Cut

There are two parts of our cutting down trees; sawing down the ones meeting natural selection criteria, and pulling them out of the forest in a sensitive way so as not to damage the forest floor flora and soil substrate, by staying off the soil, with a winch and sleigh. So this page covers tips for both sensitively cutting down trees and winching them out of the forest.

Cutting down trees in a Full Standing Forest

Jerel is our main faller, with me as secondary, just to keep aware of how to do it. Otherwise hefting a chain saw is too tiring for me. Clear cut foresters and loggers have challenged falling in a full standing forest as impossible because of the other trees in the way, including young ones which can be damaged and the risk of scuffing up trees remaining standing, as downed trees are pulled out of the forest.  

To our surprise, Jerel either was just born to do it or else it just doesn’t take anything beyond using common sense and being careful. Right away Jerel’s hinge cuts and back cuts into the trees were precise enough to lay trees down between others, missing them, and shrubs and younger trees in the understory. Our winching technique, which is explained later, below, created no damage to the residual trees left, annulling the other excuse against selection cutting over clear cutting. But to be on the safe side, both falling and winching should be done during the winter months when the sap in the trees is down in the roots, so if a tree is scuffed, the bark will not break and spill out valuable life fluids, tree pitch. Once the sap starts flowing (April through June) falling and moving logs in the woods should halt because bark slips easily if bumped, and insects are active at that time.

Though we had no problem of hitting other trees as we brought them down through their neighbors, it did not eliminate an occasional hang-up of a falling tree, caught in the branches of another tree. This can happen in very crowded situations, where each tree is so close to it’s neighbor that their branches are intertwined. You can cut completely through the trunk of these trees and your cut tree will just keep standing there upright, even if its end has completely slipped off its stump. You can’t even push it over by hand.

To deal with this, we found a simple block and tackle works, which is a set of pulleys and rope sold as barb wire fence stretchers. You anchor one end around your cut tree and the other end of the rope around a solid tree. Pulling the free end of the rope, which is fed through 2 pulleys gives you the leverage needed to start the cut tree’s branches pulling away from the other tree’s branches, via ratcheting action. Once your enhanced pull creates enough angle of repose in the tree to come down, the tree’s own weight will pull it the rest of the way down. Be sure you are standing in a shielded position behind another solid tree, before trying this.

During falling, my task as assistant included paper work of measuring and recording their board footages for our inventory picture, the tax revenue departments requirements and for potential buyers who need certain amounts. Measuring trees is easy once they are down on the ground. To get the board foot volume of a log, multiply smallest diameter times length – “Scribner Scale”. Measuring trees on the ground instead of beforehand, while standing, saved us 3.5 hours per acre. And oftentimes, we found we reversed decisions on trees marked for cutting, once we were at that point. Reasons would include realizing that though a tree was accurately marked for being naturally selected out, it was in a forest position that if removed would open the forest too much, (such as we hadn’t noticed before it was on the edge of an opening), changing the light, moisture and soil below; a thing natural selection ecoforestry avoids.

Through the process of “live and learn”, we found it was easier to do the function of falling all at once instead of falling a few and then winching them out. Falling everything allowed us to see how all our logs laid, before winch trails were blazed through the brush, which had to be straight beelines, missing residual trees, zigzagging until, the log loads made it out of the forest. Once you do your first complete harvest and winch paths figured out and blazed, subsequent harvests can incorporate this knowledge and add directional falling, to fit where the trails are.

To postpone the natural process of logs beginning to rot, as they lay waiting for the future step of winching, they can have their cut ends painted with simple latex exterior paint. The cut ends provide an entry point for fungus, insects and uneven drying-out of the log, subjecting them to cracking, longitudinally. To keep this from turning into a big job in itself, we found it worked best to go back before the next day, and paint the ends of that day’s cut. Keeping logs in the woods under the canopy, versus getting them winched out of the forest immediately proved for us a curb against sure cracking. Milling was an even further out-in-the-future step for us, and the logs we winched out into the meadow, when we were still switching back and forth between falling and winching, cracked while waiting out in the meadow, for milling.

Falling everything and then winching everything also eliminated moving the winch repeatedly back into areas all over again, instead of just once. When we did one operation, instead of multi-tasking, equipment was set up and we had everything we needed with us. And doing each operation all at once, we found that the smaller tools for that function, just had to be carried into the woods with us every day, rather than have tools for 2 tasks to carry with us (and forget and have to go back for!).

We cut-up the down trees into 16 foot lengths, but learned after the later step of milling, that trees should be cut into 8 foot lengths, to get more useable wood out of a naturally selected out tree. The growth habit of a tree that has been naturally selected out, has changed from growing in a straight up-and-down column shaped tree to a cone shaped tree, due to its ceasing to grow upwards anymore, but still growing outward with a yearly growth ring. Thus in a 16 foot long log, the diameter at one end is much smaller than the diameter at the other end which penalizes you with wood wastage, if you stick to this long a length when you go to mill it.

To make straight dimensional boards out of a round log you have to first cut the rounded sides off of it, making it into a squared up log. The longer the log, the more wood will end up in these first 4 rounded sides getting cut off, instead of in the squared up log to be sawn into boards. To cut off the 4 rounded sides of the log to make it an even block from which to cut even boards, the cut has to be started from the end of the log with the smallest diameter. This rounded slab of wood that comes off a cone shaped tree is thin at the end where the cut was begun and thick at the other end with the larger diameter This triangular shaped piece of slab wood can’t be used for a board unless you want to save it and put more work into it later, re-sawing the thick end. Milling our own wood helped us to arrive at shorter logs, by actually demonstrating the waste, right before our eyes.

Secondly, cutting trees into 8 foot lengths is more practical because rarely are longer boards needed by woodworkers. We are not creating lumber to be used for studs in a building, but for woodworking. Studs, or 2 x 4’s, for structural framing complicate things because it needs paying a professional “grader” to judge the structural integrity for building codes. Plus 2 x 4’s from clear cut logging are sold on the market so cheaply, that the extra care of selection harvest would not be able to get the money for the work put into them.

Third, winching out shorter logs is physically easier than maneuvering longer logs into position for being winched out of the woods. And lastly a load of 8 foot logs is less weight and less length making winching doubly more sensitive on the forest floor and trees along the way, as they are pulled through the forest. Whatever length, when cutting a tree up into pieces in the woods, add on an extra 3” for shrinkage in drying and for cutting off cracks which may occur in the ends.

We found 4 hours is about the right amount of time to spend a day, tree falling and then go on to something else because falling is physically back breaking and to make ecoforestry more interesting. We have had no falling mishaps to date. We follow safety procedures such as having our truck turned around and parked on the road ready to drive straight out if we needed to go to a hospital. Wear leather chaps, steel toed boots, hard hat, in-tact leather gloves and safety glasses. Keep your chain on the saw well adjusted so it stops revolving when you are walking with the saw and, of course, keep your finger away from the trigger when walking with it.

We file the necessary quarterly state taxes for the trees we fall. We cut no more than a logging truck’s worth of logs a year or 5000 board feet, which in Washington, doesn’t require a forest practice permit, but we must file because we are not using the wood for our own use as fire wood or building fences. We are making it into something to sell. You also have to file if you are selling the raw logs. If the wood were merely for our own use, we additionally would be freed from filing the quarterly stumpage tax because the wood would never leave the land.

If you are selling logs or finished wood products, there is a dollar incentive for doing selection, and cutting less board footage per year, than getting more board footage by doing a clear cut. If you cut 4,449 board feet or less in a year’s quarter the timber tax (in Washington) is less than $50. If your stumpage tax is less than $50 in a quarter, paying it is waived. So take care not to harvest over this in a quarter. Your county will not benefit tax wise from you cutting, but will benefit from the free amenities your selectively harvested full-standing forest will afford the county, like clean air, more water, wildlife habitat and an ameliorated climate.

We found that the trees we were cutting in our 60 year old second growth Douglas fir forest, in 1995, averaged 18 board feet. To get the advantage of not being taxed ($200 or more per year), this equaled 247 trees per quarter. Through government literature we found our land’s soil type is capable of producing a 2% growth rate, a year, in a natural forest. The natural mortality rate of a generic forest is about 2% per year. We cut 2.33% of the forest’s mortality in our first cut, which has not been cut for at least 23 years of my ownership. So, in spite of future periodic cutting, with each tree cut being of more and more board feet, the production of volume of our remaining trees will be accumulating through the years ahead.

The hypothesis of Natural Selection Cutting, founded by Orville Camp, is that a certain point in time will arrive when the volume of the trees we have individually cut, will amount to the same volume of wood a clear cut would yield, with the same number of years between clear cuts. At this point of time our forest will have doubled itself. In other words, instead of a forest starting all over again from a clear cut, we will have the same amount of board feet of wood alive and standing, as what we cut! And from then on production and harvested board feet will keep topping that, and climax old growth forest will develop on down the line. New forest trees will come from holes made in the forest canopy where natural disturbance has taken trees when they are still dominant, not weakened slowly. Natural disturbance will call the shots for where and when the forest achieves uneven-age development.