A new forestry practice is confounding hikers deep in the woods of Orland. It’s strange. It’s ugly. But it’s working.
I recently stumbled upon it while hiking Great Pond Mountain and Oak Hill in Orland, in a swathe of conserved land known as the Wildlands. And all I could think was: What on Earth happened here?
Throughout the forest, trees were sawed off a few feet above the ground, leaving thousands of hip-high stumps. The nosy journalist in me couldn’t let the matter rest. So I reached out to the landowner, Great Pond Mountain Conservation Trust, and was fascinated by the explanation.
High-stumping is a forestry method used to get rid of diseased, canker-filled beech trees.
“By cutting up high, the root system thinks there’s still a tree up there and doesn’t root sprout,” said Landon Fake, the land trust’s executive director. “It continues to send nutrients up the trunk.”
The tree then dies without sending out dozens of sprouts like it normally would if it were cut near the ground. And this allows other tree species to grow.
This method of diversifying the forest, while effective, is also highly visible to Wildlands visitors. Some confused visitors have expressed anger, Fake said, assuming it’s the work of a lazy forester. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“We’re working on a project to create more permanent interpretive signs to explain forestry practices and try to educate people about it before they have this visceral negative reaction,” Fake said.
Wildlands forester Roger Greene has been improving the forest on the 5,100-acre property for more than a decade. A professional forester for 52 years, he was getting ready to retire when he took on the newly conserved land as a “hobby job.”
Prior to being conserved in 2005, the property was heavily harvested by its previous owner in preparation for subdivision housing. Trees of all sizes and species were cut and turned into everything from sawlogs to pulpwood. And in the absence of competition, diseased beech trees took over much of the property.
“I was so depressed I wanted to cry the first time I looked at it, and I questioned my sanity [for wanting to take it on.] But I’ve seen it grow. I’ve seen it develop. It’s getting more diverse, but it needs to have little nudges in the right direction. That’s our whole reason for being here, to just keep on with the nudges,” Greene said.
Beech trees have been struggling in Maine for a while due to beech bark disease caused by a tiny scale insect that drills holes in the bark to consume sap, followed by the introduction of a specific type of fungus. Infected trees develop cankers and eventually die.
Nearly half of the hardwood stands in the Wildlands are diseased beech. And to make matters worse, beech leaf disease (associated with a plant parasitic nematode) has also crept into Maine.
“For a while, the standard practice was to cut them off at the ground and then put herbicide on the cut face, and that would go down into the roots and kill the tree,” Fake said. “That’s both time consuming and expensive, and you’re putting a lot of herbicide into the ground when you have a lot of beech trees.”
An alternative, high-stumping is a technique developed by Ralph Nyland, a silviculture professor at Syracuse University’s forestry school. In the trials he conducted, 75 percent of cut beech died within five years. He shared his success in a paper published in The Forestry Chronicle in 2017.
In the Wildlands, Greene finds that if there’s too much sun exposure, the tall beech stumps will sprout and persist. That means high-stumping needs to be done in intervals, over time, leaving a canopy to shade the cut trees.
“It takes quite a while for an observable change to take place,” Greene said. “That’s why I’m going to try to live to be 175.”
The goal is to restore the forest to what it was — a healthy ecosystem. Every 10 years, the Wildlands collects data on cut stands and develops a “prescription” that could be a single or combination of forestry “treatments,” Greene said.
To date, the land trust has prescribed the high-stump treatment to 723 acres dominated by diseased beech.
But there is hope for the beech tree.
About 1 percent of beech trees appear to resist beech bark disease, and there are clusters of them in the Wildlands, Greene said. Their bark remains smooth, and they can grow to be much older than their diseased brethren.
In the Wildlands, these healthy trees are saved. Trees around them are sometimes cut down to give them space to grow — a forestry practice called “releasing.”
Beech trees are an important part of the Maine forest. They produce a nut crop that’s part of the diet of a variety of species, including the state’s iconic black bear. Sadly, beech bark disease reduces nut production, and can halt it entirely.
To combat that food loss and continue to diversify the forest, Greene has planted white oak and American chestnut trees. He also thinned thick spruce stands to encourage trees to grow larger. And he cut young trees out of 50-foot wide strips of forest to mimic more mature stands, where hawks and owls can easily fly under the canopy.
“All in all, it’s been the biggest challenge I’ve ever had to face as a forester,” Greene said.
While some forestry practices may appear ugly to hikers, they make sense when looked at through the lens of a forester who plans in decades. Healing a forest takes patience.
Last year, the Maine Tree Farm Program awarded Great Pond Mountain Conservation Trust as the year’s Outstanding Tree Farmer.
I’d say it was well deserved.
