Wonderful Wildlife Surprise!

 We have four pairs of geese hanging around the pond this year, and also too many raccoons. I had given up on having goslings because of nest predation, but today five goslings appeared, grazing their way around the pond with the proud parents.

It looks like we will have fawns soon.

Stump Talk

Here we are looking at a stump from a harvest eight to twelve years ago. We were counting eight nodes on oak seedling sprouts, so we are pretty close on the timeline. Black oak stumps fall apart pretty fast, and you can see that the sapwood is almost totally gone, and bark is hanging on just at the bottom of the stump. One of the things you learn is to estimate the time since a tree was cut by the stump. White oak stumps last much longer, and down in the bottoms, stumps disappear quickly with rot and floods erasing them in short order. We figured out a plan of action for this timber, and the new owners will be busy. They will need to do two or three burns to bring up oak regeneration through the competition, but they have trails in place, so that will be easily managed. They can break up the woods into three burn units and rotate the burn to the next unit every spring. In ten or fifteen years they should see their young oaks popping up throughout their timber.

Are You Stumped?

I have been told all of my adult life that you can steer a tree by making the hinge thicker on one end. I believed that early-on, but never had any luck making it work, and have never actually seen anyone successfully "turn" a tree once it is released to fall, but I still hear this method promoted.

If we set up a pointer at 90 degrees to the front of the hinge cut, we should see the treetop to the left of the pointer. OOPS! The treetop landed slightly to the right!

This pecan stump has an extraordinarily thick hinge on the right side, ostensibly to make the tree go in that direction. What is the result?

The treetop lies to the left. I have yet to see this method work the way its promoters say it does. You can watch loggers doing this on YouTube if you check out the tree falling videos. I have seen write-ups that tell they are using a "swing cut," but the tree goes in the direction it starts without turning. Putting a tree where you want it is simple, and doesn't require any magical skills. Go to the spot you want the tree to land on, look back at the tree, and if it is vertical in relation to you, aim straight on with the sighting line on your saw. Correct right or left in the opposite direction of side-lean, up to your side-lean limit. If the tree has more side-lean than the hinge can hold, pick another spot to drop your tree into. You can handle about half as much side-lean as you can back-lean. With back-lean, all of the hinge is holding against it, but with side-lean, only half of the hinge is holding against it.

In addition to being an ineffective method of aiming a tree, thick hinges destroy value in the most valuable part of the tree. Those long splinters should have remained in the log to become part of the lumber produced, but defective lumber will be cut now from an otherwise good log. One of the skills a logger needs is the knowledge of how thick he can make a hinge without causing fiber to pull as the tree falls. You can see on this stump that pecan begins pulling fiber when the hinge is a bit thicker than 1/2 inch.

Another common mistake you will see in timber operations is the tall stump. The wood in this stump is perfectly sound, and the logger should have cut this tree just a few inches off the ground. In this case, about forty board feet of the butt log was left behind, which would have been worth around $5.00 to the landowner at junk hardwood prices.

Women On Target, Carmi Rifle Club, 2023

 

                                                             Click The Picture To Enlarge

Carmi Rifle Club had our annual Women On Target event this past weekend. Fourteen ladies participated, and all had a great time shooting pistols, rifles and shotguns. Debby, on the right put ten rounds into the Ten Ring on her target, and that is remarkable! She was shooting a Ruger Mk III Target Pistol with the factory trigger and a red dot sight on top, offhand at 15 feet. Valinda Rowe, on the left is our primary instructor. Come to our NRA Day in June at Carmi Rifle Club, and Valinda can teach you to shoot, too!

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