It’s not every day that the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests has an opportunity to visit a Forest Society Reservation in the center of their own hometown. The Emma Gipson Forest provided the perfect learning opportunity on a warm May morning to walk in the woods and learn how the society manages forests for wood products and for wildlife.
“We are grateful to the teachers and administration at Greenfield Elementary School and to the students for their enthusiasm and willingness to learn about a timber harvest taking place right in their own backyard,” said Gabe Roxby, filed forester for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
Behind Stephenson Memorial Library is the forest society’s 18-acre Emma Gipson Forest. Students in third- and fourth-grade classes were given the opportunity to meet Roxby and Dave Anderson, senior education director for the society, for a walking tour of the recent timber harvest of white pine by logging contractors D.H. Hardwick and Sons.
Students wasted no time after introductions in heading for the stone wall at the edge of the woods. The goal of the tour was to ask students about what they saw and what they knew about why the forest society was cutting some of the trees down.
“We hoped to open a conversation about forests, wildlife, cutting trees, growing trees, and how to age trees by counting annual rings on a cut log or stump,” Roxby stated. “Before the field trip, I sent the teachers a link to a video of me reading the book Why Would Anyone Cut a Tree Down? to my own kids. When I asked them this same question in the woods, many gave great answers.”
Some of the students talked about allowing more sunlight to reach the forest floor or using wood for lumber or firewood. One student talked about creating opportunities to let younger trees grow.
The society shared their knowledge with the children about standing dead trees as homes for wildlife. The loggers created a few smaller piles of unmerchantable logs to decompose slowly and provide habitat for ants, beetles and wood-boring insects as food for foraging mammals and birds, and wood and brush piles to function as potential den sites for smaller mammals, including mice, voles, chipmunks and squirrels as prey for larger predators.
The forest society talked about red pine trees used by bears as scent-marking posts, as well as red oak trees with pink flagging ribbons tied on them, the crop trees to be protected during logging and released to grow into the new sunlight reaching the understory due to the white pine thinning operation. Red oaks and white oaks provide valuable lumber but also acorns for local wildlife.
The thinning left stumps, and one was smooth-cut with a chainsaw by foresters for the tour with the rings marked in increments. Students looked at tree rings and learned how they are formed annually during both spring and summer growing seasons. Roxby shared that the ring count had totaled 115 years of annual growth. Cut in 2022, the white pines began growing on what was likely a former pasture ringed with stone walls in 1907.
Most of the timber volume being cut at the Gipson Forest harvest is white pine sawlogs and some chipping of smaller diameter tops and lower-quality wood. Roxby pointed out where trees were cut and removed and where remaining trees were left to grow for a future timber harvest on the same tract. The Greenfield Elementary students and their teachers hiked along the top of the hill while looking at growing trees and identifying species confers, including white pine and red pine in the overstory and white birch, red oak, and beech in the hardwood understory.
The forest society talked about balancing the impacts of removing trees with heavy machinery on the single site with the goal to create new openings of young forest growing within the surrounding woodland. The longer-term goal is to create a healthy, vigorous growing forest with layers of vegetation and sunlight reaching young saplings and stimulating growth of ferns or berry producing shrubs or stimulating growth of oaks for acorns as food for wildlife.
“Bringing 33 enthusiastic youngsters into the woods was quite the experience. They were engaged and full of questions. Some students were very familiar with forestry and logging and some others were not. A few had some reservations about cutting trees, and we tried to address those questions as we talked about the long-term health of our forests,” stated Roxby.