kets, Berkshire County businesses received some Northeast. With the confirmation of infestations in during early stages of infestation, and affected relief in May when the New York State quarantine eastern New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, trees may not show symptoms for several years. was expanded to include the counties bordering and New Hampshire, the speculation is over; the Analysis of the first known infested tree in New Massachusetts. Because regulated materials may region is now dealing with a pest that is regarded Hampshire indicated that EAB had been present move freely within contiguous quarantined coun- in the same vein as chestnut blight and Dutch for at least three years before it was discovered. ties, Berkshire County ash can now be shipped to elm disease. Another option that was considered was a roughly half of New York State. Although the ecological consequences of the statewide quarantine, which would have allowed Realistically, the long-term outlook is bleak. As emerald ash borer’s work have barely begun in businesses to transport ash to customers and pro- Massachusetts Forest Alliance executive direc- our region, the forest products industry is already cessors throughout Massachusetts. The downside tor Jeff Hutchins put it: “The forest industry in feeling the effects. When the bug is discovered in of that is that it would likely facilitate the spread Massachusetts has had a rough time over the last a state, that state is added to a federal quarantine of EAB across the state. According to Department couple decades, so every blow like this worries list, which limits the movement of wood. It’s up of Conservation and Recreation Commissioner Ed people. It’s not going to completely destroy the to the states to recommend the extent of the Lambert, it was “not an action we thought was in industry, but it will be a hardship for sure.” Jeff quarantined area, and this involves balancing the state’s best interest,” adding “it certainly might Poirier, owner of the Berkshire Hardwoods sawmill a complex mix of ecological and economic have minimized the impact on the industry but, in in Chesterfield, Massachusetts, called it “devastat- considerations. The recent quarantine debates in our opinion, it would have allowed much quicker ing,” adding that it would affect 15 percent of his Massachusetts bear this out. spread in parts of the state.” Another consideration After EAB was discovered in the Berkshire is that businesses in eastern Massachusetts would County town of Dalton in September, 2012, not be allowed to sell to out-of-state markets, many businesses and landowners in western despite being a long way from Dalton and possibly Massachusetts, where 80 percent of the state’s years away from infestation. [ REF ERENCE ] 45 million ash trees grow, advocated a local The third option, a regional quarantine for quarantine that would only apply to Dalton and Berkshire County, offered a balance between the surrounding towns. In its official position the other alternatives. However, it was the least Hunting and Land statement, the Massachusetts Forest Alliance favorable option for Berkshire County businesses, Trapping Seasons argued against a larger restriction: “There is little as quarantines are highly restrictive in isolated scientific relevance to a quarantine zone based regions. There is only one hardwood sawmill in in the Northeast solely on arbitrary political borders. A more sci- the county, and it is not equipped to handle large Each fall we get calls from non-hunters ence-based approach would be to establish a volumes. There is also no dry kiln available to asking when hunting and trapping seasons quarantine zone of a given radius surrounding the treat lumber. (Hardwick Kilns, the state’s only are. People want to know when to wear source tree [which] should encompass as small facility, is in Worcester County.) Opponents also orange in the woods and when to keep their an area as is feasible.” cited a regional quarantine in New York State, pets on a leash. And so we compiled the One oft-expressed viewpoint was that the which adversely affected many businesses that following list. We haven’t included small game spread of EAB is inevitable, and any restrictions were unable to transport to companies that or bird seasons, which run on and off from beyond the known infested area will needlessly use ash, including baseball bat manufacturer September through March. And the trapping hurt an industry that has already suffered sig- Rawlings Adirondack. data gives just a snapshot of when it’s legal nificantly in recent years. Cinda Jones, president After considering the various viewpoints, to set a trap on dry land (water trapping for of the W.D. Cowls Company in Amherst, stated, Massachusetts officials decided to quarantine muskrat and beaver continues through the “We’ve urged [the state] to make the quarantined Berkshire County beginning last March. So far, whole winter in most places). In many states, area as small as possible and allow the industry to follow-up monitoring has indicated just a few seasons vary by wildlife management zones, harvest what we can before the bug gets here.” infested trees close to the original discovery in so for efficiency’s sake we’ve combined the “I’d like to be able to turn those ash trees into Dalton, and there is hope that EAB can be con- data from various zones to give an overall something useful rather than have them fall on tained there. The regulations apply to ash stock, snapshot. Thus, the season in your area will the ground and die,” voiced one Berkshire County untreated ash lumber, and hardwood firewood. fall within the window we report, but may or landowner. Acceptable treatments include dry kiln steril- may not encompass the entire time span. For However, federal and state officials and ento- ization, fumigation, and removing bark and a complete information, visit your state’s fish mologists have opposed local quarantines, based half-inch of wood (the latter two are generally and wildlife department.

16 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 16 8/16/13 11:41:57 AM MN

business. Ash constitutes 20 percent of the business NH WI of Hardwick Kilns in central Massachusetts, which

processes lumber from around the Northeast. MA In Massachusetts, the Department of Con- NY MI servation and Recreation estimates that it will IA cost businesses $500 million overall. In New Hampshire, projections indicate annual losses PA of $1 million for industries that use ash wood, OH $500,000 for firewood producers, and $25 mil- IL IN lion in lost urban trees. However, officials hope the payoff for the quar- WV antines and their economic effects will be addition- MO VA al time for businesses and communities to prepare for EAB’s arrival, allowing researchers to investigate KY potential countermeasures, such as introduced predators. Though this is likely to take years, TN there’s some hope the spread may eventually be checked. J  B Emerald ash borer quarantine map. For additional information visit www.aphis.usda.gov

HUNTING AND TRAPPING IN NE & NY Vermont Maine New Hampshire New York Massachusetts Connecticut BEAR Sep 1–Nov 24 Aug 26–Nov 1 Sep 1–Nov 26 Oct 26–Dec 8 Sep 3–21, Nov 4–23 None DEER RIFLE Nov 16–Dec 1 Nov 4–30 Nov 13–Dec 8 Oct 26–Dec 8 Dec 2–14 Nov 20–Dec 10 DEER MUZZLELOADER Dec 7–15 Dec 2–Dec 14 Nov 2–12 Oct 19–Dec 17 Dec 16–31 Dec 11–31 MOOSE Oct 19–24 Sep 23–Nov 9 Oct 19–27 None None None LAND TRAPPING Oct 26–Dec 31 Oct 20–Dec 31 Oct 15–Mar 31 Oct 25–Feb 15 Only cage traps allowed Nov 3–Dec 31 JOHN HALL JOHN

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 17

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 17 8/16/13 11:42:00 AM A Consulting Forester can help you

Markus Bradley, Ben Machin, Mike Scott Paul Harwood, Leonard Miraldi Make decisions about Redstart Forestry Harwood Forestry Services, Inc. managing your forestland Juniper Chase, Corinth, VT 05039 P.O. Box 26, Tunbridge, VT 05077 (802) 439-5252 (802) 356-3079 Design a network of trails www.redstartconsulting.com [email protected] Anita Nikles Blakeman Ben Hudson Improve the wildlife Woodland Care Forest Management Hudson Forestry P.O. Box 4, N. Sutton, NH 03260 P.O. Box 83, Lyme, NH 03768 habitat on your property (603) 927-4163 (603) 795-4535 [email protected] [email protected] Negotiate a contract Herbert Boyce, ACF, CF M.D. Forestland Consulting, LLC with a logger and Deborah Boyce, CF (802) 472-6060 supervise the job Northwoods Forest Consultants, LLC David McMath 13080 NYS Route 9N, Jay, NY 12941 Cell: (802) 793-1602 (518) 946-7040 [email protected] Improve the quality of [email protected] Beth Daut, NH #388 your timber Cell: (802) 272-5547 Gary Burch [email protected] Burch Hill Forestry 1678 Burch Road, Granville, NY 12832 Scott Moreau (518) 632-5436 Greenleaf Forestry [email protected] P.O. Box 39, Westford, VT 05494 (802) 343-1566 cell Alan Calfee, Michael White (802) 849-6629 Calfee Woodland Management, LLC [email protected] P.O. Box 86, Dorset, VT 05251 (802) 231-2555 Haven Neal [email protected] Haven Neal Forestry Services www.calfeewoodland.com 137 Cates Hill Road, Berlin, NH 03570 Fountain Forestry (603) 752-7107 7 Green Mountain Drive, Suite 3 Richard Cipperly, CF [email protected] Montpelier, VT 05602-2708 North Country Forestry (802) 223-8644 ext 26 8 Stonehurst DrIve, Queensbury, NY 12804 David Senio [email protected] (518) 793-3545 P.O. Box 87, Passumpsic, VT 05861 Cell: (518) 222-0421 (802) 748-5241 LandVest Timberland Fax: (518) 798-8896 [email protected] Management and Marketing [email protected] ME, NH, NY, VT Jeffrey Smith 5086 US Route 5, Suite 2, Newport, VT 05855 Swift C. Corwin, Jr. Butternut Hollow Forestry (802) 334-8402 Calhoun & Corwin Forestry, LLC 1153 Tucker Hill Road www.landvest.com 41 Pine Street, Peterborough, NH 03458 Thetford Center, Vermont 05075 Swift Corwin: (603) 924-9908 (802) 785-2615 Long View Forest Management John Calhoun: (603) 357-1236 Jack Wadsworth, LPF, ME & NH Andrew Sheere Fax: (603) 924-3171 Brian Reader, LPF, ME & NH SAF Certified Forester & [email protected] Jesse Duplin, LPF, ME & NH NRCS Technical Service Provider Daniel Cyr Wadsworth Woodlands, Inc. Westminster, VT 05158 Bay State Forestry 35 Rock Crop Way, Hiram, ME 04041 (802) 428 4050 P.O. Box 205, Francestown, NH 03043 (207) 625-2468 [email protected] (603) 547-8804 [email protected] www.longviewforest.com baystateforestry.com www.wadsworthwoodlands.com

Meadowsend Timberlands Ltd R. Kirby Ellis Kenneth L. Williams Jeremy G. Turner, NHLPF #318 Ellis’ Professional Forester Services Consulting Foresters, LLC serving NH & VT P.O. Box 71, Hudson, ME 04630 959 Co. Hwy. 33, Cooperstown, NY 13326 P.O. Box 966, New London, NH 03257 (207) 327-4674 (607) 547-2386 (603) 526-8686 ellisforestry.com Fax: (607) 547-7497 [email protected] www.mtlforests.com Charlie Hancock North Woods Forestry P.O. Box 405, Montgomery Center, VT 05471 New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts require foresters (802) 326-2093 to be licensed, and Connecticut requires they be certified. Note that not all consulting foresters are licensed in each [email protected] state. If you have a question about a forester’s licensure or certification status, contact your state’s Board of Licensure.

18 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 18 8/16/13 11:42:00 AM Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 19

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 19 8/16/13 11:42:05 AM Ad Index A. Johnson Company ...... 78 Allard Lumber Company ...... 48 Bay State Forestry Services ...... 19 Berry, Dunn, McNeil, & Parker ...... 77 Britton Lumber Co., Inc...... 76 Celebrating MA Town Forests: MA DRC ...... inside front cover Cersosimo Company Mill ...... 40 Cersosimo Lumber Co., Inc...... 70 Champlain Hardwoods ...... 68 Classifieds ...... 74 Columbia Forest Products ...... 8 Consulting Foresters ...... 18 Econoburn ...... back cover Farm Credit ...... 41 Fine Furniture Festival...... 78 Forecon ...... 10 Forest Metrix ...... 69 Fountains Forestry ...... 76 Fountains Real Estate ...... 19 Gagnon Lumber, Inc...... 33 Garland Mill Timberframes ...... 70 Gutchess Lumber Company ...... 21 HeatMaster...... 10 Hull Forest Products ...... 33 Innovative Natural Resource Solutions ...... 48 Itasca Greenhouse ...... 70 L.W. Greenwood ...... 76 Land & Mowing Solutions, LLC ...... 32 LandVest Real Estate...... inside back cover LandVest, Inc...... 68 Lie-Nielsen Toolworks ...... 12 Lopper North America ...... 77 Lyme Timber ...... 32 Maine Forest Service ...... 12 McNeil Generating ...... 56 Meadowsend ...... 41 N.E.W.T.: Northeast Woodland Training ...... 33 NE Forestry Consultants, Inc...... 78 NEFF ...... 40 New England Forest Products ...... 21 New England Wood Pellet ...... 56 Northern Forest Center ...... 49 Northern Logger...... 77 Northland Forest Products ...... 8 Noyes Company ...... 41 Oesco Inc ...... 10 Sacred Heart University ...... 19 Sawlog Bulletin ...... 77 Sustainable Forestry Initiative ...... 48 SWOAM ...... 77 Tarm USA, Inc...... 56 The Taylor-Palmer Agency, Inc...... 12 Timberhomes, LLC ...... 12 Valley Floors ...... 68 Vermont Woodlands Association ...... 70 Vermont Atlas of Life ...... 76 Vermont Land Trust...... 78 VWA Consulting Foresters ...... 21 Wells River Savings Bank ...... 10 Wood-Mizer ...... 40 Woodwise Land, Inc...... 68

Find all of our advertisers easily online at Northern Woodlands’ current advertisers: northernwoodlands.org/issues/advertising/advertisers

20 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 20 8/16/13 11:42:09 AM Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 21

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 21 8/16/13 11:42:13 AM 22 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 22 8/16/13 11:42:15 AM One for the Ages: The Hurricane of 1938 Battered New England’s Woods 75 Years Ago

By Stephen Long

n a steep slope in the woods above our house, one particular sugar maple stands out for both its great size and its longevity. Some of the lichen- covered bark is sloughing off its trunk, but no woodpeckers have been probing it for insects, so it seems sound. And that’s remarkable for a tree that was a seedling in 1832, the year Andrew Jackson was elected to a second term as president. The dominant tree in its neighborhood, it forks 20 feet up into a spreading crown that has relegated newcomers to the understory, and at 28 inches across, it is twice the diameter of its neighbors. All of the other outsized trees in our woods got their start as pasture trees, as indicated by their heavy lower limbs and multiple trunks. This one’s form confirms the opposite, that of a tree that grew up competing in a forest. In the long process of self-pruning, it was shedding lower limbs before the Civil War. Loggers passed it by on various occasions, probably because it has a pronounced lean and a prominent seam that compromise its lumber value. It had a 15-inch diameter in 1954, when logger Walter Dunklee bought the timber on this lot and drove his Army sur- plus deuce-and-a-half deep into the woods to truck the logs out. He didn’t cut it. ARCHIVAL Nor was it cut 16 years earlier, when the local bobbin mill bought the rights to harvest “all the beech, birch, and maple timber standing and blown down” in the worst wind that ever IMAGES hit central Vermont, the hurricane of 1938. While many nearby trees were uprooted, this

FROM U.S. maple stood firm in winds that gusted at more than 100 miles per hour. Such a performance makes it worthy of a name, and I’ve christened it Andrew Jackson.

F From the moment I learned that these woods had been blown down on September 21, OREST S 1938, I wanted to know more about the hurricane, but nobody living on our land that day

ERVICE , was still around to tell me about it. Nobody could describe to me the wind, the sky, the sound of the crashing trees, or tell me what it was like to wake up the next morning to a E

ASTERN R changed world. Fortunately, other people in town had experienced it, so I went visiting. I went to see Harry Brainerd, who was 12 years old when the hurricane hit. Harry lives

EGION four miles west of our woods, on Taplin Hill, in a white cape-style farm house, which,

PHOTOGRAPH along with its large white barn, once belonged to his great-grandfather. The buildings perch on a knoll, with acres of lush hayfield in the foreground, the very image of a well- tended New England farm.

COURTESY Harry and I sat at his kitchen table while he told me about the hurricane. He said h e’d been carried to and from school that day because he had been suffering from

OF rheumatic fever. THE F “When I came home in the afternoon, I was sitting by the window. School didn’t

OREST H let out until four o’clock back in those days, and I was sitting in the chair right there. I noticed that the little trees were bending right over, about 20 minutes past four. I thought ISTORY S ’twas awful windy but we just didn’t pay much attention.” His mother still had clothes out

OCIETY drying on the line. , D URHAM ,

N.C. In the wake of the storm: Herbert Adams standing beside the roots of a large (30 inch at breast height) yellow birch in the old growth hardwood blowdown area in Kinsman Notch.

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 23

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 23 8/16/13 11:42:16 AM The wind kept coming, and the skies got darker. A mile to the west, Harry’s classmate Bryce Metcalf saw maple trees on the ridge start toppling over, roots and all. The Metcalf farm, surrounded by hay meadows and cornfields, was just as exposed to the wind as the Brainerds’, and Bryce’s father was worried that the barn roof might lift off. He decided to clinch the nails that were holding the metal roof to the strapping, and Bryce and the hired man went with him. The hay was piled right to the roof, so the three of them climbed up on top of it and started bending the nails over. “A l l of a sudden my father could see the whole roof starting to lift up,” Bryce said. “He got us out of there, and the whole thing started to go, and then, finally, part of it went of f .” Back at the Brainerds’, Harry watched the radio aerial fly off the barn. The family had a Wards airline radio and listened to Lowell Thomas report the news of the world. Even if the radio had kept working, it wouldn’t have warned them about the storm. Weather forecasting in the ’30s relied on primitive tools, and the hurricane’s arrival was a shock to all who experienced it. With electrical and telephone lines down, word did not spread north to be prepared for the winds. During supper, Harry was startled to see their huge barn doors bouncing end over end across the field. Yard trees began crashing onto the house. “The pine and the spruce hit the house, and when they hit the ridge pole, they broke right off, and the top part of the tree slid down the other side. It got so that every time one of them huge trees struck the house, the house just jumped right up and down. I remember my father said, and my mother too, ‘I guess we’ll be starting over again.’ We figured the barns would probably be demolished and everything else. That’s the way it was.” As bad as it was, the damage in Corinth was just one twig in the brushpile. The path of destruction spanned 90 miles across, and forests were toppled in every New England state, with New Hampshire and Massachusetts being particularly hard hit. The damage was so bad that the federal government formed an agency – Northeast Timber Salvage Administration (NETSA) – to deal with all the downed timber. An administrator wrote in the agency’s report, “The capricious hurricane, contacting the earth but lightly in some places, viciously in others, left wind-thrown timber in large and small bodies over some 15 million acres, or 35 percent of all the land area of New E n g l an d .” He noted that damage occurred in 904 towns in 51 counties and took a bite out of the woodland bank accounts of 30,000 Depression-era landowners. All told, an estimated 2.6 billion board feet were blown down. To put that in context, a typical truckload of logs holds 6,600 board feet. It would take almost 400,000 of these trucks to transport the wood that was blown down. Here’s another way to think of it. The largest hardwood sawmill operating today in New England is Cersosimo Lumber in Brattleboro, Vermont. It buys 40 million board feet of sawlogs annually. At their current rate of production, it would take Cersosimo 65 years to process 2.6 billion board feet. As it was, spurred on by NETSA and with help from the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps programs, the industry geared up and sawed nearly half of the blowdown into lumber. Cutting with axes and crosscut saws, and skidding logs with horse-drawn sleds, thousands of men participated in what has to be the largest logging job ever. The worst storm In the last two years, devastating tropical storms have pummeled the Northeast. Irene in August 2011 was particularly hard on Vermont, while October 2012 found Sandy walloping New York City and New Jersey. These two storms, the second dubbed a “superstorm” by those who traffic in hyperbole, can provide a framework for picturing what happened on September 21, 1938. Out on the ocean, both storms reached hurricane status – defined as having sustained winds of over 74 miles per hour – but each had been downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it made landfall. Each did tremendous damage to the built environment, with most of the harm coming from the deluge of rain and the tidal surge. But these storms were essentially floods. Sure, there was wind, but the hurricane-force

24 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 24 8/16/13 11:42:20 AM winds they packed hit the coast hard and then dissipated as the storm traveled inland, which is typical of most hurricanes. The rain kept falling, but because a hurricane gathers its power from warm ocean water, the winds lost their force upon landfall. The Hurricane of 1938 was unique in that it carried brutal winds 300 miles inland. It brought plenty of rain as well, but less than had fallen the previous week in a separate low pressure system that stopped dumping rain only the night before. One point that has been lost in the retelling is that much of New England was already flooded when the 1938 hurricane entered the picture. On making landfall, Irene moved along at 15 miles per hour, a speed typical for hurricanes, which don’t seem to be in a hurry. They poke along, and it can take days for a huge system to work its way through any particular spot on its path. Not so on September 21, 1938. With a forward speed of 57 miles per hour, this hurricane sped from a position east of Cape Hatteras to the south shore of Long Island in only seven hours. Its center crossed Long Island at 3:30 p.m.; Hartford, Connecticut, at 4:30; the Vermont border at 6:00. High winds preceded the center’s arrival and continued after it passed, but the storm was over relatively quickly, thus the aptness of its early moniker, the Long Island Express. (The naming system that we know today didn’t come into being until 1952.) The strong winds in any one locale lasted no more than five hours, peaking for only an hour or so. White pine was most vulnerable One of the hardest hit landowners was Harvard University, which has owned a research forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, since 1907. Harvard Forest encompassed 2,100 acres in 1938 and has grown to 3,750 acres today. Before the hurricane, the staff was actively managing its timber stands to produce income to fund research at the forest. It was also a model forest, demonstrating to the public how good forestry could benefit everyone, from the owners of the woods to the lumber industry and the workers who depend on that industry. When the hurricane blew through, Harvard’s grand experiment in sustainable forestry was rendered to splinters. In residence that autumn was a new graduate student named Willett Rowlands, who was quickly enlisted to document the extent to which the various stands had been blown down. With a clipboard and camera in hand, he scrambled through blowdowns and got himself covered with oozing pine pitch every day as he documented each plot, noting the species, direction of fall, and degree of damage. The following year’s annual report featured Rowlands’ catalog of the forest destruction, citing at least moderate damage to 75 percent of the forest, with 16 percent (334 acres) completely blown down. They salvaged 5.5 million board feet, but showed only a slight profit because of the high costs of the operations. Most of the mature trees had fallen, so prospects for future timber sales looked dim, and Harvard Forest’s days of relying on timber income to fund research activities were over. David Foster, the current director of Harvard Forest, is a landscape ecologist and forest historian with an abiding interest in broad-scale forest disturbance. Over the years, he and his colleagues have studied the hurricane damage across the region and published papers explaining the patterns of damage, the difference in damage to particular species, and the factors that influence whether or not a stand of trees was blown down. It turns out that the extent of the blowdown depended largely on what kind of trees were in the crosshairs. Using Rowlands’ hard-earned data, Foster found that conifers were more vulnerable than hardwoods, and that white pine – the region’s tallest and fastest- growing tree – was the most vulnerable of all. As a rule, older, taller trees were more susceptible than shorter, younger trees, but in the case of pine, even 15-year-old individuals

PHOTOS were knocked over. At 30 years, entire stands of pines were flattened. Pine accounted for nearly 90 percent of the timber salvaged in New England. Hardwoods, which in general

BY JOHN D have a stronger root system, weren’t blown down unless they were taller, which meant OUGLAS Top: The author and Andrew Jackson. Bottom: It doesn’t take a hurricane to uproot trees. This white ash was blown down in high winds early this summer in Steve Long’s woods. Its root wad will slowly disintegrate and form a mound.

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 25

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 25 8/16/13 11:42:22 AM WIND GUSTS 92MPH -150MPH

WIND GUSTS 69MPH -92MPH

PATH OF STORM OF PATH

57MPH B DESIGN MBC 50–80MPH

65MPH + 57MPH = 122MPH ROTATIONAL FORWARD COMBINED SPEED MOMENTUM WIND SPEED

50–80MPH 65MPH - 57MPH = 8MPH ROTATIONAL FORWARD COMBINED SPEED MOMENTUM WIND SPEED

Highest sustained winds and gusts are to the east of the storm track. Gusts are calculated to be 50 percent higher than sustained winds in this illustration, which is adapted from Harvard Forest’s computer model of the wind velocity as published in Ecological Monographs in November 1994.

26 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 26 8/16/13 11:42:26 AM they would have been considerably older than the fast-growing pine. Massachusetts and New Hampshire had a preponderance of pine in their woods at the time, which explains why they suffered the greatest losses. Whether conifer or hardwood, the taller the tree, the more likely it was to uproot. Think of a tree as a lever. The taller the tree, the longer the lever and the greater force it’s capable of exerting on the ground where it’s anchored. Older forest-grown trees tend to be taller and have their crowns concentrated in the top third of the tree, so they transfer more of the wind’s force to the ground. They are also more rigid and less capable of bending, so something has to give – it’s simply a question of whether the trunk is stronger than the roots. In 1938, the roots gave out much more frequently than the trunks. Less than 15 percent of the pine trunks broke, and an even smaller percentage of hardwoods snapped off. The same principle explains why many of the old pasture trees were left standing. Open-grown trees are short; with no competition, they put their energy into growing branches and not a tall trunk – so the wind’s leverage is greatly reduced. And while more branches mean more area to catch the wind, pasture trees have spent a lifetime dealing with wind, so they’ve developed stronger root systems. Similarly, trees lining the edge of a field gain wind-firmness from years of being buffeted by wind from at least one flank, and they held their ground better than trees deeper in the forest. Foster points out that, across the region, the damage was surprisingly variable. If you had flown over New England in a plane, you would have seen a mosaic of damage, with many shades of gray between the blocks of black and white. Some large patches were flattened, and others had more than half their trees blown down. But in some forests the trees were merely inconvenienced by having their leaves stripped just a couple of weeks before they would normally have dropped. And some stands escaped damage altogether. You would have seen damaged trees on 35 percent of the land area – slightly more than 15 million acres. But only four percent – 600,000 acres – were absolutely flattened. The determining factor was a site’s relative exposure to the wind, and in interior New England, hurricane winds are always strongest from the southeast. That’s because hurricanes arrive in New England from a generally southerly direction. Those that come from the west or southwest have diminished winds because they’ve traveled over land, and are more likely to cause some rainy days rather than a full-blown disaster. Same thing if the track takes the storm out to the Atlantic: rain but no appreciable wind. But in the exceptional case when a hurricane heads due north in the Atlantic and avoids landfall as long as possible, it will pack all its winds with it. That’s what happened in 1938. Tracking from south to north, the hurricane sped forward at 57 miles per hour. If it had been a straight line storm, the winds would have been 57 miles per hour from the south, which would have been plenty. But because hurricanes are cyclonic systems, the counter-clockwise winds can either increase or diminish the effect of the forward motion, depending on your position relative to the path. The strongest winds were to the east of the track, where the forward motion was added to the rotational wind. In this case, sustained winds from the southeast of 50 to 80 mph combined with a forward speed of nearly 60 mph to produce winds of 110 to 140 mph. On the other hand, locales to the west of the storm track saw the forward momentum more or less canceled out by the winds blowing from the north. The illustration on page 26 shows the mechanics of this, and it holds true for hurricanes in general. The east side of the storm track has more wind, the west side has more rain. In 1938, the rapid forward speed exacerbated the difference. In the absence of any strong topographical features, all areas to the east of the storm track would be similarly exposed. Gently rolling terrain doesn’t change the equation much. But any hill open to the southeast wore a bull’s-eye – the steeper the slope, the more pronounced the bull’s-eye.

Clockwise from top left: Timber salvage on Jefferson Notch Road. The bridle trail up Mount Deception after a cut had been made through the birches. Forest Guard Killourhy and Forest Engineer Laing in wind-thrown spruce in west part of Dolly Copp Forest Camp, September 22, 1938, the day after the hurricane.

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 27

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 27 8/16/13 11:42:27 AM JOHN DOUGLAS

28 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 28 8/16/13 11:42:31 AM Foster’s colleague Emery Boose has created computer models that reproduce the conditions of historical hurricanes. By entering weather observations and historical docu- mentation of damage on a town-by-town basis, Boose created a model of the storm track and speed, the timing of arrival at any location, and the wind speed and direction for that location over the duration of the storm. I asked him to run the model for Taplin Hill in Corinth, and he sent me an Excel spreadsheet showing, among other things, wind speed and direction at 5-minute inter- vals. From it, I could chart the rise and fall of the wind, the period at which it reached its peak, and the ongoing change in direction as the center passed to the west. It matched up well with eyewitness reports and newspaper accounts. The strongest sustained winds were between 8 and 9 p.m. at 77 miles per hour, with gusts reaching 117 miles per hour. They came from the east and then slightly south of east (from 93 to 119 degrees). Our land, only four miles away, would have experienced the same wind speed and direction. And our hillside, with its 30 percent slope facing east, definitely wore a bull’s- eye, which makes the continued presence of Andrew Jackson, the 180-year-old sugar maple, even more impressive. Trees can talk I owe my knowledge of Andrew Jackson’s history to a forestry tool called an increment borer and to Dave Orwig, the forest ecologist at Harvard Forest who showed me how to use it. Orwig has cored thousands of trees, counting their annual rings to determine their age. More important to Orwig than age, though, is what the tree’s pattern of growth tells him about the conditions it lived through. An increment borer is a drill bit that is hollow in the center. When it’s threaded deep into a tree and aimed for the center, a core of wood about the circumference of a pencil can be withdrawn. This core shows the growth rings, which tell the story of lean years (or even decades) when the tree added little girth, interspersed with wider rings that correspond to more favorable conditions. Orwig set me up at a microscope in Harvard Forest’s herbarium and showed me how to use dendrochronology software to record each increment of the tree’s growth. We had a logging job in our woods that fall, which provided me with cookies (inch- thick cross sections) sliced from the ends of freshly cut trees. I examined these under the microscope in the same way and, with data from 16 cookies and cores, Orwig showed me how to interpret what I found. All of the trees were alive in 1938, and many were 40 or so years old when the hurricane hit. Except for Andrew Jackson, none of them was more than three inches in diameter in 1938, and their growth rings were very tight. It took these trees thirteen years to add an inch in diameter, which is very slow growth, and that’s the best they were doing. Some were growing even more slowly. Clearly, t h e y ’d been languishing in the understory. But when the overstory trees blew down in 1938, these smaller trees didn’t blow down with them. Nor were these survivors crushed by falling trees. Their final bit of good fortune was that they managed not to be in the way of the loggers salvaging the timber that had blown down. So when they were suddenly free to grow, they took advantage of it and grew rapidly for the next few decades. It took two or three years for them to recover from the stress of sudden change, but once they recovered, they really took off. Andrew Jackson’s experience differed only in that it was a larger tree when the hurricane hit. It had taken a century to grow 11 inches (hampered by a four-decade stretch, starting in 1847, in which it added only an inch), but following the hurricane it added nine inches in just 30 years. It went from a growth rate of 1.1 inches per decade to three inches per decade. Clearly, for this tree the hurricane was a godsend. This hillside, like others blown down in the hurricane, is pockmarked with deep depressions adjacent to correspondingly large mounds. This pit and mound topography

Complete hazard reduction and timber salvage at Glessner Estate, Grafton County. This roadside strip was an outstanding forest landscape prior to the hurricane. Inset: Tree cookie.

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 29

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 29 8/16/13 11:42:32 AM looks as if somebody dug a hole and piled the dirt next to it, and it happens anytime the wind uproots a tree. As the roots are ripped from the ground, they carry a mass of soil and stone, excavating a hole. The bigger the tree, the bigger the hole. Over time, the roots and stump decompose, leaving a mound of earth. One of the more interesting things about this topography is that decades after the tree went down you can stand in the pit, look out across the mound, and see exactly where the tree fell. The 1938 hurricane’s winds came from the southeast, so the conventional wisdom has long held that trees fell to the northwest. But on our hillside, most of the pit and mound pairs faced east, downhill. Something was wrong. I invited David Foster to have a look, and we spent a February morning exploring the hillside. Foster agreed that the pits and mounds showed that trees fell to the east, and he raised the possibility that these pits and mounds had been produced at another time. Maybe some portion of our woods had blown down in 1938, but the pits and mounds in front of us were from other events. Given that the prevailing wind is from the west, all these trees could have fallen over at other times. Clinging to my assumption, I proposed that the 30 percent slope came into play. Perhaps gravity trumped the power of the wind, and the trees rocked back and forth and followed their weight downhill. But Foster pointed out that white pine had fallen uphill on east-facing slopes that were every bit as steep as ours. And indeed, I’d seen that at Harvard Forest. In fact, I’d seen not just the pit and mound, but the pine stumps, identified as such by remnant branch whorls. It may seem peculiar, but softwoods rot more slowly than hardwoods, which typically disintegrate within fifty years. It’s human nature to relish a good disaster – how else to explain the attraction of the Weather Channel? – and so it pained me to even consider the possibility that the hurricane had somehow passed our woods by. At Foster’s recommendation, I sought guidance from Charlie Cogbill, a Vermont forest ecologist and historian with connections to both Harvard Forest and Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in North Woodstock, New Hampshire. An aficionado of blowdowns, Cogbill has his own shorthand for the various ways trees are affected by wind: high snap, low snap, tipup, pistol butt. He had documented the hurricane and salvage at Hubbard Brook, which, like ours, is largely a northern hardwood forest. He was intrigued by what he saw in our woods, but he wasn’t any readier than Foster to jump to conclusions. “Get the d at a ,” Cogbill said. “A n d then we can see if something different happened h e re .” In full sleuth mode now, I climbed the hill with my compass and notebook, recording compass bearings for 58 of the most prominent pits and mounds. While they didn’t all fall in the same direction, the majority fell to the east or just south of east. At each pit and mound, I took compass bearings for the aspect (the direction the hill faces) and it averaged just south of east. This data confirmed that the trees’ direction of fall was much more closely linked to the hill’s direction than to wind direction. In other words, they had fallen downhill. I wanted to see if our hillside was an anomaly, so I visited Harry Brainerd’s sugarbush, which had been laid low in 1938. One of the slopes pitched to the east, just like ours, and on it 12 out of 15 trees fell downhill instead of to the northwest. Next, I visited Hubbard Brook, where I confirmed that trees on their southeast facing slopes had fallen downhill. Any logger will tell you how difficult it is to fell a tree uphill. Gravity is working against you, and the crowns are heavier on the downhill side. All the way up the slope, the uphill trees overtop the trees below, so they can expand their crowns to the light. On their back sides, facing the hill, their crowns are smaller because they are shaded by the trees above. This produces a lot more weight on the downhill side. I was convinced that gravity was stronger than 100 mile an hour winds, and I had some data to back up my supposition. But really all it proved was that on these slopes, the trees fell downhill. It didn’t prove that they had fallen downhill during the hurricane. The only

Steve Long is standing in a pit from the 1938 hurricane with the mound downhill of him. He’s pointing out the direction of fall.

30 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 30 8/16/13 11:42:38 AM way to know that was to determine how old the mounds were. One more bit of detective work was required. Foster pointed out that I could ascertain the age of a mound by determining the age of a tree growing on it. If the tree’s origin was prior to 1938, the mound pre-dated the hurricane. He suggested I look for paper or yellow birch because these species find the disturbed soil of an exposed rootball particularly hospitable as a seed bed, meaning they would germinate soon after the tree fell. But our woods are heavy to sugar maple and, sure enough, that’s all I could find. Two mounds had sugar maples growing on them. The first stood on a mound facing 49 degrees (northeast); the second on a mound oriented 98 degrees (nearly due east). I borrowed an increment borer from Dave Orwig and extracted cores. I glued them to the ready-made holders and began sanding according to Orwig’s instruction, starting with 125 grit, then 200 grit, then 400 grit sandpaper, until they were polished like a piece of fine furniture. I have to admit, my heart was racing when I brought the first core into focus on the microscope. I marked each decade with a pencil dot and went backwards. 2010, 2000, 1990.... The first tree was from 1943, the second from 1942. Bingo. These maples had seeded onto mounds formed a few years earlier, when the trees blew down in 1938. Still, I knew that I needed to replicate these results in another forest to be sure, so I went back to Hubbard Brook and got permission to core some trees. I found four trees on down- hill mounds, two white ashes and two yellow birches. I went through the same process, and the white ash trees turned out to have been seedlings in 1956 and 1960, which showed only that the mounds they grew on were older than that – not very conclusive. I knew the yellow birches were better bets, but the first one was a bust because its core had a small section of rot where the rings didn’t show up. I had no way of knowing how many years were eaten up by that gap. But I hit paydirt with the second yellow birch. This 13-inch diameter tree was a seedling in 1942. It was standing on the mound of a tree that had fallen to the southeast (142 degrees). This birch and the two maples on my hillside showed that the mounds that provided their seedbed had been formed just before 1942. All trees have their own characteristics, and it’s not that much of a stretch to suggest that hardwoods would behave differently than less windfirm white pines when faced with catastrophic wind. It seems that in this case, at the height of the storm, gusts exceeding 100 miles per hour kept the trees swaying back and forth. A gust would push the crown in the uphill direction, then let up. “It was the tree rebounding back in the downhill direction that stretched the roots to the breaking point,” Cogbill said. “The torque from the rebound was enough to break the roots, and they failed under tension on the uphill side.” And down they went, some like dominoes, others on their own. It took me a while, but I now have a clear picture of what happened on our hillside. And, yes, it pleases me to know that it was the hurricane that knocked all those trees over. Our woods are like many across New England, a story of devastation and recovery. And the recovery came naturally; region-wide, almost none of the blown down forests were replanted. Walking through these flourishing woods today, it is hard to imagine the devastation attending their birth. Seventy-five-year-old trees seem mature and the full canopy of our woods seems ageless. Let’s just say that we’re blessed to have forests that are so resilient. That perspective and that sentiment would have provided little solace to the people who ventured into their woodlots and sugarbushes after the storm passed. Bryce Metcalf said, “The next day, my father and I walked out there. It was just a jungle. You couldn’t get through it, so many trees were down. And the trees that were left standing had branches and limbs blown off so they never ran sap like they did previously. It pretty near ruined our sugar place.” In 1938, when practically every Vermont farmer relied on income from maple sugaring, that was indeed a cruel blow.

JOHN Stephen Long is the co-founder and long-time editor of this magazine. Since leaving Northern Woodlands in 2011, he

DOUGLAS has been working on a book about the 1938 hurricane.

This article was supported by Northern Woodlands magazine’s Research and Reporting Fund, established by generous donors.

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 31

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 33 8/16/13 11:42:47 AM 34 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 34 8/16/13 11:42:54 AM small amount can undermine a beam. However, as voracious as they are, these insects cannot digest wood. Instead, each termite possesses a community of one-celled microbes in its gut. These micro-organisms, called protists, ingest the wood and convert the tough cellulose into sugars and starches that the termites use for energy. In return, the protists enjoy a steady supply of wood and a cozy, safe place to live out their lives. (Really, what could be cozier than the intestine of a termite?) Both carpenter ants and termites are social insects: members of their colonies share resources, cooperate in the rearing of young year-round, and divide up labor among different castes. By Elizabeth Farnsworth Unlike ant colonies, however, which usually consist of a single queen presiding over a few males and many female workers, termite colonies contain reproductive queens, kings, and sexually immature males and females in equal proportion. The white termites you see scrambling around in wood are workers, performing most of the wood harvesting, nest-cleaning, and other domestic chores. A caste of larger, bizarre-looking termites t’s a rite of fall: the splitting of logs for firewood. with swollen heads and big mandibles comprises about 5 It’s arduous, but great exercise, to be sure. It’s also a percent of the colony. These are the soldiers, who defend the chance to see a host of fascinating creatures hidden nest from marauding intruders such as – yes – carpenter ants. deep in “dead” wood. Just as humans are preparing to The soldiers look fierce but are remarkably helpless; they are hunker down for a long, cold winter, these bugs, blind and cannot feed themselves, so the workers feed them worms, and other creepy-crawlies are burrowing regurgitated wood pulp. The colony also produces sexually into cozy little shelters in the logs you are stacking. mature, winged termites called alates (from the Latin for wing); Perhaps the most common log-dwelling critter you will come these adventurers will disperse from the colony to found new upon is the carpenter ant. Although homeowners fear these kingdoms. Alates swarm from February to April, depending ants for the damage they can wreak on beams and joists, most on their location. With their dark bodies and large wings, carpenter ants prefer to stay outside and only invade your home they loosely resemble flying carpenter ants, but are easy to if the wood there is already compromised (i.e. wet and rotten). distinguish by their lack of a waist (ants are pinched in the The vast majority of carpenter ants inhabit dying or felled trees, middle) and their bead-like antennae (if you feel like getting as well as those nicely stacked rounds awaiting the axe. A neat a really close look). Young termites aren’t pre-programmed at pile of sawdust is the first tell-tale sign of their nests. The ants birth; depending on the condition of the colony, larvae can turn aren’t actually eating the wood, they are simply excavating it; into reproductive adults that expand the population, or soldiers, sawdust accumulates as they carve brood chambers and other or remain workers until they die. rooms for the colony. Soft, rotting wood is the easiest to carve Many other insects make their homes in the wood of living out. When your axe slices through a nest, hundreds of ants may trees, feeding on the juicy vessels and cambium. Wood-boring scatter, frantically carrying off their white, rice-shaped larvae. beetles come in many shapes and sizes. Some of the most Evacuating in a panic, they will leave behind deep, irregularly aesthetically pleasing but destructive are the long-horned beetles shaped galleries that have served as their home. Carpenter ants (in the family Cerambycidae) and the jewel beetles (in the are neatniks, meticulous about keeping their rooms free of excess family Buprestidae). The long-horns get their nickname from sawdust, frass (insect poop), and dead ants, so the galleries are their antennae, which often exceed the length of their bodies. surprisingly clean for all the activity going on inside them. Some species are spectacularly brightly patterned. Although The other denizen of logs that homeowners dread is, of you may not easily spot these elusive beetles, you can recognize course, the termite (the most common is the eastern subter- their work by the shape of the exit holes they make when they ranean termite). You won’t find piles of sawdust outside termite leave a tree. Cerambycids such as the white-spotted pine sawyer nests, though, because the insects are actively eating the stuff. (Monochamus scutellatus) exit as adults through a round hole An average-sized colony of about 60,000 termites can consume they gnaw in the bark. If they’ve been feeding in your newly-cut up to a quarter-ounce of wood a day, chewing up the equivalent pine logs, you may also recognize their messy piles of sawdust. of a one-foot two-by-four in three months; even that seemingly In contrast, Buprestids such as the 171 species in the borer genus,

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 35

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 35 8/16/13 11:42:55 AM A ARON M. E LLISON

A hard-working carpenter ant (Camponotus herculeanus) chews a nest in rotting red oak. A Bronze birch borer (Agrilus anxius) ARON M. E LLISON

This startled round-headed beetle larva has carved a neat swath through the outer layer of this log. A This beetle pupa had settled into its gallery for a ARON M. long winter’s nap when we rudely awakened it. E LLISON WHITNEY CRANSHAW

36 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 36 8/16/13 11:43:06 AM DAVID CAPPAERT

Red flat bark beetle (Cuculus clavipes)

This parasitic wasp is one of many that spend part of their life cycles inside wood. JIM OCCI

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 37

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 37 8/16/13 11:43:10 AM A ARON M. E LLISON

This flat-backed millipede, in the genus Polydesmus, inhabits wood when it is molting or rearing its eggs. Note all the mites on its many legs, demonstrating the verity of the Jonathan Swift rhyme: “Big bugs have little bugs / Upon their backs to bite them / Little bugs have littler bugs / And so, ad infinitum.”

Cerambycid exit hole on a white pine log. This isopod is trying to hide in the cracked interior of a red oak log. Note the paddle- shaped back legs (to the right): these hold the “lungs” through which it breathes. A ARON M. E LLISON

Termites (Reticulitermes flavipes) carve out a home in wood. Here, the axe has revealed the white-bodied workers and the soldiers with swelled heads (all that ego) and well-developed jaws. A ARON M. E LLISON

38 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 38 8/16/13 11:43:19 AM Agrilus, leave the tree via D-shaped exit holes. Rather, they possess two pairs of legs for each of their many body We may think of these wood-munchers as enemies because segments (centipedes have only one pair per segment), and the they can damage living trees, logs, and lumber. Fortunately, the coordinated movement of all those legs gives them an undulating enemy of thine enemy can be a friend, and many insects and gait as they move across the log’s surface. other invertebrates hunt these beetles. One predatory boring Two millipedes are especially common in the Northeast. The beetle is the red flat bark beetle (Cuculus clavipes), a cold- pink-footed millipede, Narceus americanus, has shiny black climate species found from Canada to West Virginia. This bright segments, about 180 tiny red legs, and a pink underbelly. It curls red beetle has a notably flattened body shape that enables it up into a tight ball when handled, protecting its soft underbelly to search beneath the bark for larvae tucked tightly in their with its tough exoskeleton; mother millipedes also curl up around galleries. With strong, club-shaped legs, the beetle clambers their eggs until hatching time. These millipedes normally weigh through narrow crevices and sneaks up on its prey. in at about one-tenth of an ounce, but can grow up to four inches A host of parasitic wasps also lay their eggs in or on wood- long, going through many molts as they age and grow; some may boring larvae. Many species in the ichneumonid family have live a decade or more. They often use logs as shelter in which to very long ovipositors, which they thread through bark to reach a overwinter or to molt, burrowing into the wood and sealing the larval chamber. The wasp stings the larva temporarily, stunning entrance behind them with wood they have chewed up. it while the wasp deposits one or more eggs. Her eggs then hatch The flat-backed millipede, Polydesmus angustus, is another into wasp larvae, which feed on the bodily juices of the hapless species that lurks under bark. A bit less than an inch long, full- beetle while both predator and prey mature to adulthood; one grown adults have up to twenty body segments. However, they are final sting finally fells the beetle, and the wasp emerges from the not very long-lived, and their lifespan is set by the date on which wood. The adult wasps forage for flower nectar, so one way to they are born. (I wonder what their horoscopes say?) Individuals encourage their presence is to plant a diverse garden; plants in born between May and August (Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, and the carrot and mustard families are particularly attractive food early Leos) only live one year, whereas those born from August sources to both wasps and humans, and their standing dead to October (late Leos, Virgos, and Libras) overwinter and live up stalks provide a good overwintering habitat. to two years. This species has been introduced to North America Although most of the 5,000 species of ichneumonid wasps from Europe, where it is a common and important member of the in North America are tiny (less than a quarter of an inch long), forest ecosystem, processing wood into soil. four particularly impressive species, the giant ichneumons (in When you bring that axe down, you’ll also likely stir up some the genus Megarhyssa, meaning “big tail”) attain total body isopods: the sow bugs and pill bugs (also known as roly-polies). lengths of four inches, of which half is the ovipositor. If you spot These small, gray creatures have many body segments and legs, one of these ungainly wasps in their bouncing flight, don’t run but they are crustaceans – more closely related to crabs and away screaming; it is not aiming a stinger at you, it’s hunting in lobsters than to centipedes and millipedes. Like their aquatic your firewood for its favorite prey, another wood-borer called a cousins, isopods need constant moisture and thus like to burrow horntail. A horntail is another kind of wasp, distinguished by its deep into moist wood. In her nest chamber, a female isopod stocky body (without the characteristically pinched wasp waist) incubates her fertilized eggs in a pouch until they hatch, much and the two “horntail” projections from the back end. Their like a mother kangaroo. larvae eat wood, but typically only infest already stressed trees. We’ve focused mostly on the invertebrates that will scurry When a giant ichneumon senses the presence of a horntail deep about when you slice open a log, but there are many more in a log, it goes through an extraordinary gymnastic routine. On animals – from spiders to skunks to turkeys – that enjoy hanging tip-toe it positions its flexible stylus over the wood, then actively out around your woodpile, hunting for the spineless small-fry. pumps a secretion through the stylus to soften the wood as it And let’s not forget the colorful constellation of woodpeckers drills toward its unsuspecting prey. and sapsuckers, from the diminutive downy woodpecker to the Next on the list of log inhabitants are the Myriapoda (from the giant, raucous pileated, which use their sharp bills to forage for Latin myria, for ten-thousand and the Greek pod, for feet). These living ants, termites, beetle larvae, and other insects in trees and creatures include the millipedes and centipedes. Worldwide, logs. These birds don’t actually have to bang on trees to dig for there are over 13,000 species in this group, which has evolved prey; when they are loudly bonking they are using the resonant, on Earth for more than 400 million years. Centipedes are only insect-dug hollows to send signals to other birds, perhaps rein- occasionally found in wood; more often, these predators patrol forcing territories or inviting them to the smorgasbord. under the bark and in the damp soil under a log pile, hunting Dead and dying trees support an entire, elaborate food web – for insects and other prey, which they sting with their fearsome it’s on display now at your firewood landing. When you next poison glands. Millipedes, on the other hand, are peaceable get out to whack some logs, take some time to appreciate this vegetarians that graze on decaying wood and leaf litter. wonderful world in wood. Although they cannot inflict a painful welt like centipedes, some millipedes have defensive stink glands or emit a stress chemical Elizabeth Farnsworth is Senior Research Ecologist at New England Wild Flower Society that can stain human skin. Contrary to their name, millipedes in Framingham, MA and the illustrator and co-author of A Field Guide to the Ants of don’t have a thousand feet (the world record is 376 pairs). New England.

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 39

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 39 8/16/13 11:43:20 AM New England Forestry Foundation CONSERVING FORESTS for FUTURE GENERATIONS

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40 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 40 8/16/13 11:43:24 AM This article is adapted from the authors’ 2012 book, The Changing Nature of the Maine Woods, which explores the following topics in greater depth. Sources for the article can be found there.

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 41

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 41 8/16/13 11:43:27 AM ORIGAMI BY GIOM. STAG DESIGN BY FRED ROHM; BAT BY WON PARK WON BY BAT ROHM; FRED BY DESIGN STAG GIOM. BY ORIGAMI

42 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 42 8/16/13 11:43:32 AM Paying for State Wildlife Conservation The Challenge to Adapt (Again)

By Tovar Cerulli

In 1694, with its whitetails already devastated by to include game animals. For decades, these commissions were overhunting and habitat loss, the Massachusetts Bay Colony funded by modest state appropriations. In 1897, for instance, prohibited deer hunting for half the year. New Hampshire the Vermont legislature allocated $4,750 for the “protection and did the same in 1741. Decades before the Revolutionary War, propagation of fish and game.” It wasn’t until the early twentieth residents of the Northeast were already witnessing and responding century that states began collecting revenue from hunting and to the effects of overexploitation. fishing licenses to fund conservation initiatives. By the 1820s, towns across the Northeast had begun working Our first national wildlife conservation policy, drafted by to restore depleted fisheries. Hundreds of coastal streams were Aldo Leopold and several colleagues, was completed in 1930. It managed for migratory alewives. Hundreds of inland ponds were asserted that effective wildlife protection and restoration would stocked with pickerel. And thousands of settlements around the require an investment in the burgeoning science of wildlife region petitioned for restrictions on fishing methods. management and the training of skilled professionals. Such an As historian Richard Judd documents in Common Lands, investment would require stable funding. Common People, these measures marked some of the first That funding was established in 1937 by the Federal Aid collective efforts among Euro-American colonists to steward the in Wildlife Restoration Act, more commonly known as the wild resources upon which they depended. These measures also Pittman-Robertson Act. The Act dedicated an existing 11 percent set the stage for the emergence of state conservation agencies. excise tax on rifles, shotguns, and ammunition for wildlife Between 1860 and 1870, states across the Northeast appointed research and restoration, wildlife habitat improvement, the fish commissioners to consider the restoration of migratory fish development of public access facilities, and hunter education. runs, the stocking of inland waters, and the effects of dams and Subsequent amendments extended the measure to handguns and pollution. Before long, each commission’s mandate expanded archery equipment. In 1950, the Dingell-Johnson Act instituted

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 43

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 43 8/16/13 11:43:34 AM a parallel tax on fishing tection, town conservation equipment to fund fish- commissions seeking technical eries research and restoration, assistance, teachers and students learn- habitat work, the stocking of fish, and pub- ing about conservation, farmers whose crops lic access. It, too, has been amended and expanded over the are damaged by hungry deer, and business owners decades. Together, the two programs have generated $15 billion dependent on wildlife-related recreation, among many others. since their inception. Changes have been especially swift in recent decades. “Responsibilities have increased tremendously over the last The situation now 30 or 40 y e ar s ,” said Wayne MacCallum, Director of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. “We are For three-quarters of a century, state fish and wildlife agencies responsible for all fish and wildlife, essentially all wild living have depended almost entirely on money generated by license things, not just game animals and sport fish.” In large part, sales and federal excise taxes. “Their bread and butter for funding agencies’ expanded duties stem from concerns about threatened are dedicated dollars from hunters and anglers,” said John and endangered species and complex challenges including Organ, Chief of Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration for the development, diseases, invasive species, and climate change. Northeast Region of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Just as these responsibilities and challenges escalate, many But here in the Northeast, as elsewhere in the country, agencies are hitting a fiscal wall. Like everyone else, they have trouble is afoot. been affected by the mounting costs of health care, energy, vehicle Over the past century, the scope of state agencies’ duties has fuel, information technology, and other basics. “There is a whole widened enormously. In addition to managing fish and game suite of expenses that are out of our c ont ro l ,” said Patrick Berry, species, public lands, and fishing access facilities, they now Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife. review development proposals, assist towns and landowners Agencies cannot simply pass these costs along. “The fun- with habitat work, and run educational programs, including damental issue is that we’re dependent for our core funding youth conservation camps. They also conduct research on on license sales,” said Glenn Normandeau, Executive Director – and implement protections for – a wide array of species and of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. Like any habitats. For agencies with in-house law-enforcement divisions, business that raises prices, an agency that boosts license fees responsibilities include enforcing not only hunting and fishing runs the risk of deterring buyers, so fee increases tend to be laws but also boating laws, off-road-vehicle laws, and gen- modest and infrequent. eral environmental regulations. They also conduct search-and- Unlike businesses, however, agencies can only go so far in rescue missions and provide backup for police in non-wildlife cutting services to reduce overhead, as many of their respon- law enforcement situations. sibilities are mandated. “When your licenses have a fixed price In theory, fish and wildlife agencies still operate on a user-pay, that typically doesn’t change for an extended period of time, user-benefit model, where hunters and anglers pay for – and but your costs r i s e ,” Normandeau said, “it constantly puts the benefit from – the conservation, propagation, and management squeeze on your system.” of game and fish. In reality, agencies’ diversified efforts now The problem is exacerbated by decades of static or declining also serve wildlife watchers, paddlers who use boat-access areas, license sales, noted William Hyatt, Chief of the Connecticut people who appreciate the fact that someone else picks up road- Bureau of Natural Resources. And sales are expected to drop kill, homeowners who call for help when there’s a nuisance bear further in the coming years. “A high percentage of our anglers in the neighborhood, landowners who value stream-bank pro- and hunters are baby-boomers moving into retirement a g e ,” Agency funding sources

Connecticut Bureau of Natural Resources Maine Department of Inland Fisheries Massachusetts Division of (not including the Forestry Division) and Wildlife Fisheries and Wildlife $15 million $37 million $16 million License revenues (angler, hunter, permits) ...50% License revenues (angler, hunter, permits) ...43% License revenues (angler, hunter, permits) ...46% Federal grants...... 42% Federal grants...... 26% Federal grants...... 37% General Fund...... 8% General Fund...... 5% General Fund...... 0% Other revenues...... 0% Other revenues...... 26% Other revenues...... 17%

Total revenues and source percentages vary from year to year. These are figures from the recent past: FY2012, FY2011, or an average of recent years. Totals and percentages do not match all figures in the article, some of which are current or projected (FY2013-15). New York’s Division of Fish, Wildlife, and Marine Resources did not provide funding-source data for this article.

44 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 44 8/16/13 11:43:35 AM Hyatt said. “In many states, they’ll become eligible for free they will replace. “Unfortunately, that’s not happening.” licenses.” In Rhode Island, a similar hiring freeze has led the Division The squeeze is also intensified by the fact that state revenue of Fish and Wildlife to rely on contractors to do more and more is needed to leverage federal funds. Though federal excise tax work. This solution has its drawbacks. One is that staff must revenues have increased over the years – with a particular spike spend time developing and overseeing contracts. Another is resulting from record firearms sales amidst the recent national that contractors are not committed for the long term. “You don’t debate over gun control – most states lack the matching funds get stability,” explained Catherine Sparks, Assistant Director required to capture all the federal money. The problem is for Natural Resources at the Department of Environmental especially acute in Rhode Island, where license revenues are low. Management. “You don’t get the same buy-in to a program that There, the Division of Fish and Wildlife has had to be creative in you would by developing a core group of engaged staff.” Since coming up with non-cash match, relying heavily on donations 2000, the Division – not counting the Marine Fisheries Section of volunteer hours, land, property easements, and goods and – has lost 16 positions: more than a third of its small staff. services for specific projects. With the Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson programs Shrinking capacities paying $3 for every $1 the state provides, failing to come up with the match can have serious consequences. “If you don’t have 60 While demand for services is growing, most agencies’ capacities g r an d ,” Normandeau observed, “it may not be that you have to lose are static or shrinking. Some fish hatcheries have closed; most one employee. It may be that you have to lose four employees.” facilities are operating without needed repairs and upgrades. Even when an agency has funds available, it is not always free The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission needs $50 million to spend them. Legislatures and budget offices typically hold to repair 10 high-hazard dams and another $157 million to the purse strings and often enact hiring freezes in tight fiscal complete critical upgrades and repairs to other dams, hatcheries, times. New York instituted such a policy in 2008. Jason Kemper, and boat-launch facilities. Though this aging infrastructure is Chairman of the state’s Conservation Fund Advisory Board, owned by and was originally built by the state, the commission explained that the freeze – combined with early retirement is responsible for its upkeep. Fishing licenses, boat registrations, incentives and a work-force reduction program – has led to the and federal funds can cover routine maintenance, but the loss of 13 percent of staff in the Division of Fish, Wildlife, and commission must look to the legislature and governor whenever Marine Resources (DFWMR) since 2009. Though the license- major upgrades or repairs are needed. Except as part of occa- fee-financed Conservation Fund has a balance of $40 million, sional state infrastructure initiatives, the large capital outlays the freeze has prevented the DFWMR from filling vacant wild- required are not forthcoming, so crucial work goes undone. life positions. Lance Robson, Chairman of the state’s Fish and Likewise, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department Wildlife Management Board, noted that Region 7 has no deer conducts nearly 160 search-and-rescue missions annually. The biologist, despite the fact that Tompkins County is the epicenter only funds earmarked for these missions come from a $1 fee of a massive deer overpopulation problem. “The vacancies are from each boat, snowmobile, and all-terrain vehicle registration. there and important work is going undone,” Robson said. “We These fees fall about $200,000 short of costs each year, forcing the have things we should be doing with this money.” department to eat away at the Fish and Game Fund and sacrifice Kemper is concerned about domino effects as well. “The positions, equipment, training, and other programs. Only 14 per- number of retirements we’re looking at in the next three to five cent of missions are conducted on behalf of people who contrib- years is pretty astronomical,” he said. To provide new staff with ute to the department – hunters, anglers, boaters, snowmobilers, adequate training, there needs to be overlap with the people and ATV riders – while 57 percent are conducted on behalf of

New Hampshire Fish and Rhode Island Division of Fish and Wildlife Vermont Department of Game Department (not including the Marine Fisheries Section) Fish and Wildlife $24 million $5.6 million $19 million License revenues (angler, hunter, permits) ...36% License revenues (angler, hunter, permits) ...13% License revenues (angler, hunter, permits) ...32% Federal grants ...... 36% Federal grants ...... 81% Federal grants ...... 39% General Fund ...... 0% General Fund ...... 6% General Fund ...... 10% Other revenues ...... 28% Other revenues ...... 0% Other revenues ...... 19%

LAW ENFORCEMENT: In VT and NH, these agencies include in-house law enforcement divisions. In CT, ME, RI, and MA, law enforcement is housed in separate agencies. MARINE FISHERIES: For CT and NH, funding for marine-fisheries work is included above. It is not included for other states. (In RI, the Division does marine work, but we were provided with numbers that excluded the Marine Section. In ME and MA, marine work is done by separate agencies.)

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 45

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 45 8/16/13 11:43:35 AM hikers and climbers. The other 29 Act (CARA) would have guaranteed over percent include searches for missing $3 billion annually to conservation children, crime victims, Alzheimer’s patients, programs, drawing from federal oil and more. With public safety at stake and search-and- and gas development revenue. Despite rescue missions mandated, the department cannot reduce its years of effort by a national conservation efforts simply because no one is paying. Yet the legislature has coalition, however, CARA never became law. failed to establish alternative funding. On a more hopeful note, a comparable mea- Such situations can be frustrating for hunters and anglers. sure appears to be in the works. Though Organ said it was too Though proud of their contributions over the decades, they early to discuss details, he mentioned that a new national effort sometimes question the use of their dollars for purposes that is underway to bring major political players together to speak have little to do with hunting, angling, or fish and wildlife. In with one voice in favor of serious conservation funding. New York, for instance, the license-fee-financed Conservation Over the past century, fish and wildlife agencies have Fund has been paying for a higher and higher percentage of staff received little support from state coffers. But this is changing. positions in recent years, both in the DFWMR and elsewhere in New Hampshire Fish and Game currently receives 0.2 percent the Department of Environmental Conservation. At the same of its annual revenue from the General Fund, but by 2015 the time, the DFWMR staff has been getting smaller and smaller. state will likely be covering three percent of the department’s “Why are the million-and-a-half license buyers carrying budget. In Maine, Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island, the entire burden,” asked Lance Robson, “when there are 19 taxpayers supply five to eight percent. In Vermont, where such million people in the state? We’ve got between 3 and 4 million money was first appropriated in 2005, the General Fund will nature watchers in New York. Don’t you think they ought to support 21 percent of the department’s $20 million budget in pick up some of this?” Robson pointed to a recent example: 2014. (Agencies in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania receive no $194,000 used for control of invasive hydrilla in Cayuga Lake General Fund support. The Pennsylvania Game Commission Inlet. “While I appreciate the environmental issues at stake,” – by far the best-funded agency in the Northeast – is an outlier Robson said, “the work, in all fairness, should have been funded in that 20 percent of its annual $100-million revenue comes through the General Fund or the Invasive Species account of the from Marcellus Shale gas-drilling leases on State Game Lands.) Environmental Protection Fund.” General Fund appropriations can cover shortfalls today, but Agency capacities are also stretched by the needs of threat- they leave agencies in a tenuous position, dependent on leg- ened and endangered species. In Maine, animals such as the islatures’ discretionary budgeting decisions from year to year. Canada lynx demand significant staff time. John Boland, the “What we really need,” said Vermont Commissioner Patrick recently retired Director of the Bureau of Resource Management Berry, “is a long-term, sustainable funding solution.” for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, pre- The search for a broad-based funding solution is not new. dicts that these demands will grow: “We’ve got four or five spe- As early as 1967, Missouri’s Department of Conservation cies that are on the verge of being listed. When that happens, it recognized that expenses would soon outstrip revenues and that creates a lot of work.” public demand for services was increasing. A panel created to The State Wildlife Grants (SWG) program, established by assess the health of the agency recommended that the depart- Congress in 2001 to “keep common species common,” is aimed ment extend its programs to more non-game species, provide at forestalling such difficult and costly work. But SWG yields more diverse outdoor recreation opportunities, and seek a only a small amount of revenue. In recent years, for example, substantial funding increase. In 1976, the citizens of Missouri Massachusetts and Vermont each collected $5-7 million annual- approved a constitutional amendment, adding one-eighth of a ly in Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson funds combined, cent to the state sales tax and dedicating the proceeds to natural and only $700,000 in SWG money. resources conservation. Today, Missouri has one of the best To qualify for SWG funding, a state must create a Wildlife funded departments in the nation. Action Plan that lays out proactive strategies for conserving In the decades since, other states have implemented a species and mitigating threats. According to John Organ of the variety of funding mechanisms, ranging from the creation of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, states in the Northeast have taken natural resource extraction funds to the sale of conservation the initiative by assessing vulnerabilities on a regional scale and license plates and wildlife-viewing passes. In 1992, for instance, pooling SWG funds for projects that address shared needs. Still, Colorado voters dedicated half of state lottery proceeds to “what’s lacking is some permanent overall funding to help imple- wildlife, outdoor recreation, and open space initiatives. In 1996, ment those p l an s ,” said Organ. “SWG funding won’t be adequate Arkansas followed Missouri’s lead with a one-eighth cent sales to achieve everything that’s outlined.” tax increase. In 1998, the Virginia legislature allocated a portion More substantial funding was nearly established in 2001, the of existing sales tax on hunting, angling, and wildlife-watching same year SWG began. The Conservation and Reinvestment equipment to the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

46 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 46 8/16/13 11:43:43 AM And in 2008, Minnesota voters passed a constitutional amend- it makes it difficult for state fish and wildlife agencies to imple- ment that increased the sales tax by three-eighths of a cent and ment broad-based conservation actions,” he said. “In order to dedicated the revenue to wildlife habitat, clean water, parks and fulfill the broader mandate, all citizens really have to contribute trails, and arts and cultural heritage. towards this.” Here in the Northeast, attempts have been made to estab- Emily Boedecker, Acting Director of The Nature Conservancy’s lish similar mechanisms. In 1990, for example, a commission Vermont Chapter, agrees. “Hunters and anglers have been carry- formed by Governor Kunin of Vermont reported that there was ing this charge, and funding the mission for many, many y e ar s ,” “an immediate need to broaden the funding b a s e .” Over the she said. But now, as we face challenges like climate change, which next decade, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department began require enhanced capacities and long-term strategies, she thinks receiving motorboat-registration money and small fractions of a broad-based revenue stream is vital. “It is work that benefits all rooms-and-meals and gas taxes, but the additional revenue has of u s .” been far from sufficient. This was the holistic spirit Aldo Leopold and his colleagues In 1995, following a campaign by the Sportsman’s Alliance of had in mind when they drafted the 1930 policy that preceded Maine and the Maine Audubon Society, the state legislature cre- the Pittman-Robertson Act: “No game program can command ated a new lottery ticket to pay for special conservation projects. the good-will or funds necessary to success, without harmoni- (In 2012, the lottery provided 1.5 percent of the Department of ous cooperation between sportsmen and other conservationists. Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s revenue.) But in 2011, the Maine To this end, sportsmen must recognize conservation as one legislature fell two ballots short of letting voters decide whether integral whole, of which game restoration is only a p ar t .” to dedicate a fraction of state sales tax to search-and-rescue, Broad-based funding will mean expanding programs to appeal habitat conservation, and endangered species restoration. to the interests of diverse groups. Yet hunter and angler involve- ment and support will remain vital. “The challenge,” wrote Organ A larger vision and his co-authors, “will be moving from a focus on priorities of a narrow user group toward those of the broader public without Whatever funding mechanisms are established, some wildlife alienating stakeholders long invested in wildlife conservation.” professionals contend that fish and wildlife conservation needs In New Hampshire, Normandeau thinks the time is ripe to be transformed in ways that go beyond money. to make that move. Over the past decade, he has seen a shift Many believe we need to cultivate a stronger public conser- away from old hardline attitudes about how the agency should vation ethic. Such an ethic would include an understanding of be funded and where it should focus its efforts. “There’s more how each of us is connected to the natural world, a commit- understanding that we just can’t survive on the existing para- ment to placing conservation higher on the political agenda, digm,” he said. “More and more folks realize that we do a broad and a deep appreciation for the value of fish, wildlife, and other spectrum of things and we’re not just here to count the deer and species. “A s numbers of engaged conservationists grow, they set the seasons.” provide a political base for seeking solutions to conservation Seen through the lens of history, the need for change comes problems,” said Connecticut’s William Hyatt. “They exert forces as no surprise. Three centuries ago, citizens of the Northeast and get things done from a whole variety of directions that assist began protecting deer. Two centuries ago, we began conserving us in our overall mission.” fisheries. One hundred and fifty years ago, we began establish- John Organ thinks we also need to rebuild the foundation ing fish and game commissions, which we supported with state on which our agencies stand, starting with a recommitment to funds. When the need for revenue increased in the early 1900s, the idea that fish and wildlife, both game and non-game, are we turned to hunting and fishing licenses. When the need for a held in trust for all of us, not for a particular group. This princi- dedicated funding source to support wildlife conservation and ple has been a legal and philosophical cornerstone of American restoration became clear in the 1930s, we joined the rest of the conservation for centuries. Yet state agencies have long been nation in turning to federal excise taxes. funded almost exclusively by hunters and anglers, who have Each of these steps has been an adaptation: a response to wielded substantial influence. In a 2010 Journal of Wildlife changing ecological, social, and fiscal circumstances. Today, we Management article, Organ and four co-authors suggested that stand at another crossroad, again faced with new circumstances, this influence has led to a “deeply rooted inconsistency between again challenged to adapt. rhetoric and re a l it y.” Though an avid hunter himself, Organ is committed to a Tovar Cerulli is the author of The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance. model that benefits all people and all species. “If funding is A speaker and communications consultant, he works to foster understanding of limited and comes from sources that have particular interests, diverse perspectives on hunting, wildlife, and conservation.

This article was supported by Northern Woodlands magazine’s Research and Reporting Fund, established by generous donors.

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 47

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 48 8/16/13 11:43:46 AM Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 49

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 49 8/16/13 11:43:51 AM FIELD work

Story and photos by Joe Rankin

At work cutting firewood with Paul “Butch” Reed At age 12, Paul Reed plunked down $275 for a new Jonsered, his first chainsaw. The boy’s father ran a small sideline firewood business, and while dad had spare chainsaws, of course, Paul wanted his own. “I clearly remember that my mother was not at all happy that I was buying one at the age of 12.” Fast forward six years to 1985 when Paul was 18. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do with his life, but he knew he needed to make a living. So, he fell back on the familiar and started Reed’s Firewood with a chainsaw, a 1974 Ford truck, a splitting maul, and a strong back. “I borrowed money from the credit union to buy the first three loads of wood, and I never looked back,” he said. Reed quickly realized that to build a healthy business he was going to have to do two things: get mechanized and get help. A year later he convinced his dad to come work for him, and he got a $50,000 Small Business Administration loan to buy his first firewood processor. “It was the most paperwork I ever filled out in my life,” he remembers. “But I knew I wasn’t going to make any money unless I got machin- ery that was reliable.” He also got a newer, bigger truck. Today, Reed’s is a family business in the truest sense of the word. Paul does deliveries. His wife, Tracy, manages the office, takes orders and maintains the website. His dad, Paul Reed Sr., operates the processor. Even Paul’s uncle, Rodney Proctor, who’s nearly 80, works part-time bagging camp wood. In June, Paul and Tracy’s youngest son, Joe, graduated from high school and came into the business full-time. Their older son, Spencer, a diesel mechanic, may one day as well. Both One is location: Durham is a small town, located between boys worked with the family during summers growing up. the Maine Turnpike and I-295, which makes delivery to the On a fine day in early June, Paul is at the controls of a Lewiston-Auburn area, the Portland metropolitan area, and the Prentice crane loader, plucking logs from the bed of a truck, trendy midcoast, feasible. There are a lot of potential customers stacking some and loading others onto the rails of a Multitek within easy driving distance. firewood processor. A huge chop saw trims the logs to firewood Another is the emphasis on scheduled deliveries. Paul said length, they go through a splitter, then the sticks of firewood he realized early on that the mistake many part-timers made travel up a conveyor and tip into a truck. It’s a process any was trying to work firewood production and delivery in around backyard producer would envy. Look, ma, no hands. On the everything else they were doing. The next thing they knew they firewood at least. were behind and customers were waiting impatiently for their Reed’s owns two firewood processors, two Prentice crane wood. “I said, we’re going to put down a schedule for deliveries. loaders, three cage-bodied dump trucks for deliveries, and a That caught on, that with Reed’s you can book your wood,” Paul drying kiln. The company produces about 3,500 cords of fire- said. Now the company books deliveries weeks, even months, wood a year – green, seasoned, or kiln-dried. The Reeds have ahead. Customers like the fact that their wood arrives on the a roster of about 1,000 regular customers living in 25 towns date they want it. around Durham, Maine. A growing part of the business is That requires maintaining a large inventory. The company’s bagged firewood for campgrounds. During July and August, log yard is stacked with hundreds of cords of tree-length hard- one KOA campground sells 500 bags a week, he said. wood logs – maple, oak, cherry, beech, ash – the piles 20 or There have been several factors in the growth and success of more feet high. Reed stores logs for a year or more before split- Reed’s Firewood. ting and selling them as seasoned wood. “Without inventory in

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2009, it was at 8.7 percent. The Ice Storm of 1998 “was one of the best things for fire- wood that ever h app e n e d ,” said Paul. The storm left hundreds of thousands of Mainers without power in the dead of winter. People whose wood stoves hadn’t seen flames in years fired them up again as they waited out the long days until the lights flickered back on and the furnace roared to life. People bor- rowed wood from neighbors. Cars and trucks were bumper to bumper down Paul and Tracy Reed’s driveway. “We had people lined up even to get a few armloads. It gave firewood sales a huge boost,” Paul said. In 2008, came a series of oil price shocks that pushed home heating oil prices to more than $4.50 a gallon, said Paul. That was a brutal and stressful reminder of the volatility of fossil fuel prices, and it convinced many homeowners to take another look at firewood, if only as a supplement to their oil furnace, said Paul. Firewood may be an old fuel, but it has been helped by new technology. The latest generation of wood stoves is much more efficient and cleaner burning, he notes. He and Tracy heat their house with a big Regency and find the flues need almost no cleaning. And many people like the fact that firewood is locally sourced, undergoes little processing, and is renewable. The Reeds haven’t seen any impact on their business from the growth of wood pellet stoves, said Paul. Over the years they have added products that boosted sales. Reed’s Firewood in the late 1980s. Above: Paul Reed. Camp wood, for one. Kiln-dried firewood for another. The Reeds’ drying kiln looks like a shipping container. Propane- this business you won’t make it ,” says Paul. A bad mud season fired, it can dry five cords in 24 hours. Kilning not only turns or extended rainy season that shuts down logging operations green wood stove-ready, but also kills insects, Paul said. Reed’s can throw off production, and the next thing you know you’re sells about 300 cords of kiln-dried wood a year. “Even at $330 a having to refer customers to a competitor, he said. cord (compared to $275 for seasoned) it’s way cheaper than oi l ,” Paul said delivering when you say you will is crucial, but it’s he said. (Editor’s Note: If #2 fuel oil is $4.00 a gallon, the equiva- only part of it. “People really want to know you’re a professional, lent price of seasoned firewood would be $532 a cord, according that the equipment looks good, that the delivery driver is pleas- to the US Forest Service.) ant and nice,” he said. Some customers like the fact that they can order, say, a cord An hour or so after Paul Sr. finished splitting the wood, Paul of green, a cord of seasoned, and a cord of kiln-dried. Paul will pulls into the driveway of Brewster and Judy Staples’ home in even dump them in different places. Pownal with the first two cords of the family’s six-cord order. Paul said Reed’s has grown naturally over the past 28 years, Staples is waiting outside. He sticks his hand out as Paul jumps and will likely grow some more with the addition of the couple’s down from the cab. “Right on time!” Staples says as they shake. sons. The question is whether to try to grow sales beyond that. The Staples have been loyal Reed’s customers for over 20 years. It would mean adding outside employees, he said. “I don’t want “He’s been a wonderful dealer,” Staples said, watching as Paul to get into a situation where, if it drops off 15 to 20 percent we backs the truck up to dump the load in front of the garage. “I suffer because of the growth that we’ve lost,” he said. appreciate the quality and the fact that he’s here when he says Then again, he asks, how big does Reed’s Firewood need to he’s going to be here. That’s very, very important.” be? If the business can support three generations of the family Firewood was mankind’s first fuel – and the only one for at once, “I could be happy with t h at ,” he muses. “I don’t have to thousands of years. Today, of course, it competes with elec- grow any bigger. I don’t have to have 10 employees or 15 employ- tricity, oil, natural gas, and propane. A graph of firewood use ees. I’m sure we’ll grow more. That’s fine. If it grows outside the resembles a roller coaster. As recently as 1940, 53 percent of family it’ll be because we want it to, not because we have t o.” Maine households heated with wood, according to U.S. Census data. It dropped to two percent by 1970 and rose to 15 percent Joe Rankin is a forestry and natural history writer, beekeeper, market gardener, and in 1980, only to head back down to 6.4 percent in 2000. As of orchardist. He lives in central Maine.

Wagner Forest Management, Ltd. is pleased to underwrite Northern Woodlands’ series on people working in the northeastern forest. www.wagnerforest.com

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 51 8/16/13 11:43:56 AM “T          T         .”

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Getting to the Bottom of the Scrape Story and photos by Susan C. Morse

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 52 8/16/13 11:44:07 AM e stretched his massive neck, closed his eyes, and rubbed his forehead, eyes, and antlers back and forth across the spruce’s over- hanging branch tips. Periodically, he would stop, open his eyes, and sniff his handiwork. He chewed the tip of one of the branches, sniffed it, and then rubbed the length of the branch across the top of his head again – pressing the limb against the base of his antlers. The long hair on his forehead covers an underlying network of secretory glands that are most active during the rut and in dominant, mature males. At one point, the buck seemed to deliberately push the twig tip into a nostril. Next, he more assertively rubbed his face and antlers all over the limb, this time rearing up onto his hind legs in order to reach higher into the spruce’s twigs and needles. More than 50 percent of his time was spent in dreamy-eyed pre- occupation with the scents and secretions he had deposited just seconds before. Hidden in a nearby ground blind, I watched in fascination. It was mid-October, just weeks before the breeding season would peak. Thick vegetation prevented me from seeing what hap- pened next, but his tracks and sign told all. The buck had pawed the ground directly beneath the limb and had removed leaves and duff, exposing the ground to bare soil. Next, he stepped into his 3½- to 4½-foot oval-shaped scrape and performed “rub urination.” He squeezed his hind leg hock joints together and rubbed the pronounced hair tufts of his tarsal glands against one another while urinating upon them. So far as we know, the tarsal gland is a kind of chemical command central – simulta- neously revealing a deer’s personal ID, physical condition, and social and sexual status. The three step scent-marking behavior – overhead limb-marking, pawing the scrape area, and rub uri- nation – creates what biologists call a “full sequence scrape.” The buck’s urine transmitted to the scrape beneath him a potent elixir of specific compounds. Big Guy has the right stuff! The smells impart olfactory news about the buck’s physical con- dition – even the quality or shortcomings of his diet. The full sequence scrape also serves as a repository for his unique scent identity. He is indeed a mature dominant buck – one that his fraternal cohorts and prospective breeding partners know well. But that’s not all. The mere process of pawing with his hooves leaves still more information. Interdigital glands between the primary toes of each foot leave signals that reveal the surging testosterone levels of Big Guy. Chemical ecologists have ana- lyzed interdigital gland volatiles with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and discovered 46 compounds that are found in higher concentrations in dominant males, including akanes, arcenes, aldehydes, keptones, aliphatic acids, esters, pyrroles, furans, and sulphur compounds. Many whitetail deer enthusiasts, myself included, were taught that a scrape was a place where a buck prepared a kind of scrape-date liaison center, where he would leave a message and return later to find an answer from a potential mate. If her urine left in or near the scrape affirmed her sexual readiness, then he would simply trail her and find her. However, to conclude that

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 53 8/16/13 11:44:11 AM 1 2

5 1. This buck is performing frequent sniff-checking, along with rubbing his nose and mouth on an overhead limb. Notice the long-haired pelage between the antlers. This thick hair covers his forehead glands. 2. A longer neck hair was jammed into a broken branch when a buck reared up on his hind legs and vigorously rubbed the overhead limb above his scrape. 3. An alert doe in an area with prolific buck sign. Note antler-rubbed sapling in foreground. 4. Maine’s big woods buck hunter, Hal Blood, at a full sequence scrape. Red oak, beech, speckled alder, and apple are all popular tree species with deer. Evergreens are even more popular than hardwoods. 5. Between the hoof cleaves is a glandular pocket that produces a waxy, cheesy substance called sebum. The interdigital gland’s rancid scent is caused by accumulated dead skin cells that mix with sebaceous gland secretions. Deposits of interdigital gland scent on the ground enable deer to track one another.

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 54 8/16/13 11:44:27 AM the scrape merely functions as a buck-finds-doe nightspot grossly oversimplifies a scrape’s function. Simply put, a scrape serves as a multi-purpose communications system, through which many messages may be delivered that can influence the behavior of many deer, bucks and does alike. Different messages are posted and interpreted by different deer, with different results over time and space. To be sure, bucks do sometimes trail does away from scrapes, but most scrape making occurs before the does are sexu- ally receptive. In fact, biologists now suspect that the mature does’ so-called “silent ovulation,” with elevated pre-estrus progesterone levels, is what stimulates bucks and triggers their inclination to make scrapes roughly 10 to 20 days before the actual breeding season begins. The olfactory allure of a doe’s approaching estrus biostimulates a buck and encourages his libido, aggressiveness, and determination to maintain his dominant rank in the deer social hierarchy. Social order in the whitetail world is made and maintained by challenge and dominance. From early on, fawns seek to be domi- nant. They rise on hind legs and kick and flail at one another with sharp hooves. Matriarchal does assert their authority over subordi- nate herd members, with good reason. With uncanny savvy, a wise 3 doe’s leadership assures the herd foraging success, comfort, and 4 safety. Although dominant bucks will inevitably be challenged by other bucks, their size, maturity, and “boss attitude” reward them with breeding and territorial privileges. What does all this have to do with the scrape? Remember, a full sequence scrape not only biostimulates does and synchronizes the breeding season, but the scrape also posts multiple messages regarding the mature buck that created the signpost. When Big Guy initiates a scrape, he first focuses his attention on the overhead limb. Subsequent buck and doe visitors to his scrape do likewise. A doe will sniff and lick the branches that Big Guy has scented. In addition, she will discover more information in his urine and tarsal and interdigital gland chemicals, and will thereby become intrigued by our buck’s special qualities. Subordinate bucks will do the same – with a very different outcome. These younger bucks are intimi- dated by a mature buck’s various scent messages, and their competi- tive and reproductive urges are subdued. Here again, whitetail social order and herd well-being are served. The suppression of younger bucks’ participation in the rut reduces costly energy expenditures and risks associated with debilitating injuries, as well as increased vulnerability to predators. With winter’s severe climate and food shortages just a month away, this leaves more energy to be invested in growth and survival. In this way, young bucks do a better job of growing into the mature, dominant bucks of the future.

Note: Many fine biologists and chemical ecologists have certainly helped us appreciate the remarkable functions and versatility of the whitetail scrape. For those wishing to get their nose into this subject, consult the following: David Hirth, Larry Marchinton, Karl Miller, Karen Alexy, John Ozoga, Jonathan Gassett, Glenn DelGiudice, Gerald Moore, Terry Kile, Thomas Atkeson, Timothy Sawyer, and Leonard Lee Rue III.

Susan C. Morse is founder and program director of Keeping Track in Huntington, Vermont

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 55 8/16/13 11:44:29 AM new england wood pellet —by the numbers:

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56 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 56 8/16/13 11:44:33 AM Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 57

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 57 8/16/13 11:44:40 AM The Multiplier Effect Rebuilding the Wood Product Manufacturing Base in the Northeast

By Dave Mance III

hings were simpler when we were kids, right? Culture certainly was, before 457 channels and the internet and smart phones. Probably global politics were, too. The Cold War – Rocky vs. Ivan Drago – seems almost quaint now, and a lot easier to wrap your mind around than the nuances of a place like Syria. The wood economy was definitely simpler – I’m sure of it. Where I grew up, we have mountains full of rock maple and beautiful red-hearted yellow birch, and the economy based around that wood used to be pretty linear. The woodlot owners, timber companies, and wood manufacturing companies (many of which owned extensive acreage) grew it. The loggers cut it, and some of the wood ended up at a local mill, like Cushman Furniture in North Bennington, Vermont. Cushman turned boards into furni- ture, including coat racks (stylish in the 1890s), smokers (all the rage in the 1920s), and breakfast suites (a must have in the 1960s). Afterwards, the finished wood product went to a retailer, then a consumer. To this day, you can walk into a house in Southern Vermont and see a Cushman end table or bed. This economic pyramid, with its various levels building on one another, looked just like the ecosystem pyramids from biol- ogy class, where the plants on the bottom feed the bugs, which feed the birds, which feed the foxes. And just like in ecology, J OY

things get even more interconnected when you look beyond the D. B

trophic levels and consider the niches. Back in the day, Cushman ARNES nourished not just loggers and furniture retailers but fabric mills,

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 58 8/16/13 11:44:43 AM Photos from top: Cushman Furniture, around 1950, from the Collection of The Fund for North Bennington, Inc.; Green Mountain Furniture, 1977, courtesy Joy D. Barnes; Copeland Furniture, 2013, by John Douglas.

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 59 8/16/13 11:44:46 AM chemical finishing firms, hardware and machinery producers, designers, shopkeepers, landlords, ad agencies, magazines, accountants, insurance salesmen, consultants, and on and on. Cushman is long gone. It turned into Green Mountain Furniture in 1971, then National Hanger in the 1980s. Hanger still exists but works with plastic (its line of wooden clothes hangers are imported from China). A big chunk of the manufacturing sec- tor in Bennington today revolves around aerospace composites, which furthers the idea that things just ain’t like they used to be.

Hard times

If you live in Boonville, New York, Andover, Maine, or Island Pond, Vermont, this will all sound familiar – Ethan Allan furniture has laid off workers and closed plants and/or sawmills in each of these towns in the recent past. If you live anywhere in the Northeast you’ve probably felt ripples from the decline of the wood manufacturing industry. According to Mike Dugan, author of The Furniture Wars, the U.S. furniture manufacturing industry has lost $50 billion in market share to Asian countries over the last 10-15 years, resulting in over 300 plant closures in the eastern hardwood region. Globalization is not the only culprit here, but it provides some of the most head-shaking moments. “At one point in 2005, it was cheaper for a New York sawmill owner I knew to ship a trailer full of kiln-dried hardwood lumber to China than it was to send it to North Carolina,” said Collin Miller, Director of Wood Product Initiatives for the Northern Forest Center, which Photos on this page were taken by Reuben Greene at the Cushman coordinates the Regional Wood Products Consortium across Furniture Factory, North Bennington, Vermont, around 1950; Photos northern New England and New York state. The trade imbal- courtesy of The Fund for North Bennington, Inc. To see more visit: ance has improved since the federal government imposed a 25 http://northbennington.org/cushman/cushman.html percent tariff on hardwood bedroom furniture from China in 2005, but over 70 percent of the un-upholstered wood furniture in the U.S. is still made someplace else. (An industry white paper entitled “Reinventing The Hardwood Industry One Company at a Time” opens with the phrase: “At one time the term colony was loosely defined as any geographic region that exported raw materials to the home country and then purchased those mate- rials back as value added products. By that economic measure, the U.S. is quickly becoming a colony of Asia.”) Plants continue to close, the most recent being Brown Street Furniture/Vermont Tubbs in Whitefield, New Hampshire, which closed last summer, leaving 40 people without jobs. The furniture industry has been the hardest hit, but all wood manufacturing in our region is facing similar global pressure. Wood can be produced more quickly and more cheaply elsewhere – especially in places where forestry practices are lax, or in areas where plantation style forests are the norm. And imagine being a domestic wood manufacturer in a global marketplace, where your competition doesn’t have to comply with any of the worker safety, worker health, or environmental regulations you do and can pay employees a fraction of the going wage for millwork. Oh, and doesn’t have to heat a factory seven months out of the year. These “institutional challenges,” as they’re called in industry parlance, are certainly contributing factors to the industry’s

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 60 8/16/13 11:44:47 AM decline, but there are also self-inflicted wounds. Way back in 1994, the Northern Forest Lands Council issued a report saying: “Marketing of forest-based products and services by businesses [in the Northeast] is not sophisticated. Reasons include little long range planning; not responsive to market trend changes; regional coordination and marketing lacking; and unresponsive to rapidly changing consumer tastes.” The booming late 1990s and 2000s bought a lot of not-very- innovative companies some time, but the housing collapse and subsequent recession meant the end of the line in a lot of cases. “The people in the sawmill or secondary solid wood products sec- tors who have not innovated in the last 10 years are probably g on e ,” said Charlie Levesque, an author of the Lands Council report. Photos on this page were taken by Joy D. Barnes at the Green Mountain Just because they don’t make phonographs anymore Furniture Factory (formerly Cushman) in 1977. doesn’t mean people stopped listening to music.

The notion of destruction and subsequent regeneration is at the core of both nature and capitalism. Neither is ever station- ary. Species, businesses, adapt to the changing landscape around them. Or they don’t. This isn’t meant to sound callous in the face of layoffs and declining employment numbers that have profound effects on local families and businesses. But a clinical look does allow us to see how the industry is adapting to major shifts in both manufacturing and marketing. “There are two main competitive advantages that today’s domestic wood products manufactures can exploit to stay com- petitive,” said Miller. “Their ability to have a relationship with a U.S. customer, which enables them to tailor their products to Photos on this page were taken by Joy D. Barnes at the Green Mountain add more customer value. And quick shipping – the fact that Furniture Factory (formerly Cushman) in 1977. they’re based in the largest market in the w or l d .” China has its own problems – not the least of which are ris- ing material, transportation, distribution, and production costs. Art Raymond, a wood products manufacturing consultant based in Raleigh, North Carolina, says that ten years ago the ratio between Chinese and American wages was 1:25. Now it’s something like 1:7. And “wages in China are increasing about 15 percent annually,” said Raymond. “That translates to a doubling in five years. Unless wages here grow faster, the gap between a Chinese plant and one in the U.S. will narrow further.” It’s also important to remember that globalization is a two-way street. In 2008, China exported $9.2 billion in wood products – and imported $8.2 billion. American exports of both lumber and wood products have increased substantially from 2008 to 2013 (11 percent and 17 percent respectively). And industry insiders report that the “Made in the USA” label on domestically-produced wood products has and should continue to have status abroad. One estimate holds that by 2030 there could be 3.2 billion middle class consumers in Asia (a six-fold increase), which is a lot of potential customers. Bill Luppold, a Forest Service economist, says that while much of the wood industry has been “clobbered” in the past decade, things may be starting to improve domestically. “We’re seeing increased international trade in lumber and logs and flooring production,” said Luppold. Anecdotally, he’s noticed that small

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 61 8/16/13 11:44:48 AM cabinet makers seem to be busy, an insight that doesn’t show up in employment numbers, but may be reflected in the fact that a large cabinet component mill in the Midwest is humming. The housing market has picked up, which usually portends a high tide for all facets of the wood industry. (The general wood products sector usually lags a few years behind the rise and fall of the home building sector.) Levesque’s work mostly deals with the primary sector of the wood business in the Northeast (meaning the first people who touch the wood: lumber, wood energy, and pulp producers). He says that the sawmill sector has rebounded significantly since its bottom in 2009-10. “For those mills in the Northeast that made it through the recession, production is screaming. Many mills have added shifts or are working 24/7,” he said. There’s also been an uptick in the secondary sector. Miller, through his work with the Regional Wood Products Consortium, helps manufacturers in the Northeast innovate, and he’s seen a number of recent success stories. A few cherry-picked examples include Newport Furniture Parts in Newport, Vermont, which overhauled the company in 2011, instituted a new lean manu- facturing ethos, and saw a 25 percent growth in sales in 2012, and Maine Wood Concepts, a Maine wood turning company that recently acquired a line of wooden gourmet kitchen prod- Photos on this page were taken by John Douglas at the Copeland Furniture ucts and hired over 40 people. Factory, Bradford, Vermont, in 2013. Subjects clockwise from top: Shane One of the more dramatic recent success stories is Timeless Patenaude, Brian Dyke, Janet Wharton & Ron Whipple, Ken Driscoll. Frames, in Watertown, New York, which was nearly bankrupt in 1999 and had 3 employees; a new management team imple- mented a business model using digital customization of picture frames and grew sales in the new division to $10 million in 18 months. Today they employ nearly 300 people and use 2 million board feet of northern hardwoods to make wall-hanging picture frames in direct competition with importers. Another interesting thing to note is that while employment has dropped significantly in both the primary and secondary sectors, production losses have been more modest. According to government agencies that track this sort of thing, the primary side lost 34 percent of its workforce between 2001 and 2011, but productivity (as measured in gross domestic product) was only down 7 percent. The secondary side lost 40 percent of its workforce in 10 years, but productivity only fell by 21 percent. Current numbers aren’t available, but those in the know say production has increased since 2011. Talk to enough people involved in this line of work and you’ll come to realize that there is no universal experience. Some manufacturing companies have closed. Others have expanded or retooled, in every sense of the word. What everyone seems to agree on is that the boom years of the mid-2000s were an unsustainable bubble. What we’re in now, and what we’re mov- ing towards, is the new normal. And everyone is still trying to get a handle on what that means. Over the next four issues we’re going to visit four second- ary manufacturing plants across our region that have adopted strategies they hope will make their businesses strong and competitive. Our first stop is Lyndon Furniture, in Lyndonville Vermont.

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 62 8/16/13 11:44:49 AM Bucking the Trend at Lyndon Furniture

Dave Allard grew up in Lyndonville, Vermont with a father who never said no. This meant something different back then. When Dave wanted to build a sugarhouse at age 12, his father didn’t say no. When he wanted to get into the firewood business at age 16 (100 cords, hand split), when he wanted to build a woodshop at 18, dad (and mom) went along with every entrepreneurial idea. In 1978, at age 19, he started his own cabinet shop which grew into Lyndon Furniture. Thirty-five years later, the company employs 85 people and does around $12-14 million in annual sales. We sat down with Allard and Shawn Straffin, the head of product development and business devel- opment, and asked how Lyndon Furniture has been able to buck the downward trend wood furniture manufacturing has experienced in the recent past.

The U.S. furniture Industry has lost $50 billion in market share over the past few Dave Allard, owner of Lyndon Furniture. decades. How have you stayed viable? Design is a key part to success. If you make a How has technology changed over the years? What does marketing look like in the distinctive new piece of furniture with interesting Today, our saw scans and reads the defects in a 21st century? material, it will be sought after by the consumer. board in seconds. We use a 5-axis CNC machine We’re in the digital age, where social media and This is true in every market, but especially true that can cut any angle you need, even butterfly printed QR codes [those little bar codes you often with furniture. The connection is another vital joints. We have a finish curing system that uses see in magazines] track engagement with the part. There’s the connection between the brand, ultraviolet light that dries a lacquered finish in consumer – collect contact info, as well as loca- the retailer, and the consumer. But there’s also a 5 minutes. In the old days it took 24 hours for tion and demographic information. We use Prmot. larger connection between the company and the a piece to dry, now it can come right off the line it and its SharePower™ software to promote our place where it’s located. The local craftspeople. and into a box. product on websites and social media. [Editor’s The local economy. The forest. These connections note: Straffin is the creator and CEO of Prmot.it] support each other. When you talk to people about innovative And we’re cross promoting through the web with manufacturing, the term “lean” keeps more than 200 retailers across the country. The One of the big points we’re always coming up. Put this in laymen’s terms. Regional Wood Products Consortium is encourag- trumpeting is that, from a global “Lean” essentially means no wasted material or ing us to think outside the box while providing environmental perspective, there’s a world movement. Every touch of every board is done in support and ideas for implementation. This is a of difference between a mature black a way that adds the maximum amount of value. big step for us to take in our marketing approach cherry tree that’s selectively harvested in The old models of manufacturing were inflexible and one we think will pay off over time. the Northeast and mahogany tree that’s and inefficient. You made a product that you hoped illegally harvested in a Brazilian rainforest. people would buy, stored it in a warehouse, and What hasn’t changed in the past 35 years? Do your customers appreciate this? hoped you had enough but not too much product The law of value is still at the heart of every busi- People definitely appreciate the fact that our fur- on hand. Now we operate in a “just in time” model, ness. Give more value than you take in payment. niture is made from domestic sources. But it’s the with the manufacture of furniture scheduled into And technology will never trump good old-fash- local jobs angle they’re responding to, for the most weeks of production. When an order comes in, ioned business sense. We purchased a million part. “Made in the USA” still carries a lot of clout. we order the raw material just in time to make board feet of wood in 2008, when the housing On the environmental side, we promote the fact the piece. Each week we work on an order, then market crashed and the mills needed to unload that our domestic wood is a managed, renewable we’re done and on to the next order. No inventory. lumber. So we were buying the raw material low resource and grown within a 500 mile radius of Even our packaging is lean. We used to have a and selling the finished product to people who the factory, which cuts down on our carbon foot- warehouse full of cardboard boxes. Now boxes were least affected by the downturn. Business print. We’ve also made energy efficiency upgrades, are made on site when we need them from one of 101, but it definitely helped us get through the and recycle all of our wood by-products. three sizes of cardboard. No more storage. recession.

This article series is underwritten by the Northern Forest Center, a non-profit organization. The Northern Forest Center helps create economic opportunity and community vitality from healthy working forests in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York. www.northernforest.org

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 63 8/16/13 11:44:51 AM DISCOVERIES

By Todd McLeish

On Birds and Windmills

For those concerned about climate change, renewable energy development is a no- brainer. And the breezy mountaintops of New England, far from human population centers, appear to be ideal settings for wind turbines. But there are plenty of non- human populations that could be affected, few of which have been evaluated. A new study by a Plymouth State University graduate student is the first to C examine what happens to high elevation LINTON P bird populations when their habitat is disturbed by the installation of a com- ARRISH mercial wind farm. Clinton Parrish used the Granite Reliable Wind Park in north- Bicknell’s Thrush ern New Hampshire, a development of 33 turbines, each about 410 feet tall, as thrush numbers in 2010 before the wind including Bicknell’s thrush. “Neotropical his study site. He was most interested turbines were built, during construction migrants like Bicknell’s thrush have a in learning how well the rare Bicknell’s in 2011, and again in 2012 when the wind strong site fidelity, so they will likely breed thrush fared, a bird that nests exclusively farm was operational. The good news in the same place they’ve been before, in the mountains of the Northeast. was that Bicknell’s thrush abundance regardless of how it may have changed,” he “I was trying to see if the wind farm remained relatively stable from year to explained. “But we may well see changes influenced their habitat use, if they would year, and the birds did not appear to avoid in the next generation. The habitats adja- exhibit avoidance of the turbines, and if, the turbine pads and access roads. When cent to the turbines may be less preferable, over time, we could detect a reduction in the turbines were operational, however, so the birds may shift away from them. their abundance,” Parrish said. the birds nesting closest to the turbines And as species that prefer edge habitat Focusing on the area around the 15 expanded their home ranges. move in, like robins and other thrushes, turbines between Dixville and Kelsey “We think that was perhaps an indi- that may increase competition and also peaks, he compared the differences in cation that they have to move more to cause them to move away.”

C compete with the masking noise of the The owner of the wind farm has LINTON P turbines, so they can effectively broadcast agreed to do a follow-up study of bird

ARRISH their s on g ,” Parrish said. populations in five to ten years. While this study did not find sig- nificant changes to the Bicknell’s thrush population, Parrish found changes in the abundance of other bird species. Birds that Nemus Power and Light prefer to nest in the forest interior, includ- ing gray jays, golden-crowned kinglets, Trees capture sunlight to produce chemi- and black-backed woodpeckers, declined cal energy, and they may soon be teaming in numbers, while species that prefer up with the sun to produce electricity, as more open habitat, like fox sparrows, well. A team of researchers at Georgia dark-eyed juncos, and blackpoll warblers, Institute of Technology and Purdue all increased. The biggest change was in University has created recyclable solar the number of American robins, which cells using tree-based substrates instead prefer habitat at the forest edge. In 2010, of silicon. Parrish found no robins in his study area, “A s more and more solar panels are but large numbers moved in as soon as deployed on rooftops and elsewhere, we turbine development began. asked ourselves if we could make the pan- Parrish expects further shifts in spe- els even greener,” said Bernard Kippelen, A wind farm on Kelsey Peak in northern New Hampshire. cies populations in the coming years, an engineering professor at Georgia Tech.

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 64 8/16/13 11:44:53 AM “Our alternative technology is to replace will take another 10-15 years of research scale causes cell death right where it feeds, some of the silicon solar films with organ- before the technology can be commer- but no downstream death.” He believes ic solar films.” cialized. “When it comes to recycling, that the adelgid manipulates plant chemis- The researchers have used cellulose you would just have to break that her- try to bring food to itself at the expense of nanocrystals, which Kippelen calls “the metic package to allow water to get in.” the tree, but when the scale is also present, smallest constituent of a tree,” as the the scale consumes much of that food. building block of the substrate of the It may appear that the scale could solar cells. By mixing the nanocrystals Adelgid vs. Scale be used to reduce the harmful effect with glycerol, they created a transparent of adelgid-infested hemlock forests, but Preisser does not believe that is a good organic film to hold the organic elec- When the hemlock wooly adelgid, an idea. The adelgid feeds exclusively on tronic layers, which convert the sunlight invasive pest that sucks the life out of eastern hemlocks in North America, but into electrical power. Because the organic eastern hemlock trees, made its appear- the scale feeds on other conifers and is film is water soluble, the solar cells can be ance in New England forests in the 1970s especially damaging to Christmas tree easily separated for recycling. and 80s, many forestry experts expect- groves, so intentionally releasing the scale “From the very beginning, we wanted ed it to wipe out all hemlocks in the would likely cause widespread harm to to make sure that the solar cells were region by about the turn of the cen- other trees. recyclable,” said Kippelen. “Otherwise we tury. When another damaging hemlock Preisser is continuing his studies of are simply solving one problem – less pest, the elongate hemlock scale, arrived the pests to try to learn how the adel- dependence on fossil fuels, while creat- soon after, some speculated that the trees gid manipulates hemlock chemistry and ing another – a technology that produces might disappear even sooner. Yet, oddly what the scale does to counteract this energy from renewable sources but is not enough, hemlocks are doing better in manipulation. He hopes the scale can disposable at the end of its lifecycle.” areas where both pests are present than continue to buffer the effect of the adelgid According to Kippelen, the organic they are in areas with just the adelgid. long enough for what he calls “a promis- solar cells achieve a power conversion University of Rhode Island ecologist ing biological control” for the adelgid to efficiency of up to 3.8 percent, and he Evan Preisser, who has been studying be approved for use. expects they should be able to reach the pests for more than a decade, says J seven to eight percent in a short time. that despite what logic would suggest, EFF B

The most efficient silicon-based solar in this case two pests are not worse than ACKER cells reach nearly 20 percent efficiency.

one. “How do you reconcile that the scale “Our work is a first step in a new direc- appears to be in higher densities in an tion of trying to make green solar energy adelgid dominated landscape?” he asked. even greener,” said Kippelen. “If we find “If you have two herbivores eating some- that the path is viable, it could be an thing, one’s food should be the other’s interesting new application for high value loss of food. But that doesn’t seem to be forest products. It can be produced from the c a s e .” standard pulp from the paper industry, Adelgids are known to kill hemlocks which is looking for new applications within a few short years; the scale just since demand for paper is going down causes a chronic unhealthy state. To test in the digital age. If people are thinking what happens when both pests are pres- about deploying solar panels to produce ent, Preisser introduced the insects to hundreds of gigawatts of power, then we individual branches in a hemlock forest. would need millions of tons of cellulose.” “What we found was that the scale by The primary advantage of the technol- itself hurt the branch a little, the adelgid ogy is also its only problem. Because the and scale together hurt it a little more, organic film dissolves so easily in water, it and the adelgid by itself was the w or s t ,” he will likely fall apart when it rains, so the said. When both pests were introduced to researchers are working on developing a the same branch, the abundance of each special coating to protect it. declined by about 30 percent. “The active layers that absorb sunlight Preisser said that in its native range in and convert it to electricity in traditional Asia, the adelgid creates a gall on spruces, solar cells are also sensitive to water and which causes changes in how the trees oxygen, so they need to be protected allocate nutrients. “The adelgid induces anyway. If we have to protect the active a strong hypersensitive response in the layer, we might as well protect the sub- tree, which causes lots of cell death, even strate, t o o,” said Kippelen, who expects it in areas that don’t have adelgids, whereas Matt Fitzpatrick checking for adelgid and scale.

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 65

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 65 8/16/13 11:44:54 AM THEOVERSTORY

Story by Virginia Barlow Illustrations by Adelaide Tyrol

Northern Red Oak Quercus rubra

Superlatives keep rolling in when I think about this region’s red oak: the tallest hardwood; the straightest timber; the best source of food for mammals, birds, and insects; the first choice for flooring; the most beautiful yard tree. You can probably expand on that list. Oaks are the subject of endless aphorisms. My favorite is that you can plant corn when oak leaves are the size of squirrel’s ears. That’s another reason to have an oak in the yard. Red oak grows throughout the northeast and north-central states, but is more likely to be a dominant species from southern New England south through the Appalachians. It’s easily transplanted, fast growing, and typically shapely, with dense foliage. Sandy, well- drained soils are the best for oak, and, being somewhat tolerant of drought and acidity, it will often outcompete sugar maples on south-facing rocky ridges. Quercus rubra is the most northern of the oaks, of which there are estimated to be from 300 to 600 species world- wide, and perhaps 80 in North America. Oaks date from the dinosaur age and they’ve used the intervening 60 million years to try out almost every possible leaf shape. Red oak leaves are large, roughly seven inches long and five inches wide, usually with seven to nine bristle-tipped lobes. But remember, oak leaves vary significantly, even on the same tree. If you find an acorn, you’ve almost undoubtedly found an oak. With the exception of the closely-related tanoak (Lithocarpus densiflorus), a western species, only the Quercus genus has acorns. The strong, heavy, wood does have one drawback. Unlike white oak, the preferred species for boat building, it is porous and can’t be used outdoors or for wine barrels. In colonial times, red oak barrels were reserved for dry goods and molasses. Now its rosy wood is most often used for flooring. It’s excellent for furniture and veneer as well, although nowadays lighter colored woods seem to be more popular. I’ve planted a couple red oaks around the house, but they won’t flower until they are 20 or more years old. When they do, pollen from the obvious, dangling male catkins will be windblown to the inconspicuous female flowers. It takes 18 months or so for the acorns to mature, and seeds tend to be significantly more abundant every two to five years. In between, a red oak is counting on a bunch of acorn-dependent rodents to limit the number of their offspring – or, even better, to starve to death. Oaks normally look completely healthy so it’s hard to believe that, as well as providing sustenance to birds (blue jay, turkey, wood duck, ruffed grouse, crow, white breasted nuthatch, brown thrasher, grackle, towhee) and mammals (deer, bear, raccoons, just about all the rodents), oaks are eaten by over 1,000 insect species. More species of Lepidoptera, including 15 different species of giant silk moth, chomp on oak leaves than the leaves of any other tree genus. Most of these animals coexist happily with their host, but repeated defoliation by gypsy moth caterpillars (oak is their preferred food) has killed many millions of red oaks across a large part of the northeast. Galls are common on red oaks, and especially obvious is the oak apple gall (Amphibolips confluenta). Sometimes over an inch in diameter, these conspicuous round balls contain the larva of a tiny wasp in the family Cynipidae. Hundreds (yes, hundreds) of other cynipid wasp species also develop on oaks. Walkingsticks and katydids eat the leaves and 50 different leaf miners chew at

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 66 8/16/13 11:44:59 AM leaf tissues from within. This is all good news for birds. Sometimes oak trees look just a bit ratty because of dangling dead twigs. This is the work of the oak tree pruner, a beetle whose larvae burrow inside the small branches and then make pruning cuts, killing the twig. The branch soon falls, with the larva inside, and then the ground, instead of the tree, may look messy. Acorn crops are occasionally abundant, with reports of 250,000 nuts per acre. This volume of calorie-rich food does not go unnoticed by the insect world and many weevil species have evolved to feed on acorns. Usually, the female deposits an egg in a half-grown acorn in the summer and a c-shaped larva develops in its safe little home. It chews its way out after the acorn hits the ground and then burrows into the soil for the winter, emerging the next spring or sometimes the spring after to start the process all over. Ruined acorns have a tell-tale eighth-inch diameter exit hole. Red oak leaves, acorns, and bark all contain a high concentration of tannin, which birds and mammals find difficult to digest. Even blue jays cannot live on acorns alone. As the oak leaves develop and age, the tannin content gets higher, so leaf eating insects are most active in the early part of the growing season. Fungi and bacteria are also deterred by the high tannin content of the leaves, which helps explain why oak leaves persist on the forest floor far longer than maple leaves. The best time to find red oaks is after all the maples have lost their leaves. Oaks are wise not to compete for foliage prizes with red maple or sugar maple because they would be unappreciated among that dazzling brightness. But later in October, even into November, the deep, rich wine red of oak leaves is the most beautiful thing on the landscape. It’s then, too, that oak seedlings stand out like beacons, even more than the larger trees. Last fall a friend from the next town over asked me whether I’d noticed an increase in the number of oak seedlings. Noticed? Hell, I’d been going nuts trying to figure out how oak seedlings could suddenly be popping up in droves where they never had been before. I was relieved to learn that I wasn’t the only puzzled bushwhacker around. I saw the first oak seedling on our land in Corinth four years ago, having seen zero in the previous 18 years of our ownership. A couple of years ago I noticed another one, and last year I saw about 50 here and many, many more in the wider neighborhood. The two to four glowing red leaves hang on the seed- lings even longer than on mature trees. Oaks are a southern species and they “haven’t yet perfected the deciduous habit,” – a phrase I read way back that sticks in my mind, unlike the name of its author. So what explains the sudden proliferation of red oak in the neighborhood? Two high, rocky sidehills, a mile plus to the west of us, each have a small patch of mature red oaks; their spreading crowns are visible from a long distance. In the fall, blue jays cache surplus acorns by carrying them far from the parent tree in an expandable esophagus. The average distance between tree and cache in one study was two thirds of a mile, and the bird has been known to carry an acorn for two and a half miles. The energy obtained from an acorn snack is used to transport the next nut, and a single blue jay may cache 3,000 acorns in a single year. Blue jays reliably bury the acorns, but they’re not so reliably retrieved. This long distance dispersal is unusual, and the blue jay has been credited with the rapid northward movement of oaks following the most recent glacier. Still, if it’s blue jays that are responsible for peppering the woods around here with little oaks, why did they wait until 2010? Someone’s going to say “global warming” and, yes, I’m a believer, but in the case of oaks, I’m a skeptic. I’m going with the acorn fairy.

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 67

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 70 8/16/13 11:45:21 AM TRICKS of the trade

By Carl Demrow

Big Tree, Small Bar.

Is longer better when it comes to chainsaw bars? Personally, I like a shorter bar. It allows me to use a saw with a smaller engine, which reduces overall strain on my back and muscles. Plus, shorter bars are inherently safer. But how do you cut a 34-inch tree with a 16-inch bar? By making a bore cut directly into the middle of your notch, you can cut trees that are bigger than twice the length of your bar. Before you get started, check to see if the dogs on your saw (the metal spikes at the base of the bar that bite into the tree bark) reduce the effective length of the bar. Once you have the bar’s true length, multiply it by two and add the width of the bar. This is the largest diameter tree you can cut. One caveat here: trees aren’t always perfectly round. And they often have root flare, particularly at the butt, which you’ll need to account for. Next, do your lean and hazard analysis, plan your escape route, and construct your notch, just like you would on any tree. If the tree has a bad side, position the hinge with the back cut on the bad side and set a wedge. Be sure to leave trigger or release wood on the back of the tree. Then find the spot one inch up from the bottom of the notch in the dead middle of the notch, and carefully run a bore cut straight into the middle of the face of the notch, right in line with the direction you want the tree to fall. Once the saw is plunged all the way in, carefully pivot the saw on the dogs or base of the bar, making a fan shape inside the tree. Don’t widen the kerf in the middle of the notch – keep it to the width of your bar – but fan out the tree on the inside. With this fanning motion, you’re removing wood that your saw would not be able to reach due to the bar being less than half of the tree’s diameter. Now proceed to make the back cut one side at a time, leaving trigger wood in the back. Set a wedge after you do your back cut on each side. With just the trigger wood left, go ahead and cut that and pound in the wedges if needed. Once the tree is over, check the stump to find any fiber (aside from the hinge) you did not cut, and remember that for next time!

Photos from top: (1) Measure your bar tip to dog, multiply by two, add the bar width for maxi- mum diameter cut. (2) Construct notch. (3) Plunge cut into face of notch, fan out inside tree. (4) Resume traditional bore cut, one side then the other, setting wedges as you go.

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 71

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 71 8/16/13 11:45:23 AM wood LIT

Life in a North Woods Lumber Camp among the remote lumber camps would bring as his grandson put it, and found that his school- news from the outside world. You will meet a ing sparked a “calling” to write professionally. By Thomas C. O’Donnell local character named Old Man Wright, who once He soon achieved a career as an author and Edited and with commentary by became lost because he did not trust his com- magazine editor in the United States and England. William J. O’Hern pass. He kept firing off a gun to let the loggers During his retirement in the Adirondacks, he The Forager Press, LLC know he was lost, but would wander off before he began to compose this book, but never was able could be found. After he was finally safe at camp, Thomas O’Donnell’s reminiscences of his boy- to complete it. Author William O’Hern, with the Tom’s father kindly told the weary men that they hood in a remote lumbering settlement provide permission of grandson Thomas A. O’Donnell, has an amusing and entertaining description of family needed a rest and could sleep until 6:00 the next posthumously reshaped Thomas C. O’Donnell’s life in a nineteenth-century logging camp. The morning before heading for the logging job. unfinished manuscript to provide this interesting account is not a history of logging the old-growth You will smile as Tom relates his introduction picture of life in the North Woods Bill Gove pine in the Lake States – not primarily. Rather, the to school. There were a few other children in the reader is given an interesting portrayal of an active logging settlement, but Tom was still surprised to learn that he had to attend school whether he boy growing up in a distant North Woods location Whitefoot Mouse in the central part of Lower Michigan. His father wanted to or not. Tom’s father eventually built a By Barbara and Russell Peterson had obtained a large cut of timber, and in the mid- one room log structure for use as a school house, Illustrated by Russell Peterson 1880s moved his young family into a log home but first a teacher was needed, and a young lady E.M. Hale and Company that he built for them. A log bunk house held the answered the job inquiry, accepting a wage of logging crew, and occasionally another family took $30/month plus room and board. Upon arrival, she , you know that children’s books up residence nearby. Family life and lumber camp was dismayed to learn that there was as yet no If you have kids about animals usually fall into two camps: There are life were two lifestyles that were rarely found school house; classes were held in the home. But together anywhere in the big timber country. it wasn’t long before the young gal was romanced the basic non-fiction books that give your kids just You will chuckle as Tom O’Donnell describes by one of the men in a nearby settlement, and the enough information to raise a million questions you how he and his older brother Fred found plenty to marriage was conducted by Tom’s father in his can’t answer. And there are the cute, anthropomor- keep themselves busy as only young boys could own home. The reader will be amused by Tom’s phized stories that make your kids love animals, but in the remote woods, as well as the trouble they description of the “shivaree” the new couple were fill their heads with misinformation that makes the encountered. Emulating one of his father’s log- subjected to on their wedding night. realities of nature hard to bear. But recently, a little gers, six-year old Tom started smoking a dried Tom’s young life was an adventuresome one in breath of fresh air came my way – a true-to-life elm root and soon tried tobacco. But when young that era before boys felt that they had to be enter- story of an animal, full of adventure, excitement, and Nora Jones, from a nearby resident family, stated tained by television and electronic devices. He had information worth remembering. that she would never marry a man who smoked, his own peavey at age six and used it when he and Whitefoot Mouse, by Barbara and Russell Tom quickly threw away a beautiful pipe that a his brother, plus a couple other boys, decided to Peterson, is a story for early readers (think first or logger had made for him from an elm burl. Tom copy the big guys and have their own logging job. second grade) that follows the life of one mouse was intrigued by the Saturday night dances in There weren’t enough boys to make up the crew; from October through late spring. We watch as their home and how the loggers’ caulked boots thus a neighbor girl named Rosie was used as the he searches for food, makes a nest, finds a mate, would throw up splinters and leave the floor scaler. The two-foot-long longs were rolled into the navigates the perils of winter, and watches his own pock-marked. Singing camp songs was a part of brook at high-water, never to be seen again. young strike out on their own, all written in clear, a logger’s life in the 1800s; the songs in Michigan Many interesting photos are included, most of unemotional text. Each chapter is filled with enough were quite similar to those sung by the woods- suitable clarity. I found it disappointing, however, detail to satisfy the curiosity of any child. In Night men in the camps of northern New England. that the captions seldom included the location Hunters, he “put his nose on his chest, crossed The settlement established by Tom’s father and identification of people pictured. his front paws on his nose, curled his tail around was not in complete isolation. Peddlers traveling Thomas C. O’Donnell became “aged in wood,” his body, and slept.” In Everything Grows, the baby

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21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 72 8/16/13 11:45:26 AM “took one of the mother’s nipples in its mouth and book, North Country Life: Tales of Woodsman, as Mattie, a river guide’s wife, and Earl Bonness, held on tightly…. As the milk filled the tiny stomach, Waters, and Wildlife, should keep you good com- a river driver. Finally, it’s Lea’s irrepressible poetry it showed white under the thin, pink skin.” pany. This collection is filled with stories of Lea’s that enriches this reader’s experience, his lines of This is not the fluff normally found in children’s backcountry excursions to the rivers and woods, tripping iambic meter, “he was skinny then and books. as well as to the wildlands of his memory. The she had gone a bit to girth, though she didn’t care Whitefoot Mouse was written in 1959 (the twenty essays, interspersed with twelve brief about that a particle,” and his guilelessly musi- available edition was published in 1966) and is seasonally progressing vignettes, unfurl slowly as cal phrasing, as in, “silvered like the galvanized filled with a no-nonsense approach to life cycles Lea addresses both the quiet desperations and domes of silos on the Gale’s failed farm.” that you just don’t see anymore. A number of sounding joys of confronting mortality and change All told, perhaps the best assessment of A mice die in the tale, but none in such a way that in the wild places of self and landscape. Though North Country Life is his own. “There are dogs would frighten a small child. In one place, we are each essay stands alone, cumulatively they are a I’ve treasured, quick and lost; there are horses told, “There was a tussle. The pine mouse lay call and response to his own query: “What can I and songs; there are people, living and gone, who still.” And in another, “From behind the log ran a show for this time that has flown?” have figured in my life, which has been, in so skunk and caught them both, and carried them Some passages of this book are direct address- many ways, for all my physical and mental exer- off.” If you’re looking for a story to help your child es to the long gone. For example, in a chapter tions among woods and waters, a life of words, an understand predation, it’s hard to do better. disguised as a letter to his deceased father, we extended story.” All of which, housed between the The illustrations, too, have a charming simplic- eavesdrop on the author’s endeavor to account covers of A North Country Life, fill a book that will ity. The Petersons are a husband and wife team: for the joys and errors of his life’s wayfaring. affirm those who treasure the wild tracts of woods Barbara is the writer and Russell is the illustrator. In another letter, this time to a late mentor, and yearn for its stories and quarry. He was a mammalogist for the American Museum he assesses his professional credentials, among J  S  of Natural History in New York. His tri-color pen- them a PhD, eleven books of poetry, one novel, cil drawings show his expertise and are lively one nonfiction book, and one book of criticism, enough to walk right off the page. and finds the weight of it all less worthy than Passage As if an educational, well-told story weren’t his time spent in conversation and tutelage, the enough, the Petersons include a foreword with privilege of knowing this north country woman. “I We forced the yellow paddles through new ice concise information about North American mice plain can’t imagine how my existence would have that shifted, shattering, glinting like mica. and an afterword entitled, How to Have a Mouse looked without you and your many neighbors over I never really thought that we were trapped for a Pet. This may be my favorite part of the book. generations, while I can easily imagine it minus my but made believe we might be: bold explorers carving a northwest passage. The Petersons are not interested in pet stores or PhD and books.”

manufactured accoutrements for rodents. They Even as Lea writes from the deer-stand van- We reached some open water and, exhausted, assume that you will catch your mouse and tage point of his mid-sixties, gazing out over the faced the sun, resting like huddled ducks, include instructions for making “a live trap from: territory he’s already crossed, asking, “Well, what then turned toward home, followed our jagged path, an ordinary mouse trap, a tin can with one end cut of it?” he discovers and enacts a redeeming chain sliding the oars back in the holes they’d made, out, [and] a square piece of ¼” mesh wire, slightly of relations. He writes, “Once again I marveled like walking in old footprints. larger than the opening of the can.” For a cage, at the privilege of being with an older person as

they recommend two 12” round cake pans, which she remembered older persons remembering Today, I look down at the pond and see serve as ceiling and floor, with a wall of mesh wire older persons as they remembered. If I’ve ever our trail is gone, erased by the same sun fastened in between. And who doesn’t long for a felt a sense of human continuity and perpetuity, that warmed us yesterday. The thin ice melts world where a family is more likely to have spare it’s been in circumstances like those.” These inward from the shallow shore, removing cake pans than access to a pet store? liaisons continue to reverberate with Lea’s own all signs that we were there. G  remembrances, encounters with fathers, sons, other friends, as he puts it, with “men we’ve MIDGE GOLDBERG known,” his recollections occasioned by days spent in doghair woods, in kayaks and canoes, in A North Country Life: Tales of childhood fields, and on “hill-hidden trails” while Woodsmen, Waters, and Wildlife pursuing game. By Sydney Lea As one who seldom, if ever, has held rod, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013 gun, or son – the staple subjects of this collec- tion – what I cherish most about this book is If your pulse jolts hearing the rusty cackle of a Lea’s wild-earned knowledge expressed in such turkey; if a fly made of “mallard quill thorax ribbed elegant specificities as, “Two yearling deer stand, in gold wire ahead of a roughened white hare pastern deep, on flooded ground that will soon drubbing, no wing” is your holy grail; if you’ve be broken and planted.” Some of the strongest felt caught on the barbed wire fence between passages are direct transcriptions, such as when your heritage and your destiny, Syd Lea’s newest he brings back ceased North County voices such

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 73

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Classified Ads are available at $62 per column inch, with a one-inch minimum. Only $198 for the whole year. All ads must be prepaid. Mail your ad to Northern Woodlands, P.O. Box 471, Corinth, VT 05039, fax it to (802) 368-1053, or email to [email protected]. The Winter 2013 issue deadline is September 25, 2013.

74 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 74 8/16/13 11:45:28 AM up COUNTRY

By Robert Kimber

Griff’s Camp

The first time I saw Griff – his last name was Griffin – he was Along with the changes Griff worked on his camp, he and perched about seven feet off the ground in a red maple tree, Hilma worked changes in me. We were neighbors after all. If sawing off a couple of limbs that extended out over an expanse I saw him working around the place I’d say hello, or if he was of granite ledge below. As I was walking past, headed for our out for a stroll he might stop in and tell us excitedly about the house a short piece farther down the road, he hailed me. latest rare coin h e’d picked up for his collection. Then, when I “You got a steak ready for me?” he asked. “I been working up first caught on that our dog Brandy was paying Griff and Hilma quite an appetite.” regular visits, I went over to ask if she was bothering them. “No,” I said, “I don’t, but why are you sawing limbs off a “Oh, n o,” Hilma said, “we love to have her come ov e r.” tree only a few steps back from the road and on top of a rock Love my dog, and I’ll love you. But I probably would have ledge?” loved Hilma anyway, dog or no. She was one of the most charm- “I’m gonna put a school bus on this ro c k ,” he said. “Make me ing women I’ve ever met, and because she never gave a thought a nice little camp away from the village, out here where it’s quiet to making herself charming, she was all the more charming for and peaceful.” that. Her voice had a melodic Yankee lilt that made the simplest This exchange took place just a couple of weeks after w e’d words sound like some old, gentle song. moved from frenetic Greater Boston to tranquil Temple and, as Griff had fallen for that voice and its owner, too, and when I’ve said, just a stone’s throw away from our house. I asked him once what had moved him to settle in Temple, he Great, I thought, terrific. In the winter, with no leaves on said with a big grin on his face, “I came to Temple to hunt for a the trees, we’ll be able to admire a derelict school bus from our buck, but what I got was a d e ar.” kitchen windows. We’ve arrived just in time to have the vil- Hilma and Griff are both gone now, Griff first in 1987. The lage eccentric – if not the village lunatic – move in on top of home h e’d built out of a school bus needed his energy to keep it us. Who, in his right mind, would want to squat in a roadside up, and when Hilma said she wished she could move into a nice school bus when he had, as Griff did, for his principal residence new trailer she wouldn’t have to fuss with, Rita and I bought the a perfectly livable trailer less than a mile away? But eccentric or camp and helped her do that. not, he knew how to make things happen. Not many more days Griff ’s camp is now serving as a storage building for con- had passed before a school bus, minus its wheels, chassis, and struction materials, many of them recycled, that a local church’s engine, was perched on that rock. housing ministry uses to help people renovate their homes. I My knowledge of Griff ’s personal history is scanty. I heard think Griff would be pleased to know his place is helping folks tell that he was a retired electrician from California. The elec- do what he did: build a home from the materials at hand. trician part was accurate because, within another few days, he Was Griff an eccentric? Sure, but a good-hearted one. And had put an electrical entrance into the bus himself. He was no aren’t we all eccentrics, one way or another? It’s often benign slouch at carpentry either. Once h e’d made the interior of the eccentricity – along with love – that makes the world go round. bus livable, he set about beautification of the exterior, encas- ing it in wood, painting it canary yellow to maintain the bus’s Robert Kimber has written often for outdoor and environmental magazines. He lives original color scheme, I guess, and setting off each of those in Temple, Maine. porthole-like schoolbus windows with its own frame, lovingly fitted and painted robin’s-egg blue. But that was not the end of home improvement. A school bus was pretty cramped quarters for Griff and his wife, Hilma, so over the years one addition followed another: first, a bedroom and a closet-sized room for a chemical toilet built on behind the bus; next, a spacious sitting room; and, finally, a storage shed tacked on in back of it all. At some point in this series of projects, I assumed the trailer in the village had been sold or rented because Hilma and Griff were at the camp full time.

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 75

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 75 8/16/13 11:45:30 AM Britton Lumber Company Thanks for P. O. Box 389 • 7 Ely Road supporting Fairlee, Vermont 05045 802-333-4388 Northern [email protected] Woodlands www.brittonlumber.com through: Manufacturers of Eastern White Pine Lumber Since 1946

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For more information please contact: Elise Tillinghast, Executive Director Center for Northern Woodlands Education: [email protected] 802.439.6292 PO 471, Corinth, Vermont 05039

76 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 76 8/16/13 11:45:37 AM Small Woodland Owners Association of Maine Serving small woodland owners in Maine since 1975

Monthly 16-page newsletter. Licensed forester on staff to help answer woodlot questions. Sponsor more than 50 educational workshops each year. Voice for small woodland owners in Augusta. Land Trust for working forests. Green Certification of small woodlands. ŽďĐĂƚΠƵƟůŝƚLJǀĞŚŝĐůĞƐǁĞƌĞŵĂĚĞĨŽƌƉĞŽƉůĞǁŚŽǁĂŶƚ For More Information Contact: ƚŽŐĞƚƚŚŝŶŐƐĚŽŶĞ͘ǀĞƌLJŝŶĐŚŽĨƚŚĞƐĞŵĂĐŚŝŶĞƐŝƐ SWOAM, P. O. Box 836, Augusta, ME 04332 ĚĞƐŝŐŶĞĚǁŝƚŚLJŽƵƌƉƌŽĚƵĐƟǀŝƚLJŝŶŵŝŶĚ͘WŽǁĞƌĨƵů͕ Tel: 1-877-467-9626 ĐŽŵĨŽƌƚĂďůĞĂŶĚƐƵƌĞͲĨŽŽƚĞĚ͕ƚŚŝƐůŝŶĞƵƉŽĨǀĞŚŝĐůĞƐ E-mail: [email protected] ĚĞůŝǀĞƌƐ͘ŽďĐĂƚƉĞƌĨŽƌŵĂŶĐĞĂŶĚǀĞƌƐĂƟůŝƚLJĨŽƌĂ ǁŝĚĞƌĂŶŐĞŽĨũŽďƐ͘

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Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 77

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 77 8/16/13 11:45:41 AM THE A. JOHNSON CO. Bristol, VT (802) 453-4884

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78 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 78 8/16/13 11:45:45 AM the outdoor PALETTE

“Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature itself is animated” Auguste Rodin 1840-1917

The Paper Forest, Multi-media installation, size varies, 2012

Horsebird, Handmade abaca paper, twigs, clay, wire, 8” x 12”, 2013

Riki Moss looks into the forest and imagines another world; a world filled with spirits and ambiguous life forms. For years, she has been engaged with her ever-growing, ever-shifting installment called The Paper Forest. This multi-media assemblage of curious sculptures addresses ideas of mutability and puts forth a world where things move in and out of existence. The strange, proud creatures she creates, like Horsebird, are species that did not quite make it; species made from slightly different DNA than the ones we name and study. They look like familiar creatures and plants, but at the same time, they are decidedly nothing we have ever seen before. The individual sculptures in this installation are made with Abaca paper, a material derived from banana leaves. Moss beats the cellulose plant fiber down with a pulp-making machine that was developed in the 17th century called a Hollander beater. Once the thin, translucent paper is made, it is pressed over forms constructed of twigs, wire, plaster, and clay. When the resulting “skin” dries, it is reminiscent of goat-skin vellum and reveals the haphazard structure that lies beneath. Occasionally, twigs and wire poke through the outer layer of hide, as if the creature is in the process of being formed or, conversely, is starting to fall apart. Moss is exploring her world, asking the question, “What is our time here on earth all about?”— Adelaide Tyrol

For a video on Riki Moss’s paper making process, visit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9b47dZnnWU

Moss’s sculptures have been exhibited in Nagoya, Japan, in conjunction with the UN council on Biodiversity, at the Paper Biennale in Holland, at the Images and Voices of Hope media summit, and at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, VT. She was a recipient of an Art Matters (NYC) grant and several Vermont Arts Council development grants. The Parade in the Paper Forest will be exhibited at the Vermont Book Festival, in Burlington, September 20-21, 2013. Riki Moss lives and works on the Champlain Islands, Vermont. Visitors to the studio are welcome by appointment. Please contact [email protected] / www.rikimoss.com

Call for entries: Send us your Outdoor Palette submissions. Contact Adelaide Tyrol at (802) 454-7841 or [email protected] for details.

Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013 79

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 79 8/16/13 11:45:48 AM A PLACE in mind

Tod Cheney

This voyage has lived in my imagination for years, and at last destination, is four miles up on the other side of the lake. here I am, alone with canoe on Chamberlain Lake in Allagash, Thinking about crossing, I feel the wind at my back, and I Maine. A chalky blue haze obscures the water and any sense of wonder how it will treat me today. distance. I’m poling my canoe close to shore, reconciling the Chamberlain Farm once stood on the east shore, opposite scale of the map I’d studied in preparation for the trip and the where I am now. Six hundred cleared acres, a dozen buildings, reality of the watery miles in my wake. I know a few things about including a store – a logging depot in the middle of the woods. this landscape. I’ve read books, have been here before. But what The forest has taken back the farm and only a single building I feel, floating along, is the present landscape; I’m certain it’s the remains on the shore, though the maps still call it Chamberlain floating that opens me to the spirit and spirits of the place. Farm. Thirty years ago, one could still walk around in remnants Mud Pond is my destination, six miles up on the west side, of open space. I saw a safe in the bottom of a cellar hole. In 1857, but the north wind has other ideas, and pushes me onto a Thoreau stopped by to purchase some sugar. Somewhere on that weather shore where moose tracks wander in the gravel. It’s a forest shore, too, a boy named Chamberlain is buried, drowned decent spot to camp. Later, lying in the tent, I listen to thunder when his canoe upset after the wind came up. His father was in rolling across the western sky. Late, when the booming fades, the woods hunting when it happened. I’m a father and I can feel the loons pick it up and send their voices to the sky. When how that father felt, across all that time. I wake and hear quiet wind, I can’t wait to get up and start I can’t see Lock Dam, where Chamberlain’s waters flow into paddling. Chamberlain is sixteen miles long, a consistent mile the Allagash, and where I will portage, but I point the canoe wide, and makes a nearly straight line northwest to southeast. where I think it is and head across the lake. The wind picks up Wind can rise up out of still air, barrel down the lake unfet- gently, and over my shoulder I watch the shore recede. By eye I tered, and stack up four-foot waves in a few minutes. I’ve seen calculate a quarter of the way, then a third, then half-way across. it happen. At 4:00 A.M. I put the coffee on, and start breaking I’ve never liked the middle of lakes in a canoe, for accompanying camp. my affinity for the water is my fear of it. Deep and insoluble, a With the calm come mosquitoes, thick, and I chase down slumbering creature that stirs on cue, as it stirs now, and rides two with coffee before shoving off toward Mud Pond, site of the along with me. ancient carry from the Penobscot watershed. On waters much At some point, I become sure that what I think is Lock like these, my father and I spread grandfather’s ashes one misty Dam really is Lock Dam, and minutes later the canoe scrapes morning decades ago, dad’s cigarette smoke drifting up over our the beach and I step on land. Years ago, Dorothea and Milford heads. Somewhere along this shore Henry Thoreau emerged Kidney lived here in a cabin. Milford tended the dam, and from the woods after getting lost on Mud Pond Carry, much Dorothea wrote books about their life here and baked brownies to the amazement of his guide Joe Polis. The logger’s dams had for canoeists. A warm brownie would be nice now, but all is raised the water level, and a wide necklace of whitened dead deserted at Lock Dam. There’s only me in the midst of it all, the trees rimmed the lake. sound of water spilling through a pipe into the outlet stream, So far as I can see I’m the only human around, so alone and and the idea I have to keep moving. insignificant, but not lonely. There are sounds; other beings. A woodpecker’s percussion on a hollow log issues from the forest. Tod Cheney lives in Blue Hill, Maine with partner Holly Bixby, and son Mariner. He Loons. A bull moose, immersed in moose thoughts, crosses writes a blog on the Maine woods for the Bangor Daily News, and is the author of So I the mouth of Ellis Brook without seeing me. Lock Dam, my Can See The Trees, Travels in the Maine Woods, published in 2013.

80 Northern Woodlands / Autumn 2013

21913_WOOD_AUT13.indd 80 8/16/13 11:45:51 AM 21913_WOOD_AUT13_COVERS.indd 5 8/16/13 12:24:01 PM 21913_WOOD_AUT13_COVERS.indd 2 8/16/13 12:23:42 PM