Testing new methods of stewardship

Not too many years back, if you wanted to locate a timber logging operation, all you had to do was listen. The angry buzzing of power saws and the screeching steel tracks of bulldozers skidding logs through the forest could be heard a half-mile away. Not anymore.

The Forest Service's 346-acre "Green Thin Stewardship Project," adjacent to the Deschutes Land Trust's Metolius Preserve, 10 miles north of Sisters, is an example of "softer" logging practices.

What you hear now is purring diesel engines powering such machines as "harvesters" and "forwarders." These quiet, rubber-tracked and rubber-tired machines of Swedish design, manufactured by John Deere & Company, are the newest and most environmentally friendly equipment in timber falling and skidding.

Forwarders don't "skid" logs and tear up the ground; they haul them.

Even the operator of the "Timberjack" harvester is of a new breed. For years, the Forest Service has spent thousands of dollars sending marking crews into timber sales to apply a slash of blue paint to tree trunks and the base of trees destined to become lumber or chipped.

Although the Green Thin Stewardship project was marked, the contractor may be told what prescription the Forest Service is looking for: what density, height, basal area and size of trees they want left; how many dead trees for wildfire; what trees should be left to prevent erosion. Then, they leave it up to the contractor to make his choices.

The Forest Service is also acutely aware of what could happen if they do not monitor their contractors closely. In the late '80s Layton & Bartlett, a logging operation working on National Forests across Oregon and on the Sisters District, was stealing trees partly because the Forest Service wasn't monitoring the operations intensively enough to catch what the contractor was doing. The owners went to jail, but thousands of old-growth trees they got away with illegally are still gone.

In spite of the possibility of something going wrong, Brian Tandy, Sisters Ranger District Silviculturist, believes the district can keep control.

Tandy says that allowing the contractor to remove the designated vegetation and trees without marking - and with careful monitoring - will save thousands of dollars in Forest Service administrative costs and paint.

Monty Gregg, Sisters Ranger District wildlife biologist, has been monitoring the White-headed Woodpecker population of the Green Thin area. He believes that by thinning the area and releasing the growth of larger trees, it will become more desirable nesting habitat - especially since there are snags left over from a tree-blasting project from the mid '90s designed to create snags for cavity-nesting species.

He is also confident that secondary nesters that use abandoned woodpecker cavities, such as Flammulated Owls, will eventually move in.

Green Thin Stewardship is an exciting project for the Forest Service. In addition to heralding new logging techniques, tree-marking methods and other money-saving concepts, such as sorting logs for lumber and chipping, there is also a new method of handling "slash," the organic debris left after a logging operation.

Logs hauled to the landing that are less than eight inches are sorted out and will be ground up for biomass fuel or chipped for other wood products. Logs that measure from eight to 16 inches are hauled by log trucks to Gilchrist for lumber. No tree will be removed from the project area that is over 16 inches in diameter, except white fir, which can be up to 25 inches.

The project area is made up of mostly second-growth Ponderosa pine and white fir. The preferred method of managing the Green Thin site is to thin from below the overstory, take out shrubs and smaller trees that compete for nutrients, sunlight and water, release bigger trees for a healthier forest capable of withstanding severe damages from wildlife, drought and insects.

Timberjack forwarders, equipped with rubber tires covered with rubber tracks, are used to haul logs to the "landing" where they are sorted. The same machines also bring slash to a central area where a diesel-powered "shovel" with a clamshell bucket stacks it into a huge pile.

When all the slash has been gathered into huge piles of up to 800 or more tons, a machine will be brought in to chip the debris into "hog fuel" that will be used to fuel a biomass steam generator and make electricity.

Rubber coated tracks and wide tires have proved to be a boon for soil conditions where in the past raw, steel caterpillar tracks tore up the forest floor and left deep gashes that allowed disease into trees left standing for the future.

If the Green Thin Stewardship project lives up to the expectations and goals set by soils, wildlife and silviculture managers, as well as to timber-marking standards - and still makes money for the contractors and Forest Service - it may become a new concept in logging and management of a forest toward achieving ecosystem standards.