“Let’s Take A Walk”

During an active timber harvest, I received a phone call from my client saying their neighbor had stopped by their house and had expressed how unhappy they were with the lot being harvested. I quickly and gladly got the neighbor’s contact information from my client and called the neighbor to arrange a meeting. After a brief phone conversation, we set up a meeting time at their home the same afternoon. As soon as we introduced one another, the berating quickly began, saying we were “destroying the land” and “clear cutting it”. I realized very quickly that a simple conversation wasn’t going to help this situation, so I said, “lets take a walk”.

The abutter quickly obliged and we took a walk next door to where they had already thinned an area that I had marked, so I could explain to him that what we were doing was a silvicultural treatment and was the second stage of a white pine shelterwood. When performing a shelterwood, the initial harvest spaces overstory trees and scarifies the soil in hopes of white pine regeneration establishing in the understory, which in this case were lucky enough to have happen. The second stage of the shelterwood removes a heavy amount of the overstory 10+ years later in order to release the well-established regeneration.

After this cut, the overstory is fairly thin, but there is excellent sapling to pole size timber growing on the site. We had all aspects of this going for us on this site, so in a forester’s eyes this was a perfect harvest and management of the woodlot. After an explanation of the best ways to manage white pine and showing him more in depth the operation being performed, the neighbor could at least begin to see the big picture, backed off and subsequently apologized to my client, their neighbor. What it all came down to is that the neighbor remembered when the woodlot had all large diameter pines, with no understory growth so it looked like an absolute park, which they loved to walk through. Yes, this was a nice-looking area, however without regeneration and multiple age classes in the stand, the lot had a poor prognosis for the long term. A harvest occurred 10 years prior to me working there, which also made them unhappy, but did start the silvicultural process of a shelterwood.

I’m always willing to take a walk with a potential client, client, or even a client’s neighbor to explain what the ultimate plan is and to educate them. Nine times out of ten, after a walkthrough, people have a far better understanding and are happy with what is going on. Forestry is both an art and a science which I will gladly share with anyone.