Tree Regeneration in the Working Forest

By Hans M. Carlson

Recently I asked Jody Bronson, forest manager at Great Mountain Forest, to take me down to the log job we put on last summer. It was a well-planned and well-executed cut, and last year was a good acorn year, so we had hopes that there would be strong regrowth. Everything is still young, for growing trees takes decades, not seasons, but Bronson had told me things looked good, and I wanted to see for myself. It was a half-hour drive, since the cut is close to the Goshen town line, but it was a beautiful day, with a nice breeze and enough cloud cover to keep it cool.

The first thing you notice about any log job is that it’s messy. To the untrained eye all the roughly cut tops left on the ground look careless, but these need to rot back into the soil to provide nutrients, and before that they provide habitat for small animals and protection for the young trees that are sprouting. What you notice next about this particular log job is that beneath the surface messiness, there is a great deal of thoughtful work. There are no skidder marks to be seen, either to standing trees or to the ground beneath the slash. Wet spots have been carefully managed too, in order to hinder erosion, and the whole thing has an underlying orderliness. Norfolk native Henry Gundlach did the harvesting, knowing that a poorly executed job would damage regeneration for future foresters and loggers. Trees will regrow here, and in fact they have already started.

We walk to the east of the Number 4 Trail and look at an old cellar hole, as well as the seedlings coming up. It’s a very old place, probably nothing more than a log cabin in its day, and this may be the oldest house site in the forest. The site is worth protecting, so Bronson placed the skid road in order to stay away from the foundation.

I’m not good at seeing the individual seedlings in all the various undergrowth, but Bronson points to oak, red maple and cherry coming up. I stand for a moment and try to let the chronology of this place settle in. I think about the 300,000 board feet of wood we took out of here, and the decades it took that wood to grow. I also think about the fact that this land was cleared at least twice before last summer’s logging. In that longer frame of reference these impossibly tiny sprouts do feel like they will be trees someday. It’s possible to think of cutting trees as a sad thing, a kind of loss of all the years of growth, but one might say the same of this old farm site, which is being taken back by the regrown forest. Maybe it’s better to see all these things in a positive light—as the inevitable change that leads to new growth.

New growth is why we’re here, and on the west side of the road there is more to see, along with another sign of change in the forest. Deer browsing is a challenge to tree regeneration, just as to a growing garden, and we have a managed hunt at GMF for that reason. More recently, we have gained a resident moose population, and there are signs that both deer and moose have been feeding in the cut. There are two levels of browsing clearly visible: the deer fairly low on the young trees and the moose up above four feet. Moose need to eat as much as 50 pounds of plants each day, so they aren’t bothering with the little seedlings now. This may change as the cut matures, however, and we will have to wait and see.

Moose are a recent arrival, and there is no hunt here in Connecticut. If their population grows, they may be a problem, though it’s just as possible that they may not stay. Moose don’t like warm weather, and this is very far south for them to live comfortably. Here again the long view is helpful. It’s good not to get too possessive of trees that have only just begun to grow. At the moment the regeneration looks good on the ground, and the changing history of the forest’s ecology will be interesting to watch as all the plants and animals move through the stages of succession.

Photo by Hans Carlson.