Young Forest Habitat Improvement for Wildlife

- Hi, Sanford Smith here with Penn State Extension.

Today I'm joined by Dan Hagen installer, and he's an Assistant Regional Forester with the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

His job is really to enhance forest lands for wildlife as well as many other things.

But some of the things that he gets involved in doing are creating small gap openings and little stand improvement projects on young forest stands.

Now we've talked about young forest before and how important they are to wildlife, and sometimes Dan and his crew and people in the game commission can actually go and improve those young stands in a few little ways for the future.

So Dan, can you tell us about this work here?

We're gonna talk first about the gap type openings that you create in young forests.

- We've got a lot of stands that are in this 10 to 15 or 10 to 20 years old post-harvest.

So they've been regenerated successfully.

We've got a lot of young trees, and they're kind of moving outta that real valuable brushy habitat stage into this more kind of dense, dark stage.

And although there's still good habitat for a lot of species, we're thinking always about how can we intervene to improve a stand at this stage for better wildlife habitat?

- Yeah, right.

Being the habitat that you're viewing here on the video is the habitat that Dan went in and demonstrated to us how to thin it down a little bit and create this gap.

And I say thin it down actually the gap has no trees left standing in it.

As you can see in the video, it was a brush saw that was used in a chainsaw.

Is that typically the way people do this work?

- That mostly what we've seen folks do, and our aim in here is to kind of jumpstart or reinvigorate some of the functions of those young forest stands.

Like browse, woody cover, dense shrubbiness that you start to lose as the canopy closes at, you know, age 10 to 15.

- Right.

So when you say young forest, you mean basically you've said it back to a beginning forest, right?

- That's right.

- A newly regenerating forest here as the sprouts and come back up from the stumps and seeds germinated in the soil.

Okay, so Dan, that's the gap treatment that you're talking about creating a small gap in a young forest.

What about the other treatment that we were talking about, which sometimes I'll call crop tree selection, where you go and you select some really nice trees that you want to favor, and that's usually for timber production that I'm looking at it for.

But you were looking at it in terms of wildlife, and we did that in this area, and you'll see that here in the video as well.

- That's right, so we often are coupling this gap creation treatment with traditional crop tree.

So traditional in the sense that you're picking that nice tree, giving it a good release by cutting its competitors.

Here we're looking for really anything that can add diversity to the stand, even if it's not gonna be a great timber species later.

So for example, some of the trees we looked at picking in here were cucumber magnolia, yellow poplar, even a black gum potentially, which, you know, not a great timber species, but actually can be a important wildlife species because it makes soft mass, bears love them, turkeys love them.

So, you know, we even opened up around one of those, and certainly anytime we're finding an oak hickory, we would be choosing those trees because of their value for hard mass production.

- Right.

I'm reminded of the term daylighting.

So you essentially have cleared away, you allowed the daylight to come down on that tree on all sides, on all four sides.

Was there any additional kind of space that you created around those trees?

- Yeah, we're in these really young stands, what we've found is they're just growing so fast that if you're doing a more traditional crop tree, just giving 'em that kind of crown touching release they call it all around, we've come back a few years later and found that it's really already started to close in.

So in these younger stands, sometimes we're looking out for that kind of next competitor.

that's gonna be out there.

One maybe one tree out.

And also cutting that one to make sure we've bought ourselves a little bit more time because what we're really after is both making that tree bigger, grow faster, healthier, but also just ensure that it's gonna survive another 10 years.

'Cause there's a lot of competition in a stand of this age.

- Right, right. It's fascinating.

It's something that any landowner can do, private landowner, forest landowner, something that other people should know about that you can actually improve wildlife habitat in very simple ways by creating a gap like we were talking about, or by favoring some trees that are special for wildlife that are food producers, or cover producers like cavities and things like that.

So it's all great for wildlife.

Well thank you very much Dan for joining me today and thank you folks for listening.