I own 40 acres in central Michigan that I purchased in 2014. At the time of purchase, there were 12 acres of standing corn and a 20-acre mature woodlot at the back of the property. The remaining acreage was some low swampy ground and old cow pasture at the front of the property along with the house. I knew the property had potential, but man did I have a long ride ahead of me.
This article is on the 20-acre woodlot on the back of the property. The property from an aesthetics perspective was beautiful. I had towering basswood, red maple, hickory, sugar maple, beech, and a pocket of aspen in a lowland area. In the 100 years the previous owners had the property, no forestry management had taken place. The woods were overstocked and held very little in the form of browse or mast production. In winter, there were areas where I could see from one side of the woods to the other.
I started contacting loggers the first summer that I owned the property. A few came to look, a few never bothered to look, but no one was interested. A few years went by before I contacted a sawmill / logging outfit that agreed to cut my woods. Lesson learned: there are a lot of options out there, I probably should have also contacted the Amish earlier to see if they were interested.
I’m sure some readers are wondering why I just didn’t go in and hinge cut some bedding areas. My answer is that the type of timber I was dealing with was mature sawtimber. There is literally to much ‘stick’ to effectively cut down and leave mature sawtimber and have effective regeneration and bedding areas. I purposely didn’t hinge cut lower value, small trees because I knew that would only hinder the future logging operation. The size of your timber is going to dictate the prescription. If you have mature sawtimber, you will get a better long-term benefit from harvesting that timber. You need to get some ‘stick’ (volume) out of the woods.
The harvest was supposed to happen in the winter of 18/19. Because of a warm winter the cut wasn’t able to take place. I have heavy ground that has some boggy areas so it needed to be frozen or dry. Luckily, I got a call in June 2019 that the crew was headed to my property. The summer had been dry and everything was dried up. The loggers worked from the back of the property to the front. My only request was that they leave the full tops where they lay. I didn’t want them reducing the slash or anything. We did get some rain with 2 weeks into the three-week operation. They did create some ruts, but that’s logging.
Luckily, the largest trees were already located in fairly defined pockets throughout the woodlot. Most of these will become their own separated bedding areas. I did have a 3 or 4-acre area that I literally wanted clear cut. It will be my main sanctuary area moving forward. This was the boggy area that had some terrain humps and was naturally broken into separate bedding areas because of the topography and wet spots. The property had good bones when I purchased it, this was one feature that I liked most. This area is dead center in the property and at the front of the woods adjacent to my field.
The biggest negative about the operation was the logging deck and haul road. The logging deck and road were located in a combination of switchgrass and tallgrass prairie plantings. They beat down about 1.5 to 2 acres of my best cover on the property. It really hurt that years hunting, but a timber harvest is a long-term project. In the long run, the timber harvest was the right prescription for the land. I reseeded the disturbed areas and I am glad I did. A harvest happening at that critical time really impacted the grass fields. I simply frost seeded and sprayed in the spring the disturbed areas. I was amazed at how little grass grew the season after the harvest.
Having the tree tops left as they fell was a personal decision. I did spend a lot of hours creating bedding areas and travel corridors. Not going to lie, it was a ton of work. I would still have the cut done the exact same way. The tops act as immediate structure, in fact, all my bedding is occurring within the dense tangle of tree tops. Additionally, there is a lot of late winter food offered by the surrounding ag areas and if I wanted to get more diverse regeneration, I needed the tops to protect seedlings. I really didn’t want a forest full of beech and hophornbeam seedlings. Deer are ravenous, and by the time the large doe herd shows up it is after the hunting season in January. Forest Health studies are taking place in Michigan currently that highlight the extreme impact whitetails are having on regeneration, one of the prescriptions for creating diversity after a timber harvest is leaving the tops in place.
Have a solid plan in place before undertaking any forestry work. Understand the benefits and drawbacks to the operation. Keep access in mind, both for hunting and future operations. You don’t have to cut all your merchantable timber. There were trees I marked to not be cut for various reasons including: acorn production, access, screening, and stand locations. The property layout and size classes perfectly fit my long-term plan. The work in the woods is not complete and probably never will be. In a couple more years, I will expand on some bedding areas by hinge cutting low value smaller diameter trees. This process allows me to spread out the natural succession that immediately starts taken place anywhere major disturbance has occurred.