FOREST STAND IMPROVEMENT: Improving Wildlife Habitat through Tree Management

[00:00:00:34 - 00:00:32:31]
But as you can see, these—to make it easy on the guy running the squirt bottle—we cut the small sweetgums off at waist height. So you could just treat the stump up high. And the bigger ones that were in here, we just girdled them with the chainsaw and sprayed the wound.

[00:00:32:36 – 00:00:50:08]
But as you can see, these—to make it easy on the guy running the squirt bottle—we cut the small sweetgums off at waist height. So you could just treat the stump up high. And the bigger ones that were in here, we just girdled them with the chainsaw and sprayed the wound.

[00:00:50:13 – 00:01:10:02]
And as you can see, it did kill the sweetgums. And then you can imagine—but if you look down through here, there's a lot of sunlight coming into this pine stand now. We actually ran a fire through here last fall—a real low-intensity fire—and it did really well. Now you see all the vegetation coming back from the fire.

[00:01:10:02 – 00:01:33:46]
And we pretty much transformed this little block of woods with a chainsaw and a squirt bottle. And then with a little bit of fire—we took a backpack blower, blew a lane around it, and burned it in about an hour. Now you have something that was virtually of no use to wildlife because it was so shaded out, and now it's got food cover coming up. It just looks a whole lot better.

[00:01:33:53 – 00:01:51:40]
It does make it a little bit trashy to begin with, because a lot of these dead trees will fall over and look a little rough for a while. But as they rot down and as subsequent fires consume them, it'll start really looking pretty in here. It almost looks like a pine woodland now instead of just an overgrown, shaded-out forest.