Jerusalem Skyline Forest

Helping songbirds through forest management

When Caitlin began managing the property in 2015, she reached out to Audubon Vermont to look at the quality of the bird habitat. They said the understory layer of the woods—vegetation that is up to 5’ tall along with standing dead trees and trees with cavities—could be increased so as to provide better breeding habitat for songbird species. The population of many songbirds are declining at alarming rates.

Here is a photo showing a lack of “understory” vegetation and downed wood.

Caitlin incorporated Audubon’s recommendations into her plan for the woods. She marked the trees for harvest with birds in mind. But there were other pressing environmental issues the forest could help address, so she considered those too.

Forest management and climate change

Climate change means not just higher temperatures but also a longer growing season, more powerful storms, and more periods of drought. All this disruption is welcoming to invasive plants and pests and diseases that affect trees.

Caitlin’s approach was to make the forest more diverse and more adaptable. As she marked trees for harvest, she considered increasing the varieties of tree types and age-ranges.

Mimicking nature's changes in the forest

Sugar maples make up half of the trees on the land, so she decided to cut mature or diseased or defective individual trees or small groups of trees and a handful of larger groups of trees. These openings mimic the results of strong windstorms and create sunny spaces of different sizes to encourage a variety of species.

The small openings favor maples and beech, which tend to be more shade tolerant.

Five larger areas—ranging from a quarter to three-quarters of an acre—were also cut (see photo). It might look extreme, but these large openings favor species like aspen, white ash, white birch and yellow birch that need more sun.

Designing logging for birds and regrowth of young trees

Kyle Pratt of KJ Pratt Logging and his two employees, Josh and Tom did the harvesting.

They cut the trees with a chainsaw and then brought them to the main skid trail with a bulldozer. Kyle then picked the trees up with this grapple skidder and dragged them to the landing.

Caitlin asked the loggers not to cut up the tree tops but to leave them as intact as possible. This will hopefully protect some of the young trees from getting eaten by deer. It will also provide cover and nesting sites for songbirds like veeries, ovenbirds, and wood thrushes that nest and/or feed near the ground.

Messiness for a healthy forest

Wood left on the ground also provides important habitat for many other animals, including forest-dwelling amphibians, and is important for the retention and cycling of nutrients in the forest.

This work resulted in a timber sale

The pulpwood was sold to International Paper’s Ticonderoga, NY mill as part of the Woods Wildlife and Warblers pilot project done in partnership with Audubon Vermont, American Forest Foundation, Vermont Woodlands Association, and others.

Leaving "legacy trees"

Caitlin also left many large “legacy trees” that we’ll never cut. When they die, they will become part of the soil carbon pool. Here is an elegant sugar maple tree, one of the “elders”. It and many others will be left to live out their full tree lives. They are our legacy—what we left and didn’t take.

Testing assisted migration in response to climate change

We’re also testing “assisted migration.” In the future, Vermont’s woods will have more types of trees that are now commonly found to the south.

Caitlin planted 150 red oaks in the two largest openings created by the harvest. There’s no red oak currently on the land but it’s more common in southern climates and so will adapt better as temperatures warm.

Managing woods for the Emerald Ash Borer

After watching it sweep across much of the country, we weren’t surprised  when this destructive insect arrived in Vermont in 2018.  The insect has the potential to destroy nearly all of Vermont’s ash trees, about five percent of our forests. We believe that keeping some trees is essential to their survival as some show genetic resistance — and we are hopeful that the future might provide solutions we don’t have today. We’ve also been spreading the word about how to manage woods to save ash trees.

During the summer of 2021 Caitlin treated twenty ash trees with an insecticide to keep them alive long enough to spread a lot more seed from which the future of North American ash species depends. She reflects on that experience, “Some call it foolish, I call it hope.”

Funding for the Emerald Ash Borer work came from the the US Forest Service Northeast State and Private Forestry program.

This demonstration project is also being funded in part with the US Forest Service Landscape Scale Restoration “Community Forests as Models of Stewardship” grant.