Beech trees

[Old saw fixer]

     I have many small beech trees in my wood lot.  Are they worth releasing from competition as I work my TSI?  Improving mostly for wildlife habitat. 

[Ianab]

If you are managing for wildlife, then keep some of the beech. The seeds are an important food source for birds and animals. 

[SwampDonkey]

They are more shade tolerant than oak and maple. If they are healthy keep a few around. Up here they are all dying from beech bark disease. I have one in the back yard. It has had a couple crops of nuts, but it has the bark disease. I saw this partridge looking for nuts under it this fall, but it didn't have any this year. ;D



Beechnut bandits.

The beech nut bandits - YouTube

[Wudman]

    I have many small beech trees in my wood lot.  Are they worth releasing from competition as I work my TSI?  Improving mostly for wildlife habitat.  

When I'm laying out timber sales, I'll work around a beech to maintain it for wildlife (when laying out SMZs in plantation wood).  I maintain them on my personal stuff as well.  I like the aesthetics to go along with the wildlife benefit.  
Wudman

[Old saw fixer]

Thanks, your advice echoes my thoughts.  I have seen some huge beech along the property lines, I have many small ones in the understory. Will they respond well to removing the competition?

[peakbagger]

Sad to say but beech moved into my wood lot in northern NH after a large ice storm in 1998 before I bought it. It was mostly sugar maple but the beech regenerated quickly and shaded out most of the other tree types regeneration. Its loaded with beech bark disease. Some of the older trees from prior to the ice storm  have little or no disease but all the new stuff is not worth much except for firewood if I catch it before the rot moves in.  I will be doing TSI with focus on girdling the beech trees over 6" that have the disease (leaving the big mature ones) and cutting the smaller ones and then applying herbicide to the cuts. There evidence of TSI done prior to my ownership and there are plenty of 6" to 10" beeches with double girdle cuts that still having living crowns several year later.  

[SwampDonkey]

Beech is hard to kill, or control. Same with hop hornbeam. I've seen sugar bush thinned, removing all the hop hornbeam. That stuff came back with a vengeance like hazel thickets from the seed. Actually, hornbeam with grow up from the centre of a hazel nut clump. I remember running clearing saw, and all hazel has to be cut down. You'd have to be careful of the hornbeam, it was the only tree to leave. ;D I hate running a clearing saw in beeeeeeech, it will rip your clothes and hide off. :D

[Wudman]

Thanks, your advice echoes my thoughts.  I have seen some huge beech along the property lines, I have many small ones in the understory. Will they respond well to removing the competition?

Beech is among the most shade tolerant of species in our area.  I'm sure it will respond to the removal of competition, but if you are getting much light to the forest floor, red maple and sweetgum will occupy the spot.  Yellow poplar will pop up if there has been a seed in the area for the last 100 years.  Good luck.  When we get out of this Covid situation, I'd like to buy you some lunch sometime.  Good to have another neighbor.
Wudman

[KEC]

So I've read, when a beech is cut, lots of shoots grow out of the root system. Could explain a woods full of beech. Hophornbeam buds are eaten by the Ruffed Grouse. Historically beech logs have low value, though better grade lumber is marketable. Some areas near here had beech that was left by the high graders. Then later on, though not the highest grade trees, they got cut because, what they lacked in quality they made up for in scale. Beech is top-shelf heating wood.

[Don P]

There's an area on our place that was taken over with them. I thinned and herbicided the doghair thicket but have yet to get the big ones out. I like the looks of the tree but one or a few would be fine, I am not a fan of its takeover habit.

[SwampDonkey]

So I've read, when a beech is cut, lots of shoots grow out of the root system. Could explain a woods full of beech.

I was a on a 'course' held by a guy in New York, but in our NB beech-maple-ash-yellow birch woods. He said beech have that habit to do that down in upstate New York. I showed him in those woods we were in, that most all of them are seedlings from seed. You could dig the little small ones up and see the root system, not attached to the old tree roots.

I've seen sugar maple woods clearcut, there was 10 % yellow birch in it. Skidder logged. The regen was 90% yellow birch. :D Thinned it with clearing saws 12 years after the CC. But then again, seen sugar maple clear cut and 90% sugar maple regen to. You just never know. ;)

[Don P]

If I tried to pull one up there would be 2 acres of trees connected to it. :D
This stand is beech/black birch which is common here.

[DonW]

Makes great hedges if it's so prolific.

Plus yor can make axe handles with it. 

[KEC]

SD, note that I said that "I read that..." and it "may explain." I'm quite certain that I'd be happy to have a few cords of beech firewood.

[SwampDonkey]

Yep, completely understood that. Our beech is quite rotten. I saw a woodlot a few years back, it was being sold for farmland. They had cut out all the sugar maple over the years and left the beech. That beech was mostly dead or dying and full of rot. Woodpecker wood. Usually you get some good wood, but that was just trash.

[mudfarmer]

Yes, Northern New York.. beech... :D

It will stump sprout, it will seed sprout, it will root sprout. Some of the worst beech thickets I have seen are in skid trails where roots were exposed during harvest.

This is a real good watch: Control or Consequence: The Plague of American Beech - YouTube

Makes awesome firewood, makes awesome wildlife food/habitat but doesn't necessarily produce seed every year.

Nothing like listening to the wind blow through beech leaves in the late winter! When the leaves finally blow off in a rain storm I know spring is here.

What it looks like after 5years when you release the understory (NOT my harvest or land!!!) :D ;)

[KEC]

In the 1970's I worked for a Lumber Co. that bought a stand of timber that had a lot of beech that were straight, tall and hardly a blemish. When cut, they were all culvert pipes. Luckily it was within reasonable trucking distance to a Masonite Plant in Towanda Pa. where they had chippers that could chip some big stuff.

[SwampDonkey]

Results of years of firewood cutting. ;D Besides the big birch and the maple in the back ground overstory, she's solid understory beeeeeeeeeeeeech.



My uncle had another firewood lot. Nice overstory of maple, but so thick with beech under it you couldn't find the little sugar shack. :D :D

[KEC]

I wonder if a factor in the dense beech understory equation is the fact that deer rarely browse beech. (?)  SD, I'd hate to try hunting deer in that thick stuff.

[Greyhound]

Sounds just like my forest in S. Central PA.  Oak/Poplar with understory of beech, red maple, black gum and black birch.  I am working on thinning the understory to let some more oak/poplar get up.  

[SwampDonkey]

I wonder if a factor in the dense beech understory equation is the fact that deer rarely browse beech. (?)  SD, I'd hate to try hunting deer in that thick stuff.

And that opening in front of the birch was the road, my uncle made narrow roads, just wide enough for a pick up and it wasn't long before they were consumed. :D
Low deer numbers here, you see maybe 6 in a year on a good year. Use to be hundreds before they lost winter habitat from clear cutting. All you got to do is find where the deer are in winter, they are in under mature softwood cover up here, not out in 200 acre clear cuts. The mature forest is so fragmented that they have no escape in winter, but to follow riparian corridors where the predators know where to go looking. If you cage 10 deer and add some coyote or wolves, how many deer you got come spring time? Planners up here have a narrow view of what it takes for deer to survive the winter, it ain't just the cover and the food, they need wider spaces to escape the coyotes. Doesn't do much good to have 500 newborns when winter kills 495 of'm. Add to that lost adult deer. Can't be far off, because the deer ain't here no more. ;D

[KEC]

SD, OK, but suppose there was an area with overwintering deer and in a small part of it there was those thick young beech trees sprouting. Do you think those beech would thrive more because the deer left them alone ? I've seen woodlots here with zillions of tiny hard maple seedlings and they didn't grow into such a thick stand of saplings. Presumably (dangerous word) the deer factored in there as we have deer and they eat maple.

[mudfarmer]

SD, OK, but suppose there was an area with overwintering deer and in a small part of it there was those thick young beech trees sprouting. Do you think those beech would thrive more because the deer left them alone ? I've seen woodlots here with zillions of tiny hard maple seedlings and they didn't grow into such a thick stand of saplings. Presumably (dangerous word) the deer factored in there as we have deer and they eat maple.

Deer browse of non-beech leading to less species diversity and increased beech density is definitely something that foresters and land owners in this area discuss, and there is some good info about it in that video posted earlier as well.

[SwampDonkey]

I find they browse red maple heavy and hardly touch sugar maple. Sugar maple is very tough, and deer tear twigs like moose, they can't actually snip twigs off like hares. No, I've seen sugar maple as thick as can be, you'd have to swim through it, parting the stems as you go forward. :D But by the time it is 15 feet tall it is thinned out a lot naturally.

Probably what happened to them maple is like up this way, they had overstory removed and got sun scald to death. Those maples might be 30 years old and not even knee high.

The green around my feet here is sugar maples, the saplings behind are mostly beech. That is a real old sugar maple with my hand on it. ;) I believe this lot was used for firewood and it was public land, but now private.

[KEC]

What I've seen, hard maple is not at the top of the prefferred list for deer, though it's way above beech. I cut a limb off a hard maple  by my driveway this past late fall and left it there for the deer to eat the buds. It was not until the weather got a little rough that they ate most of, but not all of the buds. Had it been Red Maple they would have hit it sooner and cleaned their plate.

[Don P]

Eastern hophornbeam is another I wish was on their plate here. They seem to like the same trees I do.

[Ron Scott]

Retaining 2-4 beech trees/acre for wildlife mast and den trees should be part of your wildlife management plan if improving and maintaining wildlife habitat is one of your land management objectives.  

[Old saw fixer]

     Well, this turned into an interesting conversation!   I thank all for their contributions and advice.

[mainepatriot]

Like peakbagger my small woodlot in western Maine is getting overrun by Beech.  I have a love hate relationship with Beech, I love it for firewood as it seasons quickly if kept covered and burns hot but the gnarly branches and stubborn stumps make clearing around my homestead/woodlot a real pain.  The benefits to the wildlife are obvious too so I'd like to control them.  A fairly heavy cut 10 years ago has really increased the numbers and 90% of the trees over say 12" have bark disease.  I'm just starting to research my options of which none sound too good.  Red Oak, Ash, Sugar Maple and Birch do well here so I'm interested in them growing them for saw logs.  
It's interesting to me that Hornbeam is a problem for some.  I have it on my land in very small numbers.  I have to look for it.  I know where they are when I need one for a project where I need a solid pole.

[HemlockKing]

So I've read, when a beech is cut, lots of shoots grow out of the root system. Could explain a woods full of beech.

I was a on a 'course' held by a guy in New York, but in our NB beech-maple-ash-yellow birch woods. He said beech have that habit to do that down in upstate New York. I showed him in those woods we were in, that most all of them are seedlings from seed. You could dig the little small ones up and see the root system, not attached to the old tree roots.

I've seen sugar maple woods clearcut, there was 10 % yellow birch in it. Skidder logged. The regen was 90% yellow birch. :D Thinned it with clearing saws 12 years after the CC. But then again, seen sugar maple clear cut and 90% sugar maple regen to. You just never know. ;)

Just curious SD is it common in your area for the red spruce to sprout 2-3 trees from the same root system? I notice when a spruce has multiple trees on one root system it's 90% a red spruce, and if the main one dies, a bunch of others rise up from the same system, they seldomly grow straight trunks out of the ground, always a slight bend/curve to them.

[peakbagger]

Like peakbagger my small woodlot in western Maine is getting overrun by Beech.  I have a love hate relationship with Beech, I love it for firewood as it seasons quickly if kept covered and burns hot but the gnarly branches and stubborn stumps make clearing around my homestead/woodlot a real pain.  The benefits to the wildlife are obvious too so I'd like to control them.  A fairly heavy cut 10 years ago has really increased the numbers and 90% of the trees over say 12" have bark disease.  I'm just starting to research my options of which none sound too good.  Red Oak, Ash, Sugar Maple and Birch do well here so I'm interested in them growing them for saw logs.  
It's interesting to me that Hornbeam is a problem for some.  I have it on my land in very small numbers.  I have to look for it.  I know where they are when I need one for a project where I need a solid pole.

Same with me. I have some Eastern Hophornbeam in spots, mostly rocky slopes but its always just minor component. 

[SwampDonkey]

Just curious SD is it common in your area for the red spruce to sprout 2-3 trees from the same root system? I notice when a spruce has multiple trees on one root system it's 90% a red spruce, and if the main one dies, a bunch of others rise up from the same system, they seldomly grow straight trunks out of the ground, always a slight bend/curve to them.

Snow shoe hare browse for the multi stems and snow load for the bending over.

I looked after a harvest on a town lot some years ago. It was a water reserve for the town for ever, so was never cut. The red spruce were as big as pine and the rock maple was up to 45". The regen was red spruce under the maples, no balsam fir except in the gullies.

Some birdseye maple, but too much heartwood and the eyes never went deep. The birdseye buyer wasn't interested, so it got ground up at the pulp mill. If it were me I would have bought the logs, but not prime rate. There wold be a lot of good jacket wood before you got near the heartwood. Some folks want perfect logs. Up here they are scarce, so have at it. Salute! :D

Only red spruce I have, i hand planted. My ground was white spruce ground before I planted a lot of black spruce. I have planted a few whites after I seen spots that black spruce didn't take to. I lost a lot to hares I think.

[KEC]

SD, Just curious, how would you rate hares as table fare ?

[Rhodemont]

I find the Beech good for wildlife and aesthetics but invasive in my forest.  Nothing besides it's own suckers grow under the mature beech so it opens up areas from filling in with sweet pepper and briar.  But, when a neighboring canopy tree is cut and more sun gets to the ground the root sprouts come up like weeds.  If I do not cut them back within a year or two the area becomes a thicket of saplings.  I have not taken any big beech down but have milled some medium size into boards and like it for firewood.

[SwampDonkey]

SD, Just curious, how would you rate hares as table fare ?

Hare stew is good eat'n. Mom's aunt liked it the time she made it and never told anyone. There was a few blessed redeemers uttered. :D :D