John Matel's Memorial Blog
I am down in Georgia for the “Longleaf Academy” to learn about longleaf pine regeneration as the name suggests. We discussed transitioning loblolly to longleaf. I plan to do this on some of our acreage.
My photos show the cheaper gas in South Carolina. If you are traveling south, fill up in Virginia and then do not do so again until you’ve reached South Carolina. The other photos are from Mary Kahrs Warnell Forest Education Center, where the conference is being held.
We held a landowner Tree Farm dinner at Reedy Creek Hunt Club in Freeman, Virginia. I sold the hunt club six acres a few years ago and they built a really nice facility. The meet there and can cater lunches or dinners, which they did for us. They made an excellent pulled pork. They can seat around 150. Our local meetings are much smaller, but they can do large or small.
I got to show my land to the dinner guests. I am proud of my longleaf pine and the progress since they were burned in February. We also talked about tree farming and the values of conservation.
My theme is that we should not talk about making our ecological footprint smaller, but rather make it much bigger, since what we do improves the land, soils and water conditions for biotic and human communities depending on them. I hate this whole “footprint” concept. It is defeatist. It says that you can never move forward, but only limit the damage you do. It is like the original sin, but worse since there is no redemption. I think we can – and we do better.
Taking advantage of my pilgrimage to the Aldo Leopold place, I stopped off in Madison. Always liked it there and Madison formed the backdrop for lots my thinking. I studied Greek and Latin. I forgot both, but the discipline of those languages stayed. I didn’t actually go to the city or the university, however, but stuck to the edges at the Wisconsin Arboretum and my old running trail that juts into Lake Mendota.
They do prescribe burning at the Arboretum, so I went to see some of the prairies maintained by fire. The big one is Curtis Prairie, originally laid out by Aldo Leopold in 1935, along with the less well-known Norman Fassett, Ted Sperry and the eponymous John Curtis, on an abandoned pasture. There was also a graduate student John Thompson, who planted seeds, along with dozens of CCC boys. It was the first example of scientific restoration. They brought in sod and seeds that they thought represented the original cover and it has been growing ever since.
You can see Curtis Prairie in the first photo. On the side is Leopold woods. It is good to have the history, since you can get ideas about the ages of the trees. These are about eighty years old. In the next photo you can see that they grew up in the open, since the white pine kept many of its lower branches for a long. Lake Wingra in the next photo is surround on three sides by the Arboretum and so is nice and clean. Next is the end of Picnic Point on Lake Mendota, the turn around point for my runs for obvious reasons. I used to be able to stop and get a drink at the pump shown in the photo, but it is now defunct.
Old growth forest in Milwaukee
Cudahy nature center is actually in Oak Creek, just off College Avenue. I started coming here sometime in the early 1970s, before it was a nature center and before Milwaukee County owned it. I used to read books about ecology and natural succession and then come to place like this and try to see how it worked. This is very much my “home woods.”
The preserve is about 42 acres of maple-basswood forest (farther east it would be joined by beech, but there are no natural occurring beech trees in Milwaukee County outside the immediate reach of Lake Michigan fog) that managed to avoid being cut. I doubt it is “virgin” forest, as some say, but it sure is old growth.
An obvious sign of old growth are big trees, but there is more. If the stand is really old growth, i.e. has been there for more than a generation or two, you will find unevenly aged trees and a variety of species.
If you look closely, you can see how the forest composition has been changing. There are some very old oak trees. They are probably at least 200 years old. Some look like they grew in a more open setting, since they had lower branches, but most are very tall before they branch, indicating that they grew with lots of other trees.
The oaks, however, are not the future. Oaks are disturbance dependent, since they need a fair amount of sun. Their offspring will not grow in the shade of the parents and here you have sugar maples and basswood that replace them.
You can see that in my first photo. I saw the trunk and the bark and though “oak” but then looked up and saw maples leaves. I was confused for a second and then looked farther up and saw oak leaves. If I could jump 100 feet into the air, I would see an oak poking out above a sea of maples. The next photo shows some very big basswood trees. They are part of what we used to call the climate community. Basswood and maples will dominate this site until disturbed, since their seedlings can thrive in the shade. The third photo is one of the old oaks that I bet grew up in a much less dense forest, maybe a field. Last is me by the sign for the nature preserve.
Kettle Moraines
Continuing some observations from yesterday’s wet walk around Mauthe Lake. One thing I like about the walk is the constancy of the biotic communities around the lake; another is the constant change. It seems like a contradiction that both can be true at the same time, but that is how natural systems work.
One change I do not like is the death of the ash trees. I noted last time that the ash were still alive. Invasive emerald ash borers evidently arrived in sufficient numbers to change that. I wonder how the damp, but not wet, land near the lake will change.The ash grew well in this environment and changed it by their growing, pulling up water and transpiring it. Will the damp-land become wetland now that they are not doing that? Will the damp forest become more marsh-like. Or will some other sort of trees take up the slack from that niche? There may adapt some natural control. Emerald ash borers eat only ash. They have now eaten themselves out of a home, although I am sure there are residual populations lurking around. Maybe local birds and frogs will learn to like the taste of ash borers and they will be transformed from an existential threat to a mere local menace, maybe just a nuisance, or maybe human effort can extirpate them. Hope.
Mauthe Lake represents the headwaters of the Milwaukee River. The official source is nearby Long Lake, but it flows through Mauthe. The river was high, as you can see from my photos.
My first picture shows a nice stand of white pine along the path. They are probably (only a guess, I was unable to confirm & if anyone knows better let me know too) seventy years old, planted by CCC. Next is the Milwaukee River leaving Mauthe Lake, followed by a photo of is coming in. The “river” after that is not a river at all. the left branch is the hiking trail and the right one is a bike trail. The water was shallow and warm. Last is the ghost forest of ash trees.
When you get completely wet, and can’t get any wetter, you no longer dread getting wet. That happened to my feet at least. And there is a real charm in walking in the woods in the rain, even when the trail is officially flooded.
I liked how they treated the warning. They did not close the trail, just warned you to do it at your own risk. Even if it had been closed I would have gone, but I liked that I did not have to break the rules. The worst parts of the flooding were only about ankle deep, as you see in the photos below. This should not be surprising on a trail through wetlands. The surface underneath is paved with gravel, so you don’t sink into mud and walking is not hard. It started to rain as soon as I arrived, this and the flooding trail meant that I had all the Mauthe Lake Trail in Kettle Moraine State Park to myself.
The Kettle Moraine State Forest is where I first learned about ecology. This was back in 1965, when I was ten years old. I got to go to a day camp up around Mauthe Lake. We did nature walks and learned about the forests, wetlands and the various remnants of the lake ice age, conveniently names “Wisconsin Ice Age” after the state where some of its most prominent features was easily visible. I try to go back when I am nearby. I get a very peaceful feeling here, maybe reaching back to my childhood and my imaginings of the great forces that moved earth.
My pictures show the trail, the wet trail and my wet feet. There is also a cut red pine. I counted the rings best I could. There are more than fifty. This means that it was just a little tree plantation when I was there in 1965. It grew very fast at first but in the last decades grew hardly at all. Last are the red pine relatives.
Part of the beech forest on our tree farm on Diamond Grove. It is a beautiful spot in one of our stream management zones. The video catches the moment better than a still photo, since you can look around and hear the sound of the stream.
The video lasts 57 seconds. Don’t click if you have a very slow connection, but if you are on WiFi, enjoy a minute of peace and beauty.
Researchers use local species to expand market for cross-laminated timber
Wood is the sustainable solution
We need to construct billions of new houses, offices and other structures in the next decades. We can to this at high environmental cost with plastics, concrete & steel. Or we can build sustainably with wood, using exciting new wood technologies.
I was talking to a couple people about building with wood. They acknowledged wood’s advantages, but asked if we would run out of wood. I told the unequivocally that we will NOT run out of timber in America. The United States is the world’s biggest wood producer, yet we have more wood growing today than in any other time in more than a century. I am not sure they believed me. I can mention statistics, but my certainty comes from my own observations. And I thought that I might be more persuasive if I shared that experience. Fortunately, I have photos. All the pictures are those I took of my own land, so I am confident in their veracity.
Above is a clearcut a few months after the loggers are gone. It looks very desolate, doesn’t it? Below is a few months later. Nature is reslient.
Let’s start with cutover land, i.e. land right after a clear cut. A clear cut must be done if you want to grow sun-loving trees, like pines. Since we grow pines, we do clear cut. If we were growing maples, we would cut selectively. If we were growing oaks, we would clear in patches. It all depends on the type of ecology you are working with. When I learned ecology in the 1970s, clear cuts were considered terrible things. They talked about climax forests that were supposed to be normal working toward this one goal. We have since learned that there is no one goal and we understand that MOST forest types are disturbance dependent. We need new forests, middle aged ones and old growth forests. That implies disturbance. The top photo I took on my land exactly one year after it was clear cut. You cannot see them, but there are 21,000 little trees planted there. There will be a young forest in a few years. In the meantime, this acreage provides wonderful habitat for bobwhite quail & deer. And I think it is beautiful.
Within a few years, you can see the little trees popping up through the brush. The picture above shows one of my plantations of longleaf pine. They are six-years old, which means that this is a clear cut after seven years. They soon will be be entering a stage of very rapid growth. On a side note, longleaf pine requires – REQUIRES – fire. Fire can be very destructive, but it is also part of the ecology in many systems. It is a mistake to exclude fire in many places. You can see a photo below of our burning. Don’t worry. It’s all good. I started the fire and I would not do it if I though it would destroy those trees I love. The longleaf ecology is the most diverse in North America because of the under story and the variety of plants on the ground, all of it enabled by regular fire.
In about fifteen years, loblolly pine in southern Virginia will be ready to thin. We MUST thin the trees to allow proper growth and avoid pests. It is like thinning flowers in a garden. If they are too close together, none of them grow right. The photo above shows fifteen-year-old pines thinned a couple weeks before. We removed 2/3 of the of the trees, which became pulp to make cardboard. Follow this link to see where they went. Below is what they look liked like five years later. There are fewer much healthier trees and more total growing wood than there would have been had we not thinned. These trees are twenty-years-old. We will soon thin them a second time, removing about half the total number of trees. Five years after that, there will be as much total standing timber, maybe a little more, since the thinning will allow the trees to grow that much faster and stronger. Healthy forest require thinning.
Below here are loblolly pines thirty-years-old. You notice that they are bigger than the twenty-year-old trees, but not that much. Trees continue to grow their entire lives, but they start to grow a lot more slowly after they are mature. In the case of loblolly pine, the slow a lot after they are thirty and it is almost time to harvest and start over.
One bonus section. One of the criticism of forestry is that we plant mono-culture, i.e. only one sort of tree. This is potentially a problem. We plant a lot of loblolly pine in the South, but we also are planting other sorts of trees. I am restoring longleaf pine on my farms, for example. We also have significant diversity in areas around the streams and wetlands. We protect water by not cutting near streams and lakes. This means that there are a lot of old, mixed forests. Besides protecting water, these zones provide corridors and shelter for wildlife. And they are just beautiful and peaceful places. Below are pictures of our stream management zones. You can see that these are open, mature forests.
And finally, forest owners are usually forest lovers. This is a picture of what I call “Old Virginia” since it features the mix of oak, shortleaf pine and others that made up a typical mixed forest of the past. This will not be harvested. We just enjoy them.
Anyway, will we have enough timber in the future? Yes we will.
Wood is 100% renewable resource. We know how to grow timber sustainably in the U.S. and we are doing it. Wood is the most environmentally benign building material throughout its full life cycle. We should build more with wood.
Posted also on LinkedIn
Clean water is a forest product. A forest slows runoff and filters the water. I was reminded of that looking at our stream management zones. These are areas near streams that we mostly leave in natural forest to protect water quality.
Went down to the farms today, along with Alex & his friend Colin. We walked around on the Brodnax farm. I rarely do the full circuit. Showing them the farms gave me a chance to get in touch a little more myself. You can in the photos that the SMZs are doing okay.
The first picture is a big shortleaf pine with me to show scale. Shortleaf pine grow slowly. I do not know the precise age of the trees in the big shortleaf in the grove, but I am guessing that they are at least 70 years old, which indicates that this land has not been cleared at least since the 1940s, before I was born anyway. Shortleaf pine can live more than 300 years. Unlike most pines, they tend to persist in mixed hardwood forests, often in association with oaks as you see here. Notice the unique bark on the shortleaf. It is one of the easiest ways to identify them. It is kind of like alligator skin, as you see in picture #2.
Next shows toad eggs in an ephemeral pond. Colin told me that they were toad, not frog eggs because they are in that kind of chain. I don’t know about that. I do know that amphibians need these sorts of temporary ponds to reproduce and that such ponds are getting harder for them to find, as people make sure their yards are neat, without mud puddles. The pond must be permanent enough (at least a couple months) to let the amphibians develop and move out, but not so permanent for a resident fish population that eats the eggs or tadpoles. This pond is fed by a seepage from the woods above. Below it runs into the creek, so I think this will fit the bill.
The other two photos show water in the creeks. It looks clean to me, so our woods are doing their job to protect water quality. We are part of the Chowan watershed via the Meherrin River in Brunswick County. The water eventually ends up in Albemarle Sound in North Carolina.
More pictures at the end.
Went to visit the burn plus one month. It is looking desolate still, but a few green shoots are coming up. By next month, we will see growth bursting out all over. I checked for the terminal buds on the longleaf and they were intact on those I checked. I am not 100% confident in the loblolly, but I think they will be okay too.
If the loblolly are okay, I am going to use fire more in the new stands. I spent most of the rest of the day hacking away at vines in the 2003 loblolly. Running fire through them every couple years would control these things. I cannot use fire in the 2003 loblolly yet, since the vines and trapped branches currently caught up in them would likely carry the fire into the canopy, but if I do it with the 2015 loblolly starting in 2020 I can prevent that situation in the first place.
All that said, I do enjoy cutting vines because it gets me into the woods with something to do, but I recognize that my efforts are not very effective and the vines are hurting my trees. Better to control them with better means. Beyond all that, I am getting a little old for this work and it is unlikely to get any easier. I am always stiff after a day of vine fighting. This time I even managed to hurt myself with my saw. I hit my knee and made five evenly spaced holes. Lucky it was just a hand saw. There was a lot of blood, although not much pain. This morning, however, it is stiffer than usual.
One more thing, a good one – look at the longleaf plantation. Since we did a good job of site prep, there was not much brush. I spent many hours knocking down volunteer loblolly and hardwood. The fire get more of that job done and it looks like we will have a superb stand of longleaf.
