Herbaceous Forest Openings for Wildlife

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- Hi, Sanford Smith here with Penn State Extension.

Today I'm joined by Brent Harding, and he's the director of Penn State's Forest Lands Management Office, and we're gonna talk about forest land openings, openings created for wildlife.

Brent, can you tell us a little bit about those?

- Absolutely.

What we use herbaceous openings for is to not only create vertical diversity, but also structural diversity in our forests, and there's many benefits to both game and non-game species, is also additional benefits to the forest landowner in maintaining these herbaceous openings.

- Brent, what kind of wildlife use these openings?

- [Brent] Turkeys do use these openings a lot.

Small mammals will utilize these openings.

When you have the small mammals, the snakes follow.

For the turkeys, primarily they're poults because of the vast amount of insects that populate these herbaceous openings.

And then also non-game bird species, they'll use it for nesting, and then when those smaller birds occupy these sites, the larger birds of prey will come into these sites and predate off of those smaller ones.

- And I understand, Brent, that it's really the insects that are the big type of food that are produced in these openings.

- [Brent] That's right.

The insects really benefit from these herbaceous openings.

They feed on the leaf material.

They can also feed on some of the larvae that are in the stems of these herbaceous plants.

And then again, the bird species really benefit from all those insects.

- So what kind of maintenance is required to have an opening?

- [Brent] Well, these ones, we mow them annually.

You could actually stretch that out to two years in between your mowings.

Our main objective in these herbaceous openings, we just simply don't want to have woody vegetation become established.

And that woody vegetation could be both native, so desirable trees that grow here in Pennsylvania or shrubs that grow in Pennsylvania, or also we wanna keep out the undesirable tree and shrub species.

So your autumn olives, your multiflora rose, your various honeysuckles.

- And those undesirable things are invasive non-native species that have come in, right?

- That's right.

When you have an open area that has a lot of sunlight and has disturbed soil, that's an excellent recipe for having invasive vegetation want to become dominant.

- [Sanford] So you can see here in the video we're showing one of the mowing jobs that went on here and it's using a brush hog.

Of course you can do this with a hand-pushed mower or something pulled by a tractor like an old-time brush hog.

Is there any other ways that people do this?

- You certainly have some other ways.

One could potentially be prescribed fire.

It's not all that common in Pennsylvania, but that is an option.

Mowing is the primarily way that we approach this with a larger skid-steer with a brush hog attached to it because of the sheer volume of the mowing that we need to have occur.

But you could certainly do this with an industrial brush cutter.

You could do it by hand.

It's very labor intensive, but if you're a small forest landowner, your opening may not be that large.

Typically, the size of these openings that we're dealing with are under half acre in size, primarily because they originate from a log landing.

And in Pennsylvania, typically our log landings don't really need to be much more than half an acre in size.

- Yeah, and you can see in the video here that we're using an industrial brush cutter, you might say, but it has cutting attachments that are more for herbaceous vegetation, not just woody vegetation.

Is that right?

- That's correct, and they do a great job.

They're very efficient.

They create a vertical layer of material that's still capable of growing for the remainder of the growing season.

When we're mowing these once a year it's usually late in July, sometimes in August, and that's outside the primary nesting season for most wildlife, so at this point in the growing season, birds may have come into these herbaceous openings.

They may have established nests, they may have had young in these particular herbaceous openings, but they've now fledged and they've left the nest.

So when we come in here and mow we're not displacing anything.

If a white-tailed deer had been utilizing this, a doe had been utilizing this with her fawns, they're now mature enough that they can get up and run away when we're starting to mow this, so late July mowing into early August, and we still have enough time in the growing season to see a response where this vegetation will grow back up, it'll green up, and it'll still give some of that benefit to wildlife going into the dormant season.

- Yeah, and some of it I understand produces seeds so that you actually have a little feed in that way for wildlife in addition to the insects that use these areas.

I wanna ask you one other question.

It's about the suitability of these types of openings in different areas.

In other words, if you have farms and such around your forest land, is this a good thing to have, or is it better to have all forest around the area?

- Well, if you've got a lot of active agriculture next to your forest, these wildlife openings, these herbaceous openings aren't necessarily as critical.

When you have a very unfragmented forest, these wildlife openings are a really nice location for that diversity, again, both vertically and also structurally.

But we certainly encourage forest landowners to maintain their openings.

Maybe they had a timber harvest operation.

Maybe they had an old abandoned home site on their particular property.

It's certainly worthwhile to spend the amount of time once a year.

It's relatively minor as far as a labor requirement to maintain these.

And it also gives you an opportunity for recreation.

Quite often this is where you're gonna see the game and non-game species.

You're also gonna see your butterflies tend to visit these herbaceous openings quite often.

And also the access points, the skid trails or the haul roads, if it was affiliated with a timber sale, that approach these herbaceous openings, it's a great idea to maintain those as well because that's another excellent spot to locate wildlife or insects.

- Brent, you and I were talking earlier about the fact that there are other type of openings that people create.

One might be called a successional opening where you have a lot of woody vegetation, but another opening that some people are interested in are food plots.

Can you contrast these herbaceous, these tender plant kind of openings versus those?

- Yeah, our herbaceous openings are dominated by your grasses and forbs, both native and non-native.

And the contrast or the comparison to an established food plot is a food plot you're really establishing one particular type of vegetation, and it's primarily for a targeted species of animal.

In these herbaceous openings, we're looking at diversity.

There's a lot of different plant life that occupies these openings, and there's also a lot of different wildlife and insects that utilize these openings.

So we're not creating food plots.

Food plots are very labor intensive.

It requires a significant more amount of maintenance than what we would actually see in these herbaceous openings.

When we establish these herbaceous openings at the conclusion of a timber sale, we're making a recommendation on a seed mixture based off available soil moisture, sunlight conditions, and also the soil composition.

We purchase that seed, it's distributed, it's just broadcast onto the disturbed soil.

We may add a little bit of lime and fertilizer.

Then it's free to grow until we come in and mow the following year.

Much less labor-intensive than what the food plot is.

- Yeah.

Thank you very much, Brent, for telling us about herbaceous openings today and their importance for wildlife.

And thank you folks for listening.