Logging silver maple and cottonwood

[Good Feller]

I'm not real familiar with bottomland forests here in Iowa.  My neck of the woods was always the upland (oak/hickory).  What are some pointers for maple and cottonwood?  What's the minimum dbh you'd mark for harvest?  I did get a forester to tell me he just uses a biltmore stick when measuring them because it's faster than using a d tape. 
I've never even cut a maple or cottonwood.  Unfamiliar territory for me. 

[timberfaller390]

First place to start is getting spec sheets from all the local mills and log buyers, that will tell you minium diameters they will accept and should list all species they want.

[Ron Wenrich]

The only problem you're going to run into here on the forum is that everyone deals in a lot of different species.  I have seen only a few silver maples and even fewer cottonwoods.

Cottonwood would be considered a low grade species in my area.  The only market we would have is for pallet and low grade.  Silver maple falls into the soft maple classification, but I've seen buyers who will not buy silver maple.  I don't think it matches up too well with red maple.  Silver maple can be cut into ties, cottonwood can't.

Are you looking for management advice or marking advice?  I can't help you on the management aspect of those two species.

As for marking, I always use a d-tape.  Biltmore sticks are only as good as the user.  I know of one guy who was consistently 1 to 2 diameter classes off and his sales were way overscaled.  If you overscale your sales, you'll be out of business in short order.  Accuracy will give you a better sale and a better reputation. 

Each area of the country has different specs that can be worked up.  We don't have much use for pulpwood, so most guys won't fool with it.  Firewood workers can often come in after the sawlogs are cut off.  Our minimum dbh for sawtimber is 12", but many guys have moved on to 14" and leave the 12". 

Your bid sheet should have your sale divided up by species and diameter class.  I always use a 2" dbh class.  I've seen some at 1", but that seems to be a lot of work.  I also put volumes in both Doyle and International scales.  They are both used in our area.  Scribner can also be used, but it is dependent on local markets.

One thing to remember about scaling hardwoods is that after a crotch, that volume is generally lost in felling.  There are some exceptions, but many times that breaks up.  Don't put limbwood in your volume estimate.  Too many scalers have never felled a tree and count unusable material as merchantable volume.

I don't know if this answers any of your questions, but keep on posting so we can help you through. 

[Kansas]

I dont know if the cottonwood and soft maple in iowa is comparable to kansas. We log a lot of it along the river, mostly cottonwood, but we also run into some maple there. For the most part, quality is good. We generally dont take anything that isnt at least 18 inches dbh on cottonwood. What we are trying to establish is having a number of timbers within close range of the sawmill that we can log every 10-15 years. Be careful of bigger ones-once they get up around 36 inches in diameter or more, a lot of those have internal problems. Also you occasionally get into pockets of cottonwood that have a fair amount of shake. Again, I dont know how cottonwood there compares to here. I would think there would be pallet mills there glad to buy cottonwood. It has been my experience that you can get as good or better money for pallet out of cottonwood than grade.
Maple is a different story. Good maple traditionally can bring good money per board foot. You would want to talk to a grade mill or two in the area. They most likely know the quality  thats there, and the current market for it. Worm can be a problem although at times thats actually a specialty market. I would start by talking to the local mills. With the price of fuel, you just cant haul cottonwood long distances. If you dont have a local market, you probably wont have one at all.