young red pines plastered down to ground by heavy snow

[wisconsitom]

So yes, storm about two weeks back consisted of perhaps 15 inches of heavy wet snow.  I'm finding young red pines (mostly), perhaps 4 to 5 feet tall, stuck right down to the ground such that in many cases one hardly sees them, buried in the snow as they are.  We're kicking around and freeing them up, carefully shaking off crusty icey snow, of course, but it is surprising to find so many of them already this year.  At my site, wind is able to get a good fetch going from north, with farm field there.  Our snow storms usually feature strong NE winds, and this one did for sure.  So there's that, and maybe with rapid cool-down this fall, trees aren't quite stiffened up yet for winter...I don't know?

But we're sure having to "rescue" a lot of red pines.  And a few spruce two.  That area is in the bull's eye for some ice this weekend, but then soaking rain to follow (with more snow after that of course!), so maybe they'll all work lose anyway.  But again, more stuff plastered down than usual.  We're in there raising up spruce, pine and larch, as well as repairing any damaged, doubled tops, etc. as we go along.

[barbender]

I've heard, I have no way to know if it's true, that red pine seedlings and saplings can be laid flat by the snow and stand back up in the spring. I have seen firsthand where pine had been bent over by snow, and the landowner stood all of them back up as you described. We got to thin it 30 or so years later. Almost every butt log, and sometimes the second stick, was bent and had to go in the pulp pile. So a stand that should've been 40/60 bolts/pulp was 20/80 instead. It may not have changed anything if he had let them be, but I suspect it would've been better if they had stayed flat under the snow.

[wisconsitom]

Yeah, good thing it's the minority of stems affected.  We won't even necessarily get to all of them before more snow buries them or ice glues them tight!  But we've done a few.  It's a pain to do and seems like a lot but most red pines are doing great, standing tall, and well beyond this size class that seemed to be somewhat vulnerable.

[Clark]

It is odd how certain trees can take a beating from the snow (birch) and show no ill-effects the next year. The pines seem to be difficult to predict in their reaction to snow-loading events. I've often wondered if red pine, when they are young and have a majority of their trunk and limbs still bearing needles, are more vulnerable to snow than several years later when there is more bare trunk and limbs?

You bring up a good point barbender. These events can last the life of the tree. I know of one stand of red pine, mostly gone now, that is about 100 years old and there are some trees that had a similar event happen in their young life. Over 80 acres there were about a dozen trees that had the exact same sweep starting near the ground and extending upward 10-12 feet where the tree grew nice and straight again. I would have thought the trees would have "corrected" themselves faster which makes me scratch my head how it happened.

Clark

[wisconsitom]

I tend to think of the wood, even in a young red pine, as being stiffer than that in white pine.  Yet we are finding no white pines blown sideways like these reds.  A few straggler Norway spruce are also being buried but these are trees of obviously slower initial growth and are little bitty things yet.  Any spruce that are 4 or 5 feet tall are not having this issue.

Because this site is 58 miles from my home and my work there is episodic, I'm not necessarily going to get every one of the buried trees.  In fact, more snow and ice today, tonight and tomorrow may mean we've already got to any we're going to be able to get to.  We'll very likely be able to make comparisons between trees we've freed up from their snowy, crusty tombs, and those we never got to.

Even though I've described this as "many" red pines, it is in fact a tiny percentage of our total red pine stock.

[barbender]

Tom, my experience is that red pine is stronger, yet more limber. White pine= stiff and brittle.