Harvesting to set the stage for the future forest

The Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation is currently conducting a timber sale on Proctor Piper State Forest in Cavendish, Vermont. The combination of careful sale layout and a good contract between the logger and the state resulted in an excellent timber sale. Like many things in life, though, this was not done without some challenges.

Proctor Piper has been a state forest since the early 1900s. There are still old stone remnants of a once very active Civilian Conservation Corp camp that was in use in the late 1930s. Other things that made this sale tricky to put together were a Vermont Association of Snow Travelers ( VAST) corridor trail running through the sale area (which had to be cut in frozen conditions during prime snowmobiling season), a fish and wildlife department mapped deer wintering area, huge white pine scattered throughout the stand (some of which biologists were interested in retaining for ecological interest), steep inoperable ground, and a number of seeps which provide excellent amphibian habitat.

The objectives of the management activity were to harvest timber, improve the deer wintering area, and produce more deer browse. These objectives are being met with four different regeneration treatments in the sale.

In one stand, the management plan called for a hemlock shelterwood harvest. The timber sale contract required 3 full days of bulldozer time to drive around the stand in order to scarify the soil. The hope was to stir up mineral soil, creating a good seed bed for tree regeneration. Another section was treated with an overstory removal in which everything was cut except 40-60 square feet of basal area of white pine, red oak and hemlock two inches and larger. The prescription for the oak portion of the sale was a red oak shelterwood cut in which everything that was two inches or larger was cut while leaving 40 square feet of overstory basal area as a seed source. The fourth type of regeneration treatment was a pine shelterwood in which all hardwood trees with a diameter of two inches and larger were cut out of the stand leaving a residual overstory of 90 square feet of basal area of white pine. Some of the white pine average 1200 board feet per stem. The “regular sized” pine is being sold to Mill River Lumber Company in Clarendon, Vermont while the large stems are going to Cowls Lumber in Amherst, Massachusetts for building timbers.

This harvest is currently underway accomplishing multiple objectives as well as implementing some innovative experimental approaches to regenerating forest stands.

Sam Schneski

Assistant County Forester

VT Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation