News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon

Wood-cuttin'

Every time I fire up my wood stove or head out to the woodshed for a wheelbarrow-load of wood, I go back to when I was about 11 or 12, wood-cutting with my uncles in Hubbard's Woods. It was during the Great Depression when I was living on what my grandfather called "Rockefeller Farm" on Jones Hill Road in West Haven, Connecticut.

We'd haul firewood out of the old hardwood forest for our beast of a furnace on a big stone-boat pulled by our old tobacco farm horse. When we went wood-cutting, it was an all-day job. Big, old-growth oak was the wood of choice, which required bucking into blocks with an ancient, two-man crosscut saw, then splitting the blocks with sledge hammers pounding on big steel wedges.

I was too puny to do any of the splitting, but my uncles put me on the end of that big old crosscut and wouldn't let me off until I was about to die. Yes, I did my part; I helped file the teeth and set them, to ensure the old crosscut was hungry and cut fast. When Uncle Harry pulled that big old crosscut through the tree, I did my best to haul it back, but I could always tell when I was pooped out: He'd shout, "I don't mind you ridin' that thing, Catsfur, but you gotta' quit draggin' your feet!"

Every once in a while we'd cut through an old lead ball, left behind from Revolutionary and the War of 1812 times. Uncle Ben would save the block and count the rings before it was split into firewood, to determine when the ball was shot into the tree, and then the fabulous history lessons would follow.

It was during the splitting process that Uncle Ben also gave me my first lessons in entomology. Often, finger-sized wood-boring beetle larvae would fall from the split pieces of sassafras, elm and oak. I was hooked. Like the big orb-weaver writing spiders I learned to love, so I came to admire wood-boring insects, and especially the miraculous story of metamorphosis my uncle presented, from egg to worm to beetle.

I delight in burning wood to keep my home warm: memories and the added enjoyment of watching who and what falls out as I put the split piece in the wheel-barrow and hauling it to the house - along with the beautiful spiders that end up in my bathtub.

When I'm burning mixed conifer, wood-boring beetles seem to be most abundant insects that fall out the firewood, and among them flat-headed borer which - through the same miracle of metamorphosis - become the metallic wood-burrowing beetle at maturity.

Wood-boring beetle families usually get their start from fire. A fire in the forest is one of the most wonderful things that can happen for the welfare of woodpeckers and the smaller competitors know as gleaners: nuthatches, chickadees and the like who dine on wood-boring insects.

Adult wood-boring beetles go berserk when they sense smoke in the air. The urge to reproduce takes over and they go on a sex-frenzy, following the smoke to its source.

As soon as - and at times even before - the trees cool off, the process of rotting begins. That makes the burned tree perfect substrate for food for juvenile beetles that hatch from eggs laid into and under the bark.

One of the most abundant and showy beetles to utilize our forests are the "jewel beetles," aka metallic wood-boring beetles; the Buprestidae; pronounced, bew-press-ta-dee. The elytra (hard covering on the beetle's back) is metallic green, red, orange, brown and other hues. In India, Thailand, Japan and other Asian areas these beetles are used as living jewelry, and highly prized by insect collectors worldwide.

The larvae hatch and immediately begin chewing rotting wood which, with the chemicals they contain, make up the perfect food. It's those hundreds of beetle larva growing inside the rotting wood that also bring woodpeckers and shrews by the hundreds.

White-headed, black-backed woodpeckers and other wood blasters will be hammering away on the tree, digging out beetle larvae. Eventually, if the tree is of the correct texture, and there's a need for a home, the woodpecker(s) will excavate a nesting cavity. When the original builder is through raising babies, these will be used - year after year - for nesting by nuthatches, chickadees, swallows, small owls and several other smaller birds.

In summer, migrating bats will also use the cavities for day-roosts, and in winter adult mourning cloak and brush-footed butterflies will hibernate in them.

Unfortunately, most of the larvae living in firewood never have the opportunity to make it to their adult lives. The big pine borers, for example, can take up to five years to make it from egg to larva to adult, and not many people's firewood supplies last that long.

Sometimes there are surprises that drop out of a piece of firewood. If that should happen to you someday and you don't know who you're looking at, please take a moment and place it into a container and give me a call, (541-480-3728) or just send me an email: [email protected], and we'll have a good chinwag about your discovery.

Stay warm, have a great winter and Happy Holidays...

 

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