A little brush...

Tillaway · September 06, 2002, 03:50:15 PM

Poor Don... or poor me. We had two units comprising about 425 acres that looked like this and worse.

I was hanging the flagging and packing a big GPS through this. Don was painting and tagging the boundary. This is a boundary to a RHCA (Resource Habitat Coservation Area). Until I had finished the unit traverses with the GPS, Don was measuring these (150' slope corrected) with a tape. You had to litterally crawl the whole day.

woodman · September 06, 2002, 09:02:36 PM

No thank you . ;D

Ron Scott · September 07, 2002, 10:32:26 AM

This is when a forester appreciates open stands. It looks like it would make a good burn though.

Tillaway · September 07, 2002, 12:01:39 PM

Ron

We had long discussions on how to burn these. This stuff (Tanoak) is hard to get burning but when it does... look out. It burns way too hot. If you burn it too cool you just kill it and it leaves increased fuel loading and you are worse off than before. We assumed they (FS) would masticate first, then burn. We found out that they had no plans to do this so they will get either a too hot or cool burn unless they get really lucky.

By the way, there are trees out there, it is just that the brush is so thick you can't see them. Really big ones like 60" plus Sugar Pine and Doug Fir. This is what grows under "old growth".

Ron Scott · September 08, 2002, 07:17:33 AM

How's the wildlife use in such stands?

Tillaway · September 08, 2002, 04:47:48 PM

Wildlife? Almost nonexistent. The only mammals present are some squirrels (some unfortunate Foresters) and some bear sign in the thinner (brush) areas. Deer, large and small carnivors and basically everthing else you can think of are not present in these stands. They are nearly devoid of animal life. In this case the crown closure was not enough for Spotted Owls to use for nesting habitat although there were plenty of suitable trees available. Basically these stands are devoid of forage, or a prey base for the carnivors. There were some Raptors present, but nothing out of the ordinary.

This unit is classified as spotted owl habitat though. This is because because of the size of trees present. If more than 10% (basal area, crown cover?... no one could tell us) of the stand is comprised of large >24'' trees and is a two storied stand, then it is spotted owl habitat. Or if the QMD is >24" and is larger than two acres then it is spotted owl habitat (this unit met either criteria). Basically this description applys to approximately 80% of the stands on the Plumas National Forest. We were restricted to cutting only trees =<12" dbh in these stands.