Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast, you can't
Speaker 1: predict anything presented by First Light, creating proven versatile hunting
Speaker 1: apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear. For every hunt,
Speaker 1: first Light, Go farther, stay longer. All right, we're in
Speaker 1: our brand new studio. It's like Phil died. I couldn't
Speaker 1: I When I got in, I was so it was
Speaker 1: like I was sad and I realized that it's like
Speaker 1: Phil died.
Speaker 2: I'm still here, I promise, Yeah, but I wouldn't know
Speaker 2: that that's true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can't see him behind all taking.
Speaker 4: From beyond the veil.
Speaker 3: He's like, yeah, it's like a ghost.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's got like a little command and control center
Speaker 1: where it was like purposefully set up to not like
Speaker 1: you could. You wouldn't even know. Even right now, sitting
Speaker 1: here looking for him, I wouldn't know he's in here.
Speaker 3: It's like it's like the Wizard of Oz.
Speaker 4: Just pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Speaker 1: Cal suggested we get like a heart rate monitor up
Speaker 1: on the wall above Phil so we could at least
Speaker 1: see his vitals.
Speaker 4: I think Steve would have some fun games with that
Speaker 4: that would be very confusing to the listener, trying to
Speaker 4: see how he can spike poor Phil's heart rate.
Speaker 1: Back there, Man, one time I had I was doing
Speaker 1: this uh this life insurance policy where I had to lamp.
Speaker 1: Some dude came over and I had to lamb my
Speaker 1: couch and he hooked me up to a bunch and
Speaker 1: put a bunch of those little stickies on me to
Speaker 1: monitor your heart rate, you know. And I'm laying on
Speaker 1: my couch and periodically you could hear I could hear
Speaker 1: my kids fight upstairs, you know, and you here like Matthew,
Speaker 1: stop it right. And I had and I'm and I
Speaker 1: had to be on this thing for twenty minutes. And
Speaker 1: I asked the guy, can you see that? He goes,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he goes every time that like when those
Speaker 1: kids make that stomach noise.
Speaker 3: Nice.
Speaker 1: It takes a toll on you, man, slowly kills you.
Speaker 1: But back to Phil, He Phil, why you got it
Speaker 1: wrapped up in black blankets and stuff? Back there?
Speaker 2: It's another temporary solution, Steve. It's a there's a lot
Speaker 2: of cables. I was trying to make it less of
Speaker 2: an isore. I think it might have had the opposite effect.
Speaker 1: He's waiting on a little coffin. He's waiting on a
Speaker 1: little coffin. Or he'll hide back there. Yeah, we've been
Speaker 1: talking about Phil is going to get a DJ deal,
Speaker 1: like a platform Yeah, because picture well, no, DJs don't
Speaker 1: use screens.
Speaker 5: Though, no, they don't. Put they're on platforms. You should, like,
Speaker 5: you should take a picture of him and and be like,
Speaker 5: where's Phil? Post it and just see if anyone can
Speaker 5: can really see that he's back there.
Speaker 1: It's killing me. Join Today by author and Forrester, Michael Schneider.
Speaker 1: Do you go like a Snyder?
Speaker 6: It's Snyder like Schneider, not like Schneider.
Speaker 1: Not like Krin.
Speaker 6: It's it's been anglicized from the Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh man. When I got your book woods Wise, I'm trying,
Speaker 1: sad to say, this is the nicest way possible. I
Speaker 1: was initially dismissive because I've never read a forestry book
Speaker 1: in my life.
Speaker 6: And you're in a big club.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like most Yeah, like most Americans, like an overwhelming
Speaker 1: majority of Americas. I never read a forestry book. And
Speaker 1: the minute I it's sat on my desk and sad,
Speaker 1: my desk, and one day I opened it and realized
Speaker 1: how it was structured. It's it's structured in like questions,
Speaker 1: many of which are great questions, and it's like it
Speaker 1: poses a question and answers the question.
Speaker 6: Addresses the question.
Speaker 3: Addresses the questions, and some of them are unanswerable.
Speaker 6: I'm big on that.
Speaker 1: The minute I opened it up and saw that there's
Speaker 1: a thing why are conifers shaped like cones? I was like,
Speaker 1: shod ever thought about that? Why are they shaped like cones?
Speaker 6: Awesome?
Speaker 1: No, that's when I wanted. That's why I told Krim
Speaker 1: we should have this guy on to talk about all
Speaker 1: the like, because this is great for people's barroom banter capabilities.
Speaker 1: To imagine some single fella, maagine some single fella down
Speaker 1: in the bar. Everyone go get Michael's book.
Speaker 3: It sounds like my past.
Speaker 1: Yeah, down the bar. It's a lovely young lady next
Speaker 1: to you, and you're like, shit, man, I can't think
Speaker 1: of a good icebreaker. You know, I can't be like
Speaker 1: you sure are pretty, because that don't fly. He'd be like, hey, man,
Speaker 1: do you ever wonder why uh you know pine trees
Speaker 1: are cone shaped? That's good, dude, that's rock. So solid.
Speaker 3: Put that one in your and your pick up.
Speaker 4: That's real audience specific. I just came back from a
Speaker 4: wedding in La and I don't think that would have
Speaker 4: got you anywhere. And like, let me tell you why
Speaker 4: your lips look like that.
Speaker 1: No, so we're gonna we're gonna dig in. But tell
Speaker 1: about your job, because you know the comedy Parks and
Speaker 1: w Reck. You were actually at a place called Parks
Speaker 1: and Reck.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Forest Parks and w Reck.
Speaker 1: Do you guys love that show?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 6: And I got a lot of that over the years.
Speaker 6: And I'm like, oh, okay, sure. But and so I
Speaker 6: was the commissioner. So that's also fun because you get
Speaker 6: to be the commission.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you were a high level individual.
Speaker 6: Well yeah, in a you know, big fish in a
Speaker 6: small pond kind of way. But you know, so I
Speaker 6: am I am as of January first, I am no
Speaker 6: longer the commissioner of the Vermont Department of Forest, Parks
Speaker 6: and Recreation. But that's what you're referring to, and that's
Speaker 6: what I was for twelve years.
Speaker 1: This was sad about this.
Speaker 6: It was my choice. There's stuff I missed, the good people,
Speaker 6: the good stuff. The mission is amazing, credible, staff of
Speaker 6: professional foresters, biologists, you know, recreation specialists, parks people. But
Speaker 6: it's heavy to politics and bureaucracy and that that gets
Speaker 6: old and uh and I did it for an inordinate
Speaker 6: amount of time. Uh historically speaking that you know, I
Speaker 6: served through two government It's an appointed position by the governor.
Speaker 6: You lead a department that has the it is well
Speaker 6: named with a statutory mission for forest force, health, forestry,
Speaker 6: the state park system, which is really quite excellent in Vermont,
Speaker 6: and then sort of broadly speaking, outdoor recreation. And we're
Speaker 6: a sister department to the Department of Fish and Wildlife,
Speaker 6: and so our our our forests are their habitat right,
Speaker 6: and so we we managed public lands cooperatively together. It's
Speaker 6: a really cool tradition of kind of inter departmental work
Speaker 6: and uh so it it It was amazing. I worked
Speaker 6: for fourteen years prior to that within the department as
Speaker 6: a forester and as what we call a service forester.
Speaker 6: Most states have in a Department of Forestry an arm
Speaker 6: that includes people who give technical assistance to private landowners municipalities,
Speaker 6: and that's what I did. That is like the best
Speaker 6: job you can have. It's so cool. You're just out
Speaker 6: with interesting people, walking interesting pieces of land and helping them.
Speaker 6: You don't have to drum up business. You're not really
Speaker 6: much of a regulator. You're just a facilitating conservation on
Speaker 6: private lands, which is you know in the East, is
Speaker 6: like it's the majority of the lands. And so that's
Speaker 6: what I did, and that's where the book really came from,
Speaker 6: was just being with people and their fascinations with the woods,
Speaker 6: their ignorance with the woods, their love of the woods.
Speaker 6: And then you know, collecting questions and realizing that I
Speaker 6: answer a lot of questions and I'm kind of a
Speaker 6: geek coming from a background in forest science in particular,
Speaker 6: thing about I grew disillusioned with we produced, you know,
Speaker 6: published peer reviewed papers that didn't really go anywhere except
Speaker 6: other scientists citing them and their proposals and their their work.
Speaker 6: And so I'd left wanting to get I took a
Speaker 6: chance at being one of these county foresters with a
Speaker 6: county as a geography of an area of jurisdiction, to
Speaker 6: give that kind of technical assistance with a hope that
Speaker 6: you know, maybe I can help bring the science to
Speaker 6: the management and stewardship of private woodlands. And did that
Speaker 6: for fourteen years, and then out of nowhere, an incoming governor.
Speaker 6: The transition team contacted me and said, hey, we're hearing things.
Speaker 6: We wonder if you'd like to be the governor's you know,
Speaker 6: commissioner for the governor. Then Peter Shumlin, a Democrat who
Speaker 6: who had been in this state Senate and was Senate
Speaker 6: pro Tem, ran first statewide office, won that election and
Speaker 6: was putting a team together, and they reached out to me.
Speaker 6: I said, no, you kidding me. I mean maybe when
Speaker 6: I'm old then you know, my knees go and I
Speaker 6: can't roam the woods anymore, and maybe I'll be like,
Speaker 6: whys and then I'll be commissioner. And they're like, we're
Speaker 6: asking you now, and I went to I said no,
Speaker 6: I don't really am not interested. And then some I
Speaker 6: would call them elders and people in my life that
Speaker 6: you know, we're trust and and have some wisdom.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 6: They were like, you got to do it, and so
Speaker 6: I took a chance. I said okay, and I lasted
Speaker 6: three terms with him. He decided to not run again,
Speaker 6: and the new governor, governor elected Scott, came in. He
Speaker 6: notified all the appointees, which is very typical. You know,
Speaker 6: you know, please send in your resignation letters. If you
Speaker 6: want to work in our administration, you're free to. But
Speaker 6: you can apply just like everybody else, through the web portal,
Speaker 6: which is what I did.
Speaker 1: And uh kind of really okay, that was that a
Speaker 1: different political party?
Speaker 6: Yes? I should have mentioned that. Yeah, totally, he's a Republican.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's why the assumption was you're out.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's pretty pretty traditional. And uh so you know
Speaker 6: I did, and uh, I'm pretty sure I was the
Speaker 6: last kid picked. You know. Uh, they announced all these
Speaker 6: new appointees and new secretaries of this and commissioners of that,
Speaker 6: and it was stressful because I'm into it.
Speaker 1: I'm like super So you went to the web portal,
Speaker 1: I went filling out. Yeah, what it says like current
Speaker 1: job would be like this job.
Speaker 6: Well, it's a little surreal, and I feel like I.
Speaker 1: Have very relevant work experiences since I have this job.
Speaker 6: Exactly. Uh, I'd like to say to his everlasting credit
Speaker 6: he uh, Now, they brought me in and and you know,
Speaker 6: it was, uh, it was pretty intense. I had some
Speaker 6: very tough questions and some concerns, uh, because I you know,
Speaker 6: into it and had kind of a big mouth and
Speaker 6: was pushing for some certain things. Actually, to be honest,
Speaker 6: it was uh Karint and I talked about a little
Speaker 6: bit like forest fragmentation, the breaking of forest into smaller
Speaker 6: and smaller pieces to the point where they become non
Speaker 6: functional as forest and habitat and connected lands, you know.
Speaker 6: And so in our state wide land use plans and regulation,
Speaker 6: there's no lens for forests. It's a lot of other
Speaker 6: criteria they have to consider when when proposing some development,
Speaker 6: Are you going to have an adverse impact on the
Speaker 6: environment in these various ways. Forest wasn't in there. And
Speaker 6: I was saying, you know, they're so important, they confer
Speaker 6: so much power and strength to our state. We should
Speaker 6: have that as one of the checkboxes. No undue adverse impact,
Speaker 6: or you avoid it, you minimize it, or you mitigate that.
Speaker 6: And they were really concerned because they thought that was
Speaker 6: only the only solution would be regulation, which this governor
Speaker 6: was very against taking property rights away from people. These
Speaker 6: are things that matter to me too, And I was like, no, actually,
Speaker 6: there's an economic way through this. Let's reinvest in the loggers,
Speaker 6: the workforce, the mills that are dying and eroding, let's
Speaker 6: rebuild the culture of forestry in our state as our
Speaker 6: last best hope to keep forest forest and to keep
Speaker 6: all of the many benefits that accrue to all of
Speaker 6: us from these private lands flowing. And they were like,
Speaker 6: oh okay, and he reappointed me, and I had another
Speaker 6: three year term with Governor Scott, which I'm for which
Speaker 6: I'm extremely grateful, And had to navigate all that, you know,
Speaker 6: being kind of a tree freak, not kind of certifiable.
Speaker 1: And a tree hug or tree freak hug some trees.
Speaker 6: But sometimes when you you need to.
Speaker 1: Slap, don't.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know, but you know, sometimes oddly when you're
Speaker 6: you know, you're gonna you know, boor cut into one
Speaker 6: to fell it, you get to wrap your arms around
Speaker 6: a little bit sometimes. So it's a mixed bag, right, But.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you know how to borer cut?
Speaker 6: Oh absolutely.
Speaker 1: I recently learned that, Yeah, you need you.
Speaker 6: Need to control, you need control.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was not cut sure where I come from.
Speaker 3: You're in control a huge piece of.
Speaker 1: Pie out of one side. Then you're coming from the
Speaker 1: air side.
Speaker 6: Well, you come from a long tradition there, so yeah,
Speaker 6: directional felling, bar cutting, the hinge control. It's really cool
Speaker 6: when when you get it and it works, it's a
Speaker 6: I've had so many loggers. I was like, you should
Speaker 6: go to the Game of logging training and like, no, no,
Speaker 6: you know, I had to do this, you know, pencil
Speaker 6: Nick Forester, geek over theresiness. And then then then a
Speaker 6: couple of them did it and they were like, wow,
Speaker 6: you know what, I gotta admit, this is pretty cool.
Speaker 6: So much more control, you know, chasing the tree down,
Speaker 6: you're you're you're you're holding that wood together until it's
Speaker 6: safe and ready and then flip it off.
Speaker 1: And when we were when we were learning it, it
Speaker 1: was explained to me we were cutting down a big walnut. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: and these these these were like walnut specialists. These guys
Speaker 1: I was with their wallet specialists, and they're saying, on
Speaker 1: a veneer log I mean, these guys are cutting like
Speaker 1: they're down in the dirt, man, They're like, cut it
Speaker 1: down like in the roots. Yeah, and they're saying, no,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna come in here. And that cut a
Speaker 1: big you know, eight hundred dollars wedge exactly knee high
Speaker 1: and then whatever. You know, they're like very precise about
Speaker 1: they wanted zero waste way down low. I mean it
Speaker 1: was that thing was ready for the stump grinder when
Speaker 1: they cut that thing down, and they were showing me
Speaker 1: that little that cut, which I was like, that can't work,
Speaker 1: but that'll slick.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I went out with steel power equipment right and worked
Speaker 4: on a forestry project example that they had going in
Speaker 4: Oregon in conjunction with some tribal management, and they were
Speaker 4: doing this really technical felling of they wanted to drop
Speaker 4: these trees and they wanted them to overhang ever so
Speaker 4: slightly into the river in order to provide overhead cover
Speaker 4: for spawning rainbow trout nice. And so they're like, yeah,
Speaker 4: you can drop them kind of in the water, but
Speaker 4: not all the way right, And it was like it
Speaker 4: was a it was a big deal. And these two
Speaker 4: fellers that they had come out that work with steel
Speaker 4: all the time. The most painful part of the process
Speaker 4: for them was doing it slow enough so everybody else,
Speaker 4: all the state foresters and everybody could learn from it.
Speaker 4: And it was just so day to day for these folks.
Speaker 4: But they're like, yeah, we're gonna put like these six
Speaker 4: limbs over the river. The rest of that tree is
Speaker 4: going to lay right here. And by right here, we
Speaker 4: mean and they walk out and they put a little
Speaker 4: flag right there and they walk back and it's like okay,
Speaker 4: and then this happens and you could just tell they're like,
Speaker 4: let us get on with this, jeez. But it was amazing,
Speaker 4: Like every tree was just like that, and these are huge.
Speaker 6: And it's a thing. It is impressive because it's not
Speaker 6: sort of by chance or they get lucky when someone
Speaker 6: like they have control, and it's impressive, especially with leaning trees,
Speaker 6: trees with defects, decay inside. They're not structurally sound. They're
Speaker 6: really unpredictable, and yet people that really know what they're
Speaker 6: doing approach it with a plan that is real and
Speaker 6: it works.
Speaker 4: And I was staying with like the you know, kids
Speaker 4: with soft hands on the other side of the river,
Speaker 4: and when that tree hit the ground, it was like
Speaker 4: it went through you, you know, and you're like, wow,
Speaker 4: that is a substantial chunk.
Speaker 6: Of what Yeah, no doubt, dude. I was.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say where I was. I was
Speaker 1: at an event recently where I shook dozens of these
Speaker 1: softest hands I've ever touched, like more like real nice,
Speaker 1: to the point where I started to like anticipate it
Speaker 1: if it made it. It's like it's kind of like
Speaker 1: the noise when you shook the hands. Oh so weird.
Speaker 1: How are you doing back there, Phil?
Speaker 2: You good, I'm doing great. I uh I take offense
Speaker 2: to these soft hands. Please continue.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 1: We got to touch on a couple of things, but
Speaker 1: I want to get when we come back. I want
Speaker 1: to I got two things I want. I want to
Speaker 1: ask you about your disappointment about no one getting the
Speaker 1: Vermont honey thing or not not honey. I got my
Speaker 1: honey and syrup from Vermont. I'll point out right on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I got a friend that does both. But the
Speaker 1: sugar business maple syrup business, and two sugaring we call
Speaker 1: it sugaring. And two I want to tell you about
Speaker 1: one time I put a chainsaw into an oak tree
Speaker 1: and the gallons and gallons and gallons of water. It
Speaker 1: was like slicing into an old tractor tire. How much
Speaker 1: water come out of that tree? Uh, we'll get that
Speaker 1: in the first cow lay out the corner layout the current.
Speaker 4: I think I think you got to explain your tractor tire.
Speaker 1: Oh, in the old days, maybe they still do cethel No,
Speaker 1: they still do Oh.
Speaker 4: Well, I thought they use that sodium whatever.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's just whatever. It doesn't freeze filled with water
Speaker 8: or just freeze in the winter.
Speaker 1: Yeah. We're doing a project one time where we had
Speaker 1: to cut Me and my brother had to cut one
Speaker 1: hundred of these little jackpines out and limb them and
Speaker 1: cut them to length and put them on stickers out
Speaker 1: in the feet and we were cutting to get in
Speaker 1: there and left some little pungee sticks and put one
Speaker 1: through a tractor tire. And I didn't know. I was young.
Speaker 1: I didn't know, and I didn't know that. I think
Speaker 1: it was full of Brian not air.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think they used to do a lot more
Speaker 8: with before a tractors were four wheel drive.
Speaker 1: This was a two wheel drive forward. It was a
Speaker 1: forward detractor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what was it like an AD smaller?
Speaker 1: I remember man had tires bass tall as me.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Anyway, the.
Speaker 8: Guys, the guys that I knew, had two wheel drive tractors,
Speaker 8: they put them in the rear tires.
Speaker 1: It added weight to the tractor. That's exactly what this
Speaker 1: situation was.
Speaker 3: More give you more attraction, and I think it also.
Speaker 8: Factories over it. Yeah, it lowers your center of gravity.
Speaker 8: Ballaced keeps you from tipping over.
Speaker 3: So you know, like that come.
Speaker 1: Out of this oak tree.
Speaker 6: And it wasn't flying squirrels, because that's another thing.
Speaker 1: Well, listen, man, the house I grew up in had
Speaker 1: a flying squirrel infestation, but I never had flying squirrels
Speaker 1: come out of a tree, had them come out of
Speaker 1: my house bad especially one time we came up and
Speaker 1: got on an extension ladder and started dropping mothballs down
Speaker 1: into a hole in the ceedar siding. Twenty four Flying squirrels.
Speaker 8: I one time was sitting in a tree stand in
Speaker 8: New Jersey and I'm sitting there dark, waiting for the
Speaker 8: sun to come up, and it just gets like that
Speaker 8: gray light, and all of a sudden, like called the
Speaker 8: cold gray light, something like whizz passed my head and
Speaker 8: smacks the tree and runs up and it's like one
Speaker 8: of those deals.
Speaker 3: You're like, holy shit, like what was that?
Speaker 8: And then like a couple of seconds later another one
Speaker 8: what And I'm like what the hell is going on here?
Speaker 8: It was flying squirrels like soaring into the tree that
Speaker 8: I was sitting on, and it was they were like
Speaker 8: landing on the tree and then running up the tree. Yeah,
Speaker 8: there was I don't know, probably a dozen that did that,
Speaker 8: and he like hit the tree that I was sitting
Speaker 8: on and ran up to the dop.
Speaker 1: They don't get enough credit for how cool they are, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: You when I was a kid, you could turn We
Speaker 1: had a bird feeder outside the kitchen window, like on
Speaker 1: the sill of the kitchen window, and sometimes you turn
Speaker 1: the light on at night in the kitchen and it'll
Speaker 1: illuminate that thing, and like the last thing you're expecting
Speaker 1: is a bunch of little squirrels sitting there eating fucking squirrels.
Speaker 4: That's an interesting waterfowl kind of comparison that you had there.
Speaker 4: Like you can start a new little uh hunting club
Speaker 4: right where you like identify the masked tree that those
Speaker 4: flying squirrels are going to in the morning. Oh and
Speaker 4: you go on set up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, wait all.
Speaker 1: Right, corner cross it. We've covered it to the dickens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it might not. It's just a long story. It's like like,
Speaker 1: let's say you're the news. You don't apologize every time
Speaker 1: you cover the president. You'll be like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: here we are talking about the president again.
Speaker 5: And that's a big deal.
Speaker 1: It just it never ends. It just can is run.
Speaker 1: So the corner crossing deal and I don't even know,
Speaker 1: Like what if you're the news and you report on
Speaker 1: the president every day, you don't need to give back.
Speaker 1: You don't need to go like So, there's this country,
Speaker 1: the US, and they have executively, they have they have
Speaker 1: a triumph triumvirate what's the word executive judicially Like this
Speaker 1: is the United States of America. They have a judicial system,
Speaker 1: they have a congressional system and an executive leadership system
Speaker 1: and it's a triumvirate check system of checks and balances
Speaker 1: and so that fella yesterday, right, you don't need to
Speaker 1: do all that. So the wyoming corner crossing case. If
Speaker 1: you're not familiar, I don't know what to tell you.
Speaker 1: Just go back and listen to go back and listen.
Speaker 1: Go back and listen to All Up in your Airspace.
Speaker 1: That was an episode. Go back and listen to Busted
Speaker 1: for Touching It. Yes, listen to that.
Speaker 3: Or read all the articles on the website, or.
Speaker 1: Read all the articles at the media dot com. And
Speaker 1: and Cal's gonna take it away.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Steve. You Cal, I want to uh, we're
Speaker 4: gonna go off of this assumption that everybody knows what
Speaker 4: we're talking about for the most part. And then I
Speaker 4: just want to hit on a couple of parts that
Speaker 4: I think people need to focus on and pay attention
Speaker 4: to because this is what is going to be brought
Speaker 4: up again and be central to the case going forward.
Speaker 1: Yes, you know we're having a forest round right now.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine the tension that Doug durn is feeling
Speaker 1: right now. He's holding his phone. He doesn't know what
Speaker 1: he's gonna write in about, but as soon as that's
Speaker 1: some bit what he's going to complain about to me yet,
Speaker 1: but he's ready or what he's going to fact check.
Speaker 1: He's ready.
Speaker 6: That's not what we call that.
Speaker 1: He probably got off his tractor and he's ready for
Speaker 1: something to be like, well quite hard put it. But anyways,
Speaker 1: go on col A.
Speaker 4: Lot of woodlot managers out there.
Speaker 1: You said private would private forest? I think he like
Speaker 1: just whatever he is doing, he's not doing, and I
Speaker 1: have he's poised and ready.
Speaker 4: Long time ago, chased a lady out to Vermont and
Speaker 4: did like a eight month stint in Vermont. And there's
Speaker 4: a lot of foresters doing non forestry jobs in Vermont.
Speaker 4: They came out of forestry school and just couldn't couldn't
Speaker 4: find a forestry paycheck.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: So there are a lot of experts out there.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, lots of experts.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, so, and there's a lot.
Speaker 1: I'm good friends with one of them.
Speaker 4: There are a lot of experts on this case. And
Speaker 4: it's really interesting, right because it has to do, of course,
Speaker 4: with public and private interface here. So in this case
Speaker 4: corner crossing, which of course is stepping from one piece
Speaker 4: of public land to an adjoining corner of public land
Speaker 4: at the intersection of four parcels.
Speaker 1: I like the old checkerboard analogy.
Speaker 4: It is a checkerboard.
Speaker 1: Yes, so your public is black, say, private is red? Sure,
Speaker 1: and you're yeah, stepping from red to red, stepping from.
Speaker 4: On the diagonal black to black. Sure. Yeah. So four
Speaker 4: hunters from Missouri use this method to access pieces of
Speaker 4: blm land that are and of course the other adjoining
Speaker 4: corners are private land. In this case that we're speaking of,
Speaker 4: this fellow Fred Eshlman's private oasis in Wyoming called the
Speaker 4: Elk Mountain Ranch, and Eshelman decide to soothe these folk
Speaker 4: for criminal trespass. And I believe this is the the
Speaker 4: civil case.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they got acquitted for the on the criminal criminal.
Speaker 4: This is the civil case that the idea was. It
Speaker 4: was going to be tried in a civil court in Wyoming,
Speaker 4: but it was picked up by the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: The juice got off on criminal and they stuck it
Speaker 1: to him in civil.
Speaker 4: Was that on TV too?
Speaker 1: And these guys criminal the criminal courts like, nah, you
Speaker 1: need to break a law.
Speaker 4: Because and this will give you like the reason as
Speaker 4: to why. Right Judge Scovdall, who is the the federal
Speaker 4: justice here writes in his opinion, the court finds that
Speaker 4: there that where a person corn crosses on foot within
Speaker 4: the checkerboard from public land to public land, without touching
Speaker 4: the surface of private land and without damaging private property,
Speaker 4: there is no liability for trespass. Very convenient that this
Speaker 4: line is in the opinion, because this is kind of
Speaker 4: where it stands in court. Is, Oh, really you want
Speaker 4: to sue? Where are the damages? How do we prove
Speaker 4: that there are damages to private land?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 1: Didn't didn't Just a little bit earlier in another wrinkle
Speaker 1: in this the landowner had said. The landowner comes and says, uh,
Speaker 1: because my because I used to have exclusive access to
Speaker 1: this public land and I now, don't I feel that
Speaker 1: I've lost seven and a half million dollars in land
Speaker 1: value of land because I understood my ranch to sort
Speaker 1: of have to come with exclusive BLM access, and now
Speaker 1: that it's not my ranch feels to me seven hundred
Speaker 1: or seven and a half million dollars less valuable and
Speaker 1: didn't like in some prior thing the judge bring up,
Speaker 1: I'm not buying that that that's these guys problem, or
Speaker 1: that that's that that that I think you're mixing up
Speaker 1: like that that how are how did these guys cost
Speaker 1: you seven and a half million dollars when we.
Speaker 4: There's a a good chance there is a probable chance
Speaker 4: that we can't determine those damages because it's not illegal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, it's because it hinges on it being illegal.
Speaker 4: Yes, And it's like you bought a ranch that has
Speaker 4: this type of land configuration, this checkerboard land configuration on
Speaker 4: part of it. That's that's your private dealing and you
Speaker 4: should should have been aware of the risks.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I always felt that his gripe was should to
Speaker 1: be with the realtors and the lawyers that did the
Speaker 1: deal when he bought the ranch, because he bought the
Speaker 1: ranch under the under the someone gave him the impression
Speaker 1: that he had exclusive access to this and it and
Speaker 1: that idea hadn't been tested in the courts, and he
Speaker 1: should have and someone maybe falsely advertised this.
Speaker 4: But you understand you you've listened to my strip club analogy, right,
Speaker 4: no please? So I bought a.
Speaker 1: Heart rate meter. Just heart meter, spike, We're.
Speaker 4: Gonna have some good background music. Yeah. So I bought
Speaker 4: a condo and here in in Bozeman, Okay, it's in
Speaker 4: a commercial area of town. It butts up to commercial property.
Speaker 4: It is at least a partially commercial property in itself
Speaker 4: right put in the strip club and the property behind
Speaker 4: that directly a butt's up to My property was for
Speaker 4: sale at the time. It's it's been rented in long
Speaker 4: term leases for five years now. It just was up
Speaker 4: for sale again and sold again. And speaking about the
Speaker 4: future of this property, right because you're investing in the property,
Speaker 4: I was like, so, the big risk here is this,
Speaker 4: because of the nature, this changing face of this commercial
Speaker 4: property that is directly out my back window. If they
Speaker 4: were to put in some sort of like, oh, I
Speaker 4: don't know, like Bozeman thing these days of like a
Speaker 4: wine bar and tasting room or yes with yeah, and
Speaker 4: who knows, Like, my property value could very well go up. However,
Speaker 4: if it were to turn into like an ultimately like
Speaker 4: super sedy like liquor store slash strip club situation, my
Speaker 4: property values would very much likely go down. And this
Speaker 4: is me a non uh mogul of any sorts by
Speaker 4: anyone's standards, right, So I find it absolutely ridiculous that
Speaker 4: this particular fellow, with his long list of financial accomplishments
Speaker 4: could turn around and be like, yeah, well the real
Speaker 4: estate agent censol, I mean, was the victim here, you
Speaker 4: know what I mean. It's like that is part of
Speaker 4: what you do in your due diligence as an adult
Speaker 4: purchasing anything caveat emptor yes, sir, buyer beware.
Speaker 1: So hmmm, so you're pointing to the no liability Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, no, yeah, somebody forced him to purchase this before
Speaker 4: he was of legal age and he didn't quite understand
Speaker 4: the Yeah, you'd have to tell me quite quite the
Speaker 4: story of there. So anyway, and there's been these previous instances,
Speaker 4: the blue sky scenario here for this whole situation is
Speaker 4: this guy Eshelman would have been like, all right, don't
Speaker 4: just don't tell anybody that you guys are doing this.
Speaker 4: I don't want to see a bunch of cars parked here.
Speaker 4: It's a pain in the butt. There's going to be trash.
Speaker 4: There's reasons that we don't want people corner crossing in
Speaker 4: here because they're gonna spread weeds around, there's always a
Speaker 4: risk of fire. We just want good neighbors, right, you
Speaker 4: guys be good neighbors, will be good neighbors.
Speaker 1: Nobody ever that that might have been the strategic approach. Now,
Speaker 1: in hindsight, that might have been the strategic, the strategically
Speaker 1: sound approach.
Speaker 4: Yes, Now however, holy moly, yeah.
Speaker 1: You have to wait in line to jump that corner.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely absolutely. It's an easy to get tagged because
Speaker 4: it's all private land with very little access. So you know,
Speaker 4: now that corner crossing is highly publicized. I guarantee there's
Speaker 4: going to be more traffic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're just playing, If if the landowners just
Speaker 1: playing for himself and isn't interested in policy, which is
Speaker 1: probably true, you're right. He should have said, boys, you
Speaker 1: got me. But here's the deal.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna build a quantt hut over here,
Speaker 4: and you guys can park in it, and then you
Speaker 4: come back out to the county road and you corner
Speaker 4: cross You let me know when you're gonna be out there.
Speaker 1: I'll let you know when I'm gonna be out there.
Speaker 1: And this is just gonna be our little thing.
Speaker 6: Exactly exactly.
Speaker 4: That's the long game.
Speaker 1: So that's good. That's some good insight. Cal I should
Speaker 1: have brought that up a long time ago.
Speaker 4: On facebook interesting points of this, and I'm very much
Speaker 4: burying the lead here. So obviously we got a great
Speaker 4: opinion from this judge, and that opinion stands, and these
Speaker 4: guys aren't going to get dinged with anything in this
Speaker 4: particular civil suit, which is great. However, it does not
Speaker 4: mean that, Okay, now corner crossing's totally legal. There still
Speaker 4: exists some gray area. But this opinion says based off
Speaker 4: of several cases, and I found it very interesting that
Speaker 4: he also looked at cases within the state of Wyoming
Speaker 4: and he didn't cite the Unlawful Enclosures Act, which is
Speaker 4: a federal act, and I thought, this is exactly what
Speaker 4: this is going to be totally based off of. But
Speaker 4: this judge, which says that you cannot create an obstruction
Speaker 4: that limits the public's ability to access public land. So
Speaker 4: at this corner, this common corner, an agent of Eshelman
Speaker 4: put to t posts and I think a little length
Speaker 4: to chain right at the corner that was supposed to
Speaker 4: be enough of an obstacle to where these gentlemen would
Speaker 4: have had to come into contact with private property in
Speaker 4: order to get over private property. So they went through
Speaker 4: the I would say, a very ceremonial effort of creating
Speaker 4: a ladder to go over to tea posts that don't
Speaker 4: connect to anything, right, Like a lot of folks could
Speaker 4: have jumped it. But they did this in order to
Speaker 4: signal to the land agents that hey, we're here to
Speaker 4: do this and we're going to do this ridiculous thing
Speaker 4: to show you that our intent is such and it's
Speaker 4: not to mess with your private property in any way.
Speaker 4: People are really getting hung up on this ladder thing,
Speaker 4: like that's what you have to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, he's a defense maker professional.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so he's like, it wasn't hard, but people are
Speaker 4: really getting hung up on this ladder. And a ladder,
Speaker 4: like I said, it's a symbol. It's not necessary to
Speaker 4: corner cross.
Speaker 1: Was he talking about let us have the ladder. Do
Speaker 1: we follow up with him on that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I'm in touch, but I think that we
Speaker 5: should sell some ladders on the website.
Speaker 1: Well no, but can't he I want that ladder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we have the we got weights and fish.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know.
Speaker 5: We're adding to our you know, we're going to amass
Speaker 5: so many things. Facts are going to be incredibly valuable
Speaker 5: at a Sotheby's auction for our own auction.
Speaker 4: So another case known as the McKay the you went
Speaker 4: to development company case back in nineteen fourteen, is ruling
Speaker 4: that Justice fourteen, nineteen fourteen. What was going on back then, Well,
Speaker 4: it is. It's just an extension of what was going
Speaker 4: on when this checkerboard system of land was laid out.
Speaker 1: It was probably not a hunting thing. It was probably
Speaker 1: whatever else.
Speaker 4: Crazing. This is grazing, right, but just as it is now.
Speaker 4: It's you know, the landscape changes with new ownership coming in.
Speaker 4: People put up signs or three strand barber fence where
Speaker 4: it used to be open range. And I think that's
Speaker 4: what the case was here. So a guy was just
Speaker 4: moving his sheep to his historic grazing area on public land.
Speaker 4: The new landowner came in and took issue with that,
Speaker 4: and somehow, some way I should really read up on this.
Speaker 4: McKay took his right to access his public grazing allotment
Speaker 4: to the court and won. So that's another case. And
Speaker 4: then there's a nineteen seventy four case from the Tenth
Speaker 4: Circuit Court that was cited as well. And again these
Speaker 4: come down to damages right to access the public's right
Speaker 4: to access public ground. And a new case that just
Speaker 4: passed here, not case, but a new law in Wyoming
Speaker 4: that clarified some trustpass language without it was kind of
Speaker 4: an interesting thing because it didn't directly name corner crossing,
Speaker 4: but it absolutely pertains to corner crossing and proof in
Speaker 4: the pudding here is justice Goobdall used it. Where the
Speaker 4: Wyoming legislature passed law actually passed this year traveling through
Speaker 4: private property to access public land. This clarified what traveling
Speaker 4: through required physically touching or driving on the surface of
Speaker 4: private property, which would not apply to the hunters in
Speaker 4: this case. And so all these little building blocks kind
Speaker 4: of build up right now because of the This is
Speaker 4: a relatively narrow opinion. According to a mutual friend of
Speaker 4: ours who used to be with the BLM is now
Speaker 4: at the National Wildlife Federation. But because it does lay
Speaker 4: out like trespassing or walking from corner to corner in
Speaker 4: the checkerboard fashion versus a corner that's not in the
Speaker 4: checkerboard fashion, which is kind of confusing to me. But anyway,
Speaker 4: that's where we're at right now. It's I think a
Speaker 4: very positive thing. And everyone's pretty much in agreement that
Speaker 4: this landowner is going to appeal the case and try
Speaker 4: to take it to a higher court. So it's not
Speaker 4: over yet. If it's this is a you know, these
Speaker 4: are like federal actions. These are cases that would very
Speaker 4: well be cited by somebody else who is in this
Speaker 4: legal position, even if it is not in the state
Speaker 4: of Wyoming, which makes it a national thing. So tons
Speaker 4: of checkerboard here in Montana, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming.
Speaker 1: So I got a handful of thoughts that I'm going
Speaker 1: to given no particular order about on this issue. There
Speaker 1: was a little detail merged recently where the the misso
Speaker 1: corner crossers who've been who were in our I was
Speaker 1: gonna say, who've been here? They've been in our old studio.
Speaker 1: So we had we had a couple of the Missouri
Speaker 1: Corner Crossers on the podcast, they had their on X
Speaker 1: account subpoenaed, okay, which is is very common. So like
Speaker 1: game wardens people, you know, they can they can subpoena
Speaker 1: that kind of information. And there emerged is it being
Speaker 1: called waypoint number six? Yes, yeah, So when they had
Speaker 1: their on X account subpoenaed, here's this waypoint that was
Speaker 1: made very definitely, well not made. A pin was dropped
Speaker 1: very definitely on private property.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And these pins when you drop them are are
Speaker 4: dated and everything, so you.
Speaker 6: Could drop it from your house.
Speaker 1: Well that's that's the rub is they can't you know,
Speaker 1: you can't say for certain that the pin was created.
Speaker 1: There was also a lot of like apparently a lot
Speaker 1: of deleting of waypoints. But there was a pin that
Speaker 1: was made very much on private property, and that's been
Speaker 1: brought up and brought up and brought up, but it
Speaker 1: can't definitively be said. Was that pin made by someone
Speaker 1: who who hit mark my location? Or was that pin
Speaker 1: moved or just dropped for whatever reason, dropped a pin
Speaker 1: overround the guy's place? Hard to say. So that was
Speaker 1: like an interesting little wrinkle that I was watching and
Speaker 1: I think it might be it's like, you know, like
Speaker 1: the Grassy Knoll. I think it's like waypoint six.
Speaker 4: It was like, we don't I guess I don't know
Speaker 4: if we need to go in it. But like I'm
Speaker 4: cleaning up waypoints and trying to use folders mainly, so
Speaker 4: when I'm like showing off stuff on my computer, I'm
Speaker 4: not showing people all the other places I go.
Speaker 1: Where if I look at this computer's like awesome spot,
Speaker 1: awesome spot.
Speaker 4: Right exactly like you're sitting down Spencer Newhart and he's like, yeah,
Speaker 4: but what about this Turkey waypoint? And we're not talking
Speaker 4: about that, And I'm like, I can't hide half my
Speaker 4: computer anyway. So you know, there's a lot of general
Speaker 4: waypoints out there, and I'm like looking, I'm like, oh,
Speaker 4: it's totally landlocked, like totally landlocked. There's no way to
Speaker 4: get in there. Or now I've been there and that's
Speaker 4: not actually a county road, it's a private road. Or
Speaker 4: there's all these things where it's like I don't know,
Speaker 4: we're gonna head this way. Here's the waypoint, Steve, you'll
Speaker 4: figure it out type of thing right where you're and
Speaker 4: then there's other ways to do it too where you're
Speaker 4: like zoomed out far enough to where you're like fat fingering, or.
Speaker 1: You could say like, hey, I saw a strutter right
Speaker 1: here if you get on like but you can get
Speaker 1: on public and just try to get as close to
Speaker 1: where I saw this strutter from my car, so then
Speaker 1: you might have a way.
Speaker 4: I don't know there was a ton of that this
Speaker 4: spring just from me.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm just saying it's like a I have a
Speaker 8: bunch of white points like that where they're on private,
Speaker 8: but it's like I see a turkey here on private, sure,
Speaker 8: but I'm on public.
Speaker 1: Well, if your stuff, if your account ever gets subpoened,
Speaker 1: someone might say, what were you doing all over this
Speaker 1: guy's place?
Speaker 3: Well, they can clarify this.
Speaker 1: You can refer interesting wrinkle number one number two. People
Speaker 1: keep sitting back waiting for precedent setting or waiting for
Speaker 1: it to be to DA here's clarification. But the fact
Speaker 1: that that that like the rules aren't being rewritten yet, right,
Speaker 1: it's just a matter of It's just a matter of
Speaker 1: even if the law isn't clarified, if it's not publicly clarified,
Speaker 1: you know, in in the statutes, it is. It increasingly
Speaker 1: is what prosecutor is going to want to take this on,
Speaker 1: and it might be.
Speaker 4: Better have nothing going on in your county aside from this.
Speaker 1: It might be that when you go look at the statutes,
Speaker 1: it might still be confusing, but you would then look
Speaker 1: at the prosecution history and say the legal language is confusing.
Speaker 1: Yet no one and they've sure tried, No one has
Speaker 1: been successfully prosecuted. So it's like looking for this to
Speaker 1: all of a sudden where looking for the issue to
Speaker 1: get legally clarified might not happen to anybody's satisfaction, and
Speaker 1: it might just be inference. When someone says, can I
Speaker 1: because I don't understand when I read the law, I
Speaker 1: can't tell if it's okay not okay? Or why does
Speaker 1: the state recommend against it? What the hell does that mean?
Speaker 1: And they need point. One might point and say, well,
Speaker 1: here's the history of people trying to prosecute this, up
Speaker 1: to you if you really feel like going through all that,
Speaker 1: But generally you're like, so far to date, no one's
Speaker 1: been no one's been hung for it.
Speaker 4: I like to point out also that right now it's
Speaker 4: very much a motivated foot access only situation, and I
Speaker 4: think the longer this goes on, the door gets whiter
Speaker 4: and whiter to like, well, I have a high step
Speaker 4: in quarter horse, I'll guarantee I can put all four
Speaker 4: feet from public to public on my quarter horse as
Speaker 4: we walk across this pan oh right, or you know
Speaker 4: the means of transportation, because if you go through the
Speaker 4: threads and all the talking online about this, it's like, well,
Speaker 4: let's just make an easement on everyone, right, Well, was
Speaker 4: it a five foot wide easement? Is it forty inch
Speaker 4: easement enough for you know, a small trail side by side?
Speaker 4: Like what you know, where do we go from here?
Speaker 4: And you know, again, if I was a big land
Speaker 4: owner with the public interest in mind, and also you
Speaker 4: know all those things that I mentioned of, like wanting
Speaker 4: to protect like good grass stock, or be free from
Speaker 4: worrying about fire danger all those things, I'd just be like,
Speaker 4: let's just let's just not let's just just keep it
Speaker 4: how it is. The folks that want to figure it out,
Speaker 4: they can figure it out, and that's just gonna be
Speaker 4: the best thing for everybody.
Speaker 1: Uh Uh. Number three of my five wrinkles or things
Speaker 1: that I've occur to me as I think about this,
Speaker 1: accuracy fences aren't on surveyed lines for the most part.
Speaker 1: A lot of times fences are a guess, it's a
Speaker 1: matter of convenience. This is where we always understood it
Speaker 1: to be. You cannot go out. Let's say, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, the law was clarified, very definitely. Corner crossing
Speaker 1: is legal law as you don't step foot on private land. Dude.
Speaker 1: This corner we're talking about Wyoming was a surveyed corner
Speaker 1: that had a marker on it. You cannot go out
Speaker 1: and use mapping apps fence placement and be that you're
Speaker 1: right on the money. I picture a future in which
Speaker 1: access proponents are spending money surveying corners, and even that
Speaker 1: is gonna get touchy because those corners are not gonna
Speaker 1: be where these fences that have been there for one
Speaker 1: hundred years stand. They're just not They're just not.
Speaker 8: I wanted one time was curious about a corner in
Speaker 8: eastern Montana and went to that corner because.
Speaker 4: Was it like, we're so close to the road.
Speaker 3: Is man, it's close to a road.
Speaker 8: You can either go around and it takes a lot
Speaker 8: of miles and a lot of time to get into
Speaker 8: this area, or it's like you can hop a corner
Speaker 8: close to a road, and I was just like curious
Speaker 8: about it. So I went to that corner and I
Speaker 8: found a corner pin looked at my on X and
Speaker 8: the corner pin was not like on X in the
Speaker 8: corner pin were off slightly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I mean, yeah, they don't advertise as being
Speaker 1: like it's like that. You don't like settle. You don't
Speaker 1: pull up an app on your phone and settle like
Speaker 1: legal disputes about property lines. I know, cause like mine,
Speaker 1: if that's the case, my driveway is a little bit
Speaker 1: out in the road. But I don't think it is. Yeah, right, Well,
Speaker 1: when you're hunting on a grand scale, you're not like,
Speaker 1: you know, they're not saying like, oh yeah, accurate to
Speaker 1: point to a quarter inch. Yeah, it's just not what
Speaker 1: it's it's not it's not its intention for people to
Speaker 1: think that you're just gonna run around willy nilly jumping fences.
Speaker 1: If this really becomes like a contentious thing and you're
Speaker 1: just gonna really nearly run around jumping fences thinking you're
Speaker 1: never to step and foot, it's like I wouldn't trust anything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but a corner and that in this case, that had
Speaker 1: a corner mark number four. I like to point out
Speaker 1: these boys, these Missouri guys, this is like a detail
Speaker 1: that matters a lot to me. Asked and asked about, uh,
Speaker 1: can we do this? Can we do this? And we're
Speaker 1: told most and came out and said they're not doing
Speaker 1: anything wrong. Another officer came out from a different enforcement
Speaker 1: agency said they're not doing anything wrong. So they were
Speaker 1: doing like they did more due diligence on the issue
Speaker 1: than I've probably ever done on any access issue in
Speaker 1: my entire life and got completely mixed messaging. So in
Speaker 1: some ways, when they were talking about these guys being
Speaker 1: owing someone damages, I couldn't escape the feeling that there's
Speaker 1: a system that that that that failed them and being
Speaker 1: able to get a straight answer when you're really trying
Speaker 1: to go out and be like, well what about blank,
Speaker 1: everybody's like, oh, yeah, you can do that. I'm calling
Speaker 1: the cops. Cop comes out they can do that. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call a different cop that comes out and says, eh,
Speaker 1: let's try to arrest them. It's like, you can't do
Speaker 1: that to people. What was my last one? Oh, they
Speaker 1: weren't activists. They definitely your point about in hindsight to
Speaker 1: strike a deal with them. Like, I've always felt like
Speaker 1: I'm in dangerous waters when I try to bring up
Speaker 1: rolls of parks in relation to this situation. But like,
Speaker 1: they were not activists. They weren't trying to set precedent.
Speaker 1: They weren't trying to challenge precedent. They were legit Like,
Speaker 1: and I've met him, and I didn't think this is
Speaker 1: true until I met him. When I met him and
Speaker 1: heard the whole story from their mouths, I was like,
Speaker 1: these dudes were legitimately just going hunting and they probably
Speaker 1: would have never said a word to anybody. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: found a sweet spot. I'm not gonna tell anybody about it.
Speaker 1: They were not activists. No, people think they were activists.
Speaker 1: I assumed they were activists. They're not activists.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they basically had an over the counter tag opportunity
Speaker 4: as a non resident in an area that had good
Speaker 4: game populations. They have to drive all the way from Missouri. Like,
Speaker 4: these guys were not gonna all of a sudden to
Speaker 4: have twenty trucks at camp.
Speaker 5: Right, they're a bunch of middle ages love to hunt.
Speaker 3: Not activists, you.
Speaker 1: Know, but you could picture it being activist though, right,
Speaker 1: you can picture someone saying we're gonna push this to
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court and I'm gonna call the police and
Speaker 1: tell them to be there at eight am. When I
Speaker 1: jumped the corner and I'm gonna drive this home. By god,
Speaker 1: they were like, yeah, man, I think he's probably some
Speaker 1: good help back there if we like call around and
Speaker 1: clarify that what we think is true is true when
Speaker 1: going to hunt and holy cow, has it become talk
Speaker 1: about department of like unintended consequences? My god?
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, that's my final point. But also, I mean,
Speaker 4: hats off to them too, because they weren't going to
Speaker 4: just like swallow a bad pill, right. They're like, well, no,
Speaker 4: that we are right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they weren't activists, but they weren't suckers. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: when someone tried to stick it to them, they're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm not. I mean, I'm confident in what I I'm
Speaker 1: confident that what I found out is true. I'm confident
Speaker 1: about the research. I'm confident about the informed assumptions I made,
Speaker 1: and to the to date they've been born out legally.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, we do have to have to. I mean,
Speaker 4: Wyoming Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers for their expediency
Speaker 4: and back in these boys and oh and making sure
Speaker 4: that we're going to figure it out. I mean, that's
Speaker 4: that's amazing. I do have to say, I think this,
Speaker 4: this little story that I've told before is like really
Speaker 4: paints an interesting picture when we talk about because it's
Speaker 4: just so easy to simplify things into like land owner
Speaker 4: public land opposite sides of things. Right. Well, his buddy
Speaker 4: of mine, Leo, I used to guide on his place.
Speaker 4: He had an enormous chunk of Petroleum County, sweetheart of
Speaker 4: a human being, awesome, awesome guy, and I used to
Speaker 4: ride around with him all the time. He'd come down
Speaker 4: to our camp. We outfitted our base was on his place,
Speaker 4: and just to like nothing's black and white, right, he
Speaker 4: is a huge private landowner. He's got a bunch of
Speaker 4: his property in our private land public access program, which
Speaker 4: you know he can't outfit on. But we had our
Speaker 4: camp on a chunk of private that wasn't in his
Speaker 4: block management chunk. So you know, we had a sweet
Speaker 4: spot right there. So he had private, private access, he
Speaker 4: had private access open to the public. Truth be known,
Speaker 4: if he ever knocked on his door, he was just
Speaker 4: gonna say yes anyway, access. But he'd come down, he'd
Speaker 4: pick me up in the truck and we'd go just
Speaker 4: he'd want to stuff and I'd open gates for him, right,
Speaker 4: like very normal deal out there. And and I was
Speaker 4: always interested in learning more of the country. And I
Speaker 4: finally got a GPS and we came up to It's
Speaker 4: interesting because it's a state section aground, but the new
Speaker 4: lease on that state section was the first person to
Speaker 4: fence it, and the fence was ended up taking about
Speaker 4: a quarter mile of my buddy's private property. Like you
Speaker 4: could stand on the corner post and you're like, man, this,
Speaker 4: I'm like, hey, you look at this. I mean, look
Speaker 4: how far the fence is on to your place right
Speaker 4: on me're like GPS plat map the whole nine yards
Speaker 4: right because I was like doing my homework driving around
Speaker 4: with him, and he goes, huh. He goes, well, Ryan
Speaker 4: can on the whole damn world. And just like away
Speaker 4: we went and nothing was said. You know, it's like,
Speaker 4: well can the can on at all? You know, it's
Speaker 4: just like, oh my.
Speaker 1: God, Krinda's deleted on me the thing that I'm most
Speaker 1: dying to talk about, but we're short on time. Well, no,
Speaker 1: let me just hit it real quick, because this is
Speaker 1: the most interesting you want to talk about legal wrinkles.
Speaker 1: It's the weirdest thing when you go for if to
Speaker 1: say went out, there's never went and bought a gun.
Speaker 1: When you go buy a gun from an f FL
Speaker 1: a federal Firearms licensee, you come in and do a
Speaker 1: question a questionnaire, ten questions, eleven questions, stuff such as
Speaker 1: are there any restraining orders against you? Have you ever
Speaker 1: renounced your citizenship? Are you a fugitive from justice? Are
Speaker 1: you a felon? Are you addicted to drugs?
Speaker 3: Okay, there's like child support questions on there or something.
Speaker 1: I don't believe. I don't I can't think of a
Speaker 1: child support question.
Speaker 5: There may there may be like are you owing?
Speaker 1: I don't remember that? Not look him up? Well hunter Biden, dude,
Speaker 1: I'd never thought in a millionaires I would say that
Speaker 1: name in public because I like write, I don't like
Speaker 1: to go near politics that doesn't intersect with our areas
Speaker 1: of focus. However, he just intersected a thing that I'm
Speaker 1: interested in. He bought a gun in twenty eighteen, Okay,
Speaker 1: where a time when he has openly admitted he was
Speaker 1: a crack addict. Soften. When he filled out his FFL form,
Speaker 1: he said that he's not addicted to drugs, but then
Speaker 1: clarified that he is addicted to drugs in his book,
Speaker 1: in his book which puts him that he lied on
Speaker 1: the FFL form. So now his many enemies are coming
Speaker 1: after him to be like, dude, you lied on the
Speaker 1: gun control form. And his legal representatives are saying that
Speaker 1: if this becomes a legal exposure to him, he's gonna
Speaker 1: sue on behalf of his Second Amendment rights that a
Speaker 1: crack addict should certainly well be able to get a gun.
Speaker 1: Talk about like landing in a landing in a very
Speaker 1: unexpected spot, almost as almost as bewildering as I was
Speaker 1: when I saw it into that white oak and all
Speaker 1: that water came out, A lot of water came out
Speaker 1: of that tree. What was happening there?
Speaker 6: Harlow tree? Uh huh, big cavity in the middle. A
Speaker 6: lot of times the pith, the heartwood, the tree will
Speaker 6: decompose over time. And you know that's important for all
Speaker 6: kinds of critters that use those cavities, and the space
Speaker 6: inside as habitat is foldable water and everything not to me, no, uh,
Speaker 6: And so you know stem flow water runs down through
Speaker 6: the you know, up lands on the canopy, runs down
Speaker 6: the branches and finds its way into that.
Speaker 1: So you think it was it was rain water hiding
Speaker 1: in there. Yeah, filled up a hollow.
Speaker 6: Why are just trying to push your buddy's buttons now, Steve.
Speaker 1: Oh, you haven't done anything yet. He's gonna be this
Speaker 1: next one is not gonna rile them up. Okay, explain
Speaker 1: how why Like when you go look at a spruce tree,
Speaker 1: fir tree, okay, Christmas trees. Yeah, why are they shaped
Speaker 1: like a cone?
Speaker 6: Yeah? There, it's uh, it's a story of dominance and
Speaker 6: control and uh.
Speaker 1: This ties back to what I was just talking about transitions.
Speaker 6: I'm listening. I'm listening now. It's uh, it really begins
Speaker 6: with that. And you know, the imperative of the tree
Speaker 6: to grow up towards what the sun right, and so
Speaker 6: there's it's like hormones that control that are activated in
Speaker 6: the in the top of the tree, the growing tip,
Speaker 6: the leader, right. Uh, there's a leader at the top
Speaker 6: on the spruce and firs in particular, they all have them.
Speaker 6: But at the top and at the ends of each
Speaker 6: branch there is a bud that's enclosed next year's leaves
Speaker 6: and shoot growth that is controlled the opening and the
Speaker 6: extension of which is controlled by the Each of those
Speaker 6: leaders exerts control over all the other buds below and
Speaker 6: behind it. And so the leader at the top of
Speaker 6: the tree is exerting control over the ones just below.
Speaker 6: You look at the leader growth this u this summer
Speaker 6: on any of these trees, and you'll note an incredible
Speaker 6: pattern is that the top has that that noble length
Speaker 6: with the shoot length is longer on the top than
Speaker 6: it is on any of the subordinate branches. And that's
Speaker 6: because the leader is saying, I'm the leader, and I'm
Speaker 6: going up, and it exerts this hormonal control over the
Speaker 6: It sort of regulates the growth of the others to
Speaker 6: keep them from growing out sideways and trying to get
Speaker 6: up above it. Right, So it's it's this.
Speaker 1: But it's competing against its own self. Yeah, you can
Speaker 1: see it competing like it is, right, it's an organism.
Speaker 1: It's like a single individual. Sure you can see it
Speaker 1: competing against its neighbors time, but just a weird way
Speaker 1: to express at the top of the tree. But I
Speaker 1: guess it's like an ordered exactly it's ordered because it
Speaker 1: would be for one of the other branches to get
Speaker 1: uppity would be damaging to the whole tree.
Speaker 6: Right, because it's not really going in the right direction
Speaker 6: we need to get above. It's in fact, a way
Speaker 6: of ensuring or maximizing competitive edge over its neighbors is
Speaker 6: by making sure this the shoot, the leader is the
Speaker 6: leader and can really climb and get up above the
Speaker 6: competing plants around it, right, And so that's really what
Speaker 6: it is. It's just this pattern of control that, based
Speaker 6: on the way those conifer species are built, results in
Speaker 6: this sort of conical form. And then we can get
Speaker 6: into well what good is that? And that's a fun
Speaker 6: question in all these tree questions, is like any given trait,
Speaker 6: why does people are Why is it this way? Why
Speaker 6: is it that way? Well do basic answers. One is
Speaker 6: it happened sort of a mutation genetically. It just sort
Speaker 6: of occurred, and there's no good reason for it to
Speaker 6: be eliminated through selection. It doesn't harm the tree though,
Speaker 6: it sort of sticks around. The other answer is because
Speaker 6: it confers some advantage to the tree, right, And so
Speaker 6: in this case you're growing up and having this form,
Speaker 6: it's easy to imagine, well, where do these grow and
Speaker 6: montane environments heavy snow loads, and it's really good for
Speaker 6: shedding snow mm as opposed to that shape all out
Speaker 6: here bushy, and then you get branch breakage and snow loading.
Speaker 6: So it's it's a means.
Speaker 1: That's a good point, man. They do slough snow real effectively.
Speaker 6: Wicked.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, like when you get it, when you get
Speaker 1: like a June snowstorm, and all the deciduous trees are
Speaker 1: like snapping and limbs falling off from those things to
Speaker 1: shake it off.
Speaker 6: And so you know, it sort of starts with this
Speaker 6: hormonal control as sort of a growth regulation in the shape,
Speaker 6: and we can all imagine it confers some ability in
Speaker 6: their environments to kind of outcompete others and and actually
Speaker 6: just survive. First of all. Yep, it's the first order
Speaker 6: of business.
Speaker 1: I have a Colorado blue spruce that the top got
Speaker 1: busted out of it. It's chaos up there, exactly. And
Speaker 1: I've gotten up there and tried to tie a new
Speaker 1: dude in there to see if he could, Like, I
Speaker 1: tied him with a rope. See if you would like
Speaker 1: assume the dude it's chaos on the top of that
Speaker 1: tree I've given up on.
Speaker 6: That was the next point would exactly that, And you've
Speaker 6: experien inst it is that when something does in pines
Speaker 6: is a a weavil that often goes for the terminal
Speaker 6: shoot the leader. That's what did it, and they it
Speaker 6: kills it, and then it's chaos. As you describe it.
Speaker 1: They it looks like a crow, not a crowls. That's
Speaker 1: like on a sailboat. It looks like I mean like
Speaker 1: literally which is broom.
Speaker 6: And so what we do, uh in that circumstance in
Speaker 6: your yard or Christmas tree growers do it all the
Speaker 6: time is you share. And so when you have one
Speaker 6: that the leader that's broken off, you can get up
Speaker 6: in there and and just trim back that chaos a
Speaker 6: little bit and choose one. That's what I've advised countless
Speaker 6: landowners is, Oh, you know, it's not the end of
Speaker 6: the world. You can just choose that next best one
Speaker 6: that turns the secondary branch that was not the leader,
Speaker 6: but who has done pretty well and seems to be
Speaker 6: in a favorable position. Clip the other ones around it,
Speaker 6: take a third of their shoot elongation, clip it off,
Speaker 6: pruning chairs, and then that one that you left now
Speaker 6: has this advantage and it will what we call apical
Speaker 6: dominance and become the one the boss.
Speaker 1: Shoot, it's a great name for the episode. Yeah, apical dominance.
Speaker 1: Look for that new podcast feed Nice Joe Seth, here's
Speaker 1: a forester.
Speaker 6: We we discussed that already and I immediately knew I
Speaker 6: liked him for a reason. And now I know.
Speaker 1: Why did he tell you about the tests he had
Speaker 1: to take? Tellim about the.
Speaker 8: Test we had a I think it was it was
Speaker 8: it was dendro dendrology. The we had a twig test
Speaker 8: where yeah, like an I D test where they gave
Speaker 8: you a section of of twig from the leaves. Leaves
Speaker 8: are yeah, said for sockers, yead identify. I forget how
Speaker 8: many different species. Well it was a lot you had.
Speaker 1: I thought you said, it's like seventy or something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's something high like that. Yeah. Yeah, we had
Speaker 3: it just by the bud, just by the bud.
Speaker 6: It's classic. We had our dendro final at the University
Speaker 6: of Vermont when I back in another century.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 6: It was one hundred uh samples and so it was
Speaker 6: mostly buds, twigs, leaf scars, fruits, you know, like all
Speaker 6: different kinds and uh it was sort of legendary as
Speaker 6: this like real ball busting exam but a lot of
Speaker 6: pride in in like smoking it and getting it for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I got a question for you. It's not
Speaker 1: in your book. How dumb are you if you say acorn?
Speaker 3: I'm just for a friend.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know, I like, I gotta say, and I'm
Speaker 6: hip to this, I'm not. Well, I'm I'm from from
Speaker 6: I will just say that, Steve. I really like hearing
Speaker 6: people who sound like they're from someplace, you know what
Speaker 6: I mean, America And I can't even say it is
Speaker 6: it akorn? When I hear some yeah, some tree love
Speaker 6: and nuts say acorn, I'm like, all right, he's from somewhere.
Speaker 3: I'm not.
Speaker 6: That's all.
Speaker 1: There's a I don't know if we have him on
Speaker 1: the website anymore. Of apparently there's some kind of patch
Speaker 1: or something with an acorn that says ache a e
Speaker 1: R n acren.
Speaker 8: I think just that that well, I think Paul Lewis
Speaker 8: made clay some of those patches.
Speaker 1: Uh, speaking of acorns, you know, my friend and I said,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be like fact checking everything you say. Yeah,
Speaker 1: me and him had a bet one time man, and
Speaker 1: I can't remember the details of the bet. I remember
Speaker 1: I won it. It's gonna get into a question that
Speaker 1: you had. There are a question you deal in woods wise,
Speaker 1: but how many pounds? What's the most pounds of acorns
Speaker 1: that an oak tree might throw off?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know in a given amount of time, Like.
Speaker 1: I think Bubbly Dog might have said something like hundreds
Speaker 1: of pounds, and I was like, that can't be true.
Speaker 1: I can't remember the details of the bet.
Speaker 6: I don't know that that's crazy. I'm mean, it's you've
Speaker 6: walked around out there in a big year. It's like
Speaker 6: marbles underfoot, you know, you know it beg a lot
Speaker 6: of branches, a lot of leaves they put them out, Uh,
Speaker 6: one tree, I mean hundreds of pounds seems maybe it's
Speaker 6: a little steep.
Speaker 1: That that probably was that. I'm sure that wasn't what
Speaker 1: it was, But I just didn't know if you if
Speaker 1: you happened and.
Speaker 6: I could, I could that's actually find a bowl, I'm sure, yeah.
Speaker 4: And acorns are nothing when like that's like a piddly
Speaker 4: ass little fruit compared to like a horse chestnut or
Speaker 4: black walnut. And you like there's some trees out there
Speaker 4: that produce some hefty, hefty fruits.
Speaker 1: That'd be an interesting you know, like, how is it
Speaker 1: caribou that have the highest ratio of horn weight per
Speaker 1: body antler weight per body weight maybe or something like that.
Speaker 1: It'd be interesting. The what tree? Damn apple tree?
Speaker 8: Maybe citrus high weight, perinean highest weight per weight you know.
Speaker 1: Racial. But here's what okay, So on the acorn subject,
Speaker 1: you're going acorn? Oh, yeah, big time, now that he
Speaker 1: knows it's not stupid. Does the bumper crop of acorns
Speaker 1: predict a harsh winter? That's the thing I've heard my
Speaker 1: whole life. Of course, you have the trees made a
Speaker 1: lot of acorns. The thinking goes, trees produce a lot
Speaker 1: of acorns this year. Uh, they're and the logic is
Speaker 1: they're very nice, they're very kind, and they are wanting
Speaker 1: to help their animal brethren get through this severe knowing
Speaker 1: it's going to be such a bad winter and all
Speaker 1: the animals are going to be hard up. They have
Speaker 1: magnanimously thrown off a hellacious crop of acorns.
Speaker 3: Right, it's like the amount of black and a holy bugger?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: Did you ever hear that?
Speaker 6: On though?
Speaker 8: Like a wooly bugger back east, like it's brown and black,
Speaker 8: and sometimes you see something that have a little bit
Speaker 8: of brown something.
Speaker 3: I've seen them all black before.
Speaker 1: And what's that.
Speaker 8: I've heard that the more black on the wooly bugger,
Speaker 8: the harsher the winter is going to be.
Speaker 1: And there's that the animals have a particularly thick fur
Speaker 1: this fall. It's gonna be a hellacious winner.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah, So like those subjects you don't like to
Speaker 6: go near, this is these ky who am I to
Speaker 6: interrupt generations of folklore? You know that you know it's
Speaker 6: coming from a good place, But no, they're wrong. It's uh.
Speaker 6: In the case of masting, this sort of synchronous bulk
Speaker 6: production of seed or fruits within a species across quite
Speaker 6: a range. Explain synchronous all at the same time one year,
Speaker 6: where all the trees are are the oak trees in
Speaker 6: a given valley or whatever are all putting out a
Speaker 6: lot of acorns every year that year, so in synchrony
Speaker 6: with each other. Right, So that's masting in general. So
Speaker 6: this idea is that when that happens, it's any production
Speaker 6: of fruit really is more a reflection of past environmental
Speaker 6: conditions in particular and energetic conditions of the tree. It's
Speaker 6: sort of status health status. It's way more about what
Speaker 6: it has experienced in the last few years than what
Speaker 6: it is thinking the next year is going to be.
Speaker 6: So it's more a prediction of what has happened than
Speaker 6: a reflection of what has happened than a prediction of
Speaker 6: what is about to happen. It's not a good predictor
Speaker 6: of the future. It's telling you that did pretty well
Speaker 6: the last couple of years growing seasons in terms of moisture,
Speaker 6: nutrient uptake, solar gain. It takes a lot of energy
Speaker 6: to produce all of those fruits, and it's at the
Speaker 6: expense of root growth, diameter growth, shoot growth, height growth, right,
Speaker 6: But it's the biological imperative past those genes on and
Speaker 6: so they're built to do this. And what's really cool
Speaker 6: when you look across a range of species over a
Speaker 6: long march of time and geeky for scientists kind of
Speaker 6: tracking and then hypothesizing and testing, is what has emerged
Speaker 6: is this predator. It's a seed predator satiation hypothesis. That is,
Speaker 6: it's a strategy, a reproductive strategy to bulk up your
Speaker 6: energy story, your energy reserves and then put out a
Speaker 6: bunch of acorns in this case this year, everybody doing
Speaker 6: it kind of together to overwhelm all the seed predators
Speaker 6: think squirrels.
Speaker 1: Are you familiar with the term predator swamping? And with
Speaker 1: birds and animals, I mean like when you get these
Speaker 1: huge aggregations of nesting birds for it, like geese, like
Speaker 1: snow geese in the Arctic, huge aggregations synchronized egg laying,
Speaker 1: and they're getting hammered by predators. But it happens so
Speaker 1: fast that even with all the Arctic foxes, all the
Speaker 1: red foxes, everything, eating all those eggs, they can't get
Speaker 1: to them all in time. This is the same thing
Speaker 1: had you spread it out over the whole summer, they
Speaker 1: probably would have gotten every last one. But also it's
Speaker 1: like wham, we're gonna lose fifty fifty percent. They won't
Speaker 1: get to exactly, and then those ones will be able
Speaker 1: to fly by the time they get to them, you.
Speaker 6: Know, very similar. I think sort of idea here is that, yeah,
Speaker 6: in those big years you put out so many that
Speaker 6: some acorns are going to become oak trees, you know,
Speaker 6: they just and then the lean years where you don't
Speaker 6: put it out, that's actually keeping those squirrel populations somewhat
Speaker 6: in check. It's limiting them by by limiting their availability
Speaker 6: of food resources, right, So it's kind of both. And
Speaker 6: the idea is somebody gets a little wacky and start
Speaker 6: an oak tree, starts putting out in an off year. Well,
Speaker 6: they're going to lose all their acorns because the predators
Speaker 6: are kind of hungry for it. Right, So it's the
Speaker 6: same idea of like doing it at the same time
Speaker 6: and doing it over every few years instead of every
Speaker 6: year to build. So it's also allows you to then
Speaker 6: kind of rebuild your reserves, your energy and nutrient reserves
Speaker 6: so as to be able to make flowers and then
Speaker 6: fruits in the case of acorns, make sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you were pointing out in your book, you're pointing
Speaker 1: out an interesting thing as well, that a lot of
Speaker 1: oak trees are the same age, same same birth date
Speaker 1: because that system is effective. Like that, meaning on these
Speaker 1: years where they got like a piss poor amount of acorns,
Speaker 1: they're just getting eaten because there's not that many around
Speaker 1: and there's so many animals that they're going to find them.
Speaker 1: But then on those bumper crop years, you find that
Speaker 1: when you go into a stand, right, you'll find that
Speaker 1: those bumper crop years being actually reflected in any generation
Speaker 1: in recruitment, meaning like whatever twenty twenty two had a
Speaker 1: big bumper crop, you might find that down the road
Speaker 1: when you like age a bunch of trees, you age
Speaker 1: them back to that that that worked, like that big
Speaker 1: year was a made oak trees.
Speaker 6: Sort of cost benefit analysis, if you will. I mean,
Speaker 6: we're dangerously close to wild anthropomorphisms here all over the place,
Speaker 6: but it's helpful for the conversation, you know, to think
Speaker 6: of it this way. Yeah, and it stands to reason.
Speaker 1: And you brought up a thing that I've tried to
Speaker 1: explain in the past. Stephen Gould, Stephen J. Stephen J. Gould,
Speaker 1: He'd like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna butcher this this thought.
Speaker 6: He had such great stuff.
Speaker 1: But he was like, we're always looking at when we
Speaker 1: look at nature, we're always saying, well, why is that
Speaker 1: that way?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 1: And nowadays, like at a time you would have looked
Speaker 1: and everything would have you know, everything would have been
Speaker 1: explained as something divine or hidden. Right. And then we
Speaker 1: fell in love with rational thought, and and and how
Speaker 1: we defined scientific rational thought. We fell in love with
Speaker 1: with natural selection evolution, and so we came this idea that,
Speaker 1: like everything you see must be advantageous exactly Okay, So
Speaker 1: why is that tree's bark grayish brown? What is the
Speaker 1: advantage of its bark being grayish brown? And Stephen J. Goolle,
Speaker 1: I can't remember why he wrote this, is he was saying,
Speaker 1: maybe just because exactly me, maybe really thick bark is
Speaker 1: advantageous to that tree because it's fire resistant. And for
Speaker 1: whatever reason that really thick bark is grayish brown. It
Speaker 1: doesn't hurt the tree, doesn't help the tree. It's just
Speaker 1: gray as brown. There's no why. And I think a
Speaker 1: lot of times we like to say animals do this.
Speaker 4: Because, yeah, what's its job.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they like to do that because and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I agree that they sure seem to like to do that.
Speaker 1: The because part man, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 6: It's rampants, they say. And you know, God bless some
Speaker 6: forestry students, natural history students. They were asking these questions,
Speaker 6: why why why is it doing this? And it's really
Speaker 6: I've found that it really bums people out when I
Speaker 6: say there may not be a good reason. The reason
Speaker 6: may be that there's no reason for it to go away.
Speaker 6: However it emerged genetic mutation or what have you. It's
Speaker 6: here now. It's not conferring an advantage. It's just not
Speaker 6: a disadvantage. There's no selection pressure against it to remove
Speaker 6: it from the population, so it kind of perpetuates.
Speaker 1: A salmon's egg might just be orange, yeah, exactly, And
Speaker 1: if they were blue, there might be just as many salmon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there might be just as many salmon around or not.
Speaker 6: And that gets fun too, just like what's going on here.
Speaker 1: That's why I'm always advocated for parallel universes in which
Speaker 1: we could run one with blue salmon eggs, one run
Speaker 1: with orange salmon eggs, and check in with each other
Speaker 1: now and then and see, like, you know, no one's
Speaker 1: taken me up on this.
Speaker 6: I have a feeling that when when you're doing research,
Speaker 6: if you were doing field science and research, you know,
Speaker 6: I have your control group, you know you don't. I
Speaker 6: have a strong feeling that you'd always want to be
Speaker 6: in the out of control group.
Speaker 1: Mm m sure, Yeah, to keep an eye on that one. Yeah, Uh,
Speaker 1: here's the one you had in your book that we've
Speaker 1: talked about one hundred times. In context of property taxes,
Speaker 1: does a hilly acre contain more land than a flat one.
Speaker 1: I've always wondered this, like if you own deeply in
Speaker 1: sized like like a certain however, we define an acre
Speaker 1: of land okay, and it's deeply in sized or it's
Speaker 1: mountainous like that person is getting a screaming deal on
Speaker 1: property taxes over the guy that owns the flat land
Speaker 1: because the person with the super steep ground has to
Speaker 1: own more square footage of surface area. The then the
Speaker 1: person in western Kansas paying taxes on acre ground.
Speaker 6: You got it.
Speaker 1: I mean it's like, how wildly off can it be?
Speaker 1: Like how much square footage of land can you own
Speaker 1: that's still being called an acre?
Speaker 6: Well, funny you asked, because I did push the pencil
Speaker 6: around a.
Speaker 1: Little biting significant if.
Speaker 6: On a large enough area, yes, but in most ownership
Speaker 6: sort of size ranges, yeah, it's some but not huge.
Speaker 6: So the deal is, you're right, the thinking is sound.
Speaker 6: With all this hilly terrain, there's more surface area and
Speaker 6: you nailed that, but.
Speaker 1: Really explain what an acre is to.
Speaker 6: So an acre by definition is forty three, five hundred
Speaker 6: and sixty square feet.
Speaker 3: Of that number was drilled into my head.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, it's.
Speaker 3: Over and over and over.
Speaker 8: It explains where it came four three six, It's like
Speaker 8: it's there, yeah, never leave.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So originally I mean so that's a two dimensional
Speaker 6: that right, And this comes back we'll get back to
Speaker 6: the question. That's that's the issue. It's a two dimensional measure. Uh,
Speaker 6: an acre it's square be two hundred and eight point
Speaker 6: seven feet on a side, it's forty three thousand, five
Speaker 6: hundred and sixty square feet. And that, as I understand,
Speaker 6: came originally from a furrow, which became a furlong, which
Speaker 6: became the acre. So this will all be all started
Speaker 6: from the length. The distance an oxen could plow before
Speaker 6: needing a break was the length, and then yeah, you
Speaker 6: gotta love it, right, and then that turned into a
Speaker 6: team in a certain period of time, that was the acre.
Speaker 4: Do you think an oxen standard existed somewhere like, oh,
Speaker 4: that is measured off of that oxen? Yeah right, that
Speaker 4: we keep here.
Speaker 6: Badass oxen. I'm doing way more than that, right.
Speaker 1: Like I've all four measured the ground, but who's picking
Speaker 1: the ox.
Speaker 6: Excellent point. So with that prehistory there, an acre is
Speaker 6: a fixed square footage of area. And where it comes
Speaker 6: back to this question of hilly acre have more land
Speaker 6: than a flat acre is well of a hilly acre
Speaker 6: has more surface area. And that's what you said, Steve,
Speaker 6: and that's right. But real estate back to the corner crossing,
Speaker 6: I don't know if we're allowed to go back there.
Speaker 6: But these these lots are laid out not on surface
Speaker 6: area but as horizontal distance sort of floating above the ground.
Speaker 6: This is known as plane surveying p L A n E.
Speaker 6: It's a plane. And so the concept is the acre
Speaker 6: is like sort of hovering above the ground in this
Speaker 6: two dimensional thing. Now, so if you go out and
Speaker 6: measure from one corner pin to another, down a steep
Speaker 6: into a canyon or whatever, pulling a tape to measure
Speaker 6: the distance that that slope distance, the ground distance would
Speaker 6: be more simple geometry then the horizontal distance vating above
Speaker 6: those two points. And so by convention, that's all by
Speaker 6: convention it has. That's surveying is based on plane surveying.
Speaker 6: Now there is at large, like big ass scales they're
Speaker 6: surveying that takes into account the curvature of the earth
Speaker 6: there is. Yeah, but that's not how property is measured
Speaker 6: and transacted, right, But that's a whole other kind of surveying.
Speaker 1: So in the best case scenario, you might have a
Speaker 1: one point what acres of surface area per you.
Speaker 6: Know, maybe zero point one point five you might get
Speaker 6: on this sort of garden variety. So people are getting
Speaker 6: a real scream a real screaming deal. But the bigger
Speaker 6: it gets, the steeper, the more of these folds that
Speaker 6: you have, Yeah, I mean you take takes a lot
Speaker 6: more to cover it if you are covering the surface.
Speaker 6: And that does translate and a touch on this in
Speaker 6: the book to growing conditions, opportunity sites for trees to exist,
Speaker 6: you know, on the slopes, and probably more important though
Speaker 6: where productivity of trees, timber, acorns deer because of their
Speaker 6: relationship with those trees and the fruits. It's more it's
Speaker 6: it's probably more about aspect the direction that slope faces
Speaker 6: where you we'll have a greater influence on what's growing
Speaker 6: there or the habitat conditions there. But anyway, the big
Speaker 6: version here is that the hilly acre has more surface area,
Speaker 6: but not more acres because acres are measured. As this
Speaker 6: plane hovering above about acorns.
Speaker 4: I still do a whole lot of looking out the
Speaker 4: airplane window every time I fly, and I honestly think
Speaker 4: about this a lot. Like us folks love to talk
Speaker 4: about like the grandeur of the landscape, right, and you're
Speaker 4: looking at all this amazing stuff, but you know, damn
Speaker 4: good and well there's somebody who's like, yeah, but wouldn't
Speaker 4: it just be nice if it was all flat?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 4: Right? So we really knew how much we had and
Speaker 4: how who owned what? Right, Like it just just make either.
Speaker 3: When I see people.
Speaker 1: When I see someone building the big like a new,
Speaker 1: big mansion on a steep hill, I'm al was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's got no flag ground that he was gonna put
Speaker 1: a garden, no tillable. Here's one of the answer really
Speaker 1: surprised me. I'm gonna spoil it by giving the answer.
Speaker 1: It's your show and then you do what you want
Speaker 1: with it. What did New England's forests look like prior
Speaker 1: to European settlement? When I dug into that one in
Speaker 1: the book, I was prepared to be depressed and was
Speaker 1: shocked to see that. You're like, you're The answer was
Speaker 1: probably about like they do now, there's some differences, but no, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was for some reason that I was like, uh,
Speaker 1: I felt good about it.
Speaker 6: Well, because the question is very specific to the forests,
Speaker 6: not the landscape, right, like like now we have less forest, yeah, sure,
Speaker 6: more egotoriums. Right. Uh So the forests though in sort
Speaker 6: of the composition structure, a species composition, the arrangement of
Speaker 6: the trees, that is surprisingly I would agree with you,
Speaker 6: evidently because remember nobody really remembers, uh, surprisingly similar in
Speaker 6: terms of species composition, with some changes, with some notable exceptions. Uh,
Speaker 6: in the northeast, we have more aspen, more cherry, more birch,
Speaker 6: and more red maple than it was believed to be
Speaker 6: the case per your European contact. Okay, so the expense
Speaker 6: of what those what do they all have in common?
Speaker 6: They're more early successional sort of, they have poor shade tolerance.
Speaker 6: That these are fast growing pioneer type species you know,
Speaker 6: live fast, die young. So at the expense of the
Speaker 6: other the late successional, the hemlock, sugar maple, beach, that
Speaker 6: yellow birch that live hundreds of years. So we we've
Speaker 6: so the records indicate oak has, particularly in southern New England,
Speaker 6: has gone down in preponderance. You know. To me, the
Speaker 6: interesting thing about all that work is it's I guess
Speaker 6: it's surprising you would thought, oh, man, radically different.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I thought it'd be like, oh, beech trees
Speaker 1: that were twenty feet across at the stone.
Speaker 6: Well, so so there's two things. One is the other
Speaker 6: piece is that the species mix that largely looks very
Speaker 6: much the same evidently is one. But I think it's
Speaker 6: really important to quickly move to.
Speaker 1: That.
Speaker 6: But the forest is very different. There are fewer lunkers,
Speaker 6: big ass giant trees, big old trees. There's way fewer
Speaker 6: down dead trees in a variety of sizes. Of course,
Speaker 6: woody material that we know now is plays this really
Speaker 6: important habitat and nutrients, cycling and water roll. Way less
Speaker 6: of that now than in the presettlement force.
Speaker 1: So when I said I was going to answer the question,
Speaker 1: I didn't do a very good job of answering it. Okay,
Speaker 1: well no, when I felt like you said, like, but
Speaker 1: like it would now yeah, so in species you got
Speaker 1: to cat Well.
Speaker 6: It's just that what do we mean by different? So
Speaker 6: the species mix is surprisingly similar, you were right about,
Speaker 6: And that's where you were going. I'm saying, there's more
Speaker 6: to a forest than the names of the trees out there.
Speaker 6: It's what sizes what ages, what physical spacing and arrangement
Speaker 6: there were, So old forests, which those primarily were, are
Speaker 6: exceedingly rare everywhere now, particularly in the northeast. One percent
Speaker 6: of the landscape is in what we would call actually
Speaker 6: old forest. Yeah, and so old forests are more than
Speaker 6: just the species that are there. It's it's so in
Speaker 6: other words, the species haven't changed all that much, with
Speaker 6: some notable exceptions. It's the composition, what we call the structure,
Speaker 6: the three dimensionality of the forest has changed a lot,
Speaker 6: a lot. And also I think there's reason to think that.
Speaker 6: I mean, these woods have been worked hard, right, they
Speaker 6: were cut repeatedly, and then they were it was sheep pasture,
Speaker 6: then it was cows, and so there's been an export
Speaker 6: of wool, milk wood, and let's not forget soil from
Speaker 6: these places, you know, over a few centuries. So they're
Speaker 6: much depleted. And I think it stands to reason that
Speaker 6: they're probably not they're different in other ways that maybe
Speaker 6: we're not able to see quite yet in terms of
Speaker 6: their what other organisms have gone missing, right that we
Speaker 6: don't pay attention to, not the charismatic megafauna. Right, they're
Speaker 6: largely the same with some we had elk, they're not
Speaker 6: there anymore. I mean, there's some big differences, but this
Speaker 6: makes sense like they're.
Speaker 4: Sort of like is it a fecundity type of question?
Speaker 6: Well, I'm sure the basic productivity of the sites I
Speaker 6: shouldn't say. I'm sure. I suspect strongly with reason that
Speaker 6: they're much depleted. The other piece I would think i'd
Speaker 6: say about this piece is that really floored me and
Speaker 6: I thought was really fun was how do I know this?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 6: I know it from some published papers peer reviewed. How
Speaker 6: did they know it? This description of the change from
Speaker 6: the presettlement forest today? As I start the thing with
Speaker 6: kind of a wise ass remark, well nobody remembers. But
Speaker 6: fortunately the surveyors that were laying out the King's lots
Speaker 6: and original kind of doing doing these surveying in the north,
Speaker 6: in the northeast where they first landed, those first woodsmen
Speaker 6: going through the woods and surveying and laying out lots,
Speaker 6: and they were making notes of witness trees right on
Speaker 6: every corner, what are the trees around this? And so
Speaker 6: these researchers went and poured over, you know, hundreds and
Speaker 6: thousands of these old surveyor records and then kind of
Speaker 6: you know, kind of summarized and computerized them and kind
Speaker 6: of analyzed them. And that's the basis of this, Like
Speaker 6: what's the the occurrence of species then versus now? And
Speaker 6: that that's it. I just find that to be a
Speaker 6: really cool little bit of science to somebody where kind
Speaker 6: of creatively found a way to get at an answer.
Speaker 1: Maybe like accidental accidental citizen science.
Speaker 6: Yeah, really cool and right that these guys then cultivated
Speaker 6: and sort of un earth and sort of an archaeological
Speaker 6: kind of approach to those records and then rebuilt a
Speaker 6: picture of the species mix, but not the the as
Speaker 6: I say that, the structure and other forms of composition
Speaker 6: of the forest that are really important.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 1: Me and me and my colleague doctor Randall, we're discussing
Speaker 1: something like this recently where we're working on it.
Speaker 4: Sounds so official when you put it in those terms.
Speaker 1: We've made up a song about him. It's like what
Speaker 1: good is being a doctor when you can't prescribe no drug?
Speaker 1: It's like, how could there actually be a doctor of history.
Speaker 1: I gotta work on the tune, the melody, the melody
Speaker 1: and the lyrics is suffering. But doctor Randall, now we're observing.
Speaker 1: We're working on these audio We're working on these audio
Speaker 1: books about long hunters and mountain men. Okay, and rather
Speaker 1: than focusing on all the geopolitics and world events and stuff,
Speaker 1: focusing very heavily on the day to day nuts and
Speaker 1: bolts of how they did what they did. Maining. We
Speaker 1: know that Daniel Boone spent most of his career hunting
Speaker 1: deer hides. Okay, how how did he hunt deer? When
Speaker 1: he got up to a dead deer, what did he do?
Speaker 1: How did he prepare the hides for the market? How
Speaker 1: were they handled in camp? Why didn't they all rot
Speaker 1: when it rained? Who did he sell them to and where?
Speaker 1: And for how much? Who wanted that leather in for
Speaker 1: what purpose? Okay? So many of these questions are exceedingly
Speaker 1: difficult to find out. Other things that chroniclers of the
Speaker 1: time were fixated on are of low relevance to us,
Speaker 1: Meaning how an area was watered and what grew on
Speaker 1: it was of great importance to chroniclers. I went to
Speaker 1: the head of this creek. It was well watered here, here, here,
Speaker 1: and here with springs. There was a salt source here.
Speaker 1: This is what the timber array looked like. Uh, why
Speaker 1: in the hell would I write down how he skins deer?
Speaker 1: Who cares you skin deer? Like? You skin deer like?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: Like like write down what we ate? Whoever want to
Speaker 1: know that? What they want to know is is it
Speaker 1: well watered? And how right? And it's like it's in
Speaker 1: that way. And again there was always like the blazing
Speaker 1: of tree. It was they were going about what they
Speaker 1: were doing for money, and they were two steps ahead
Speaker 1: to describing land for other people. And I bring that
Speaker 1: up only because one it's a frustration that we're dealing with,
Speaker 1: and two, like those people did in New England, that
Speaker 1: might be an interesting that might be an interesting thing
Speaker 1: for for forresters trying to understand that middle ground that
Speaker 1: area of like Kentucky at that time. Because their descriptions
Speaker 1: do not conform at all to what the amount of
Speaker 1: American cane, right, Yeah, the amount of time they spend
Speaker 1: hiding in, living in, storing things in hollow trees. It's like,
Speaker 1: go find me some hollow trees now that a couple
Speaker 1: guys are going to sleep in. It's like what are
Speaker 1: they even talking about?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 1: That stuff is just not He Boon lost one of
Speaker 1: his hunting buddies who got wounded hit by a musket
Speaker 1: ball and was high benchal blood to death in there,
Speaker 1: but went and hid himself in a hollow tree, gun
Speaker 1: and everything. It's like, where the hell's that tree?
Speaker 6: Yeah, few and far out there anymore.
Speaker 1: But in reading this stuff, it seems like it was
Speaker 1: like every time you turn around, there's a hollow tree
Speaker 1: big enough for you and your Boddy to like acts
Speaker 1: a hole into encamp in.
Speaker 6: Yep, yeah, no doubt. And that to me it raised
Speaker 6: a really important point that like these old forests that
Speaker 6: I would suggest are like that the best the best
Speaker 6: expression of a forest like it is, that's what they're
Speaker 6: supposed to be, right, So you look at those as
Speaker 6: the archetype of what a forest can be is like
Speaker 6: these old forests. A real common misconception is that it
Speaker 6: was this open. It's just this unbroken expanse of bomber trees,
Speaker 6: you know, huge trees from from Maine to Missouri, that
Speaker 6: whole bit. Now, even in these old forests, the evidence
Speaker 6: indicates and stands to reason that there's trees are under
Speaker 6: all kinds of daily, seasonal, yearly, long term assault. Right
Speaker 6: their branches break, there's insect outbreaks, wind, throw, ice, ice, storms, fire,
Speaker 6: and they occur and various return cycles and in various intensities,
Speaker 6: and that results over the long time in this kind
Speaker 6: of mixed mosaic of so you have even in these
Speaker 6: The point is, even in big, old, awesome, perfect if
Speaker 6: you will, old forests, there's baby trees, they're little trees.
Speaker 6: There's broken trees, there's ugly trees, there's patches of open
Speaker 6: there's wetland complaice beaver associated areas that with early successional habitats,
Speaker 6: that the matrix, if you will, was big bomber trees,
Speaker 6: old and long lasting, but interrupted here and there with
Speaker 6: all every conceivable stage of growth and type. Right, So
Speaker 6: that's what makes them powerful is they have all these
Speaker 6: different substrates, all these different surfaces, all these different possibilities
Speaker 6: for everything else associated to make a living. And that's
Speaker 6: what's really lacking now almost everywhere, you know, is.
Speaker 5: There an oh, sorry, is there an age an age
Speaker 5: kind of definition for the cutoff of you know, old
Speaker 5: of old.
Speaker 6: Yeah, growth, it depends by species. So like in the northeast,
Speaker 6: so eastern hemlock will go for maybe five hundred years,
Speaker 6: balsam fur not so much. You know, so an old
Speaker 6: balsam fir stand might be, you know, one hundred and
Speaker 6: fifty be wicked old for a bunch of balsam fur,
Speaker 6: but mid adolescents laid adolescents for hemlock stand, if you will, right,
Speaker 6: And so we define it less. I think ecologists define
Speaker 6: it less by just age and more by age and
Speaker 6: other evidence of having escaped human disturbance. Stumps, fences, you know,
Speaker 6: barbed wire, buried in trees, stone piles, all of it. Right,
Speaker 6: So we have a definition for our tax abatement program
Speaker 6: for forest landowners that you can qualify for you know,
Speaker 6: sort of different treatment, different management requirements for old forest
Speaker 6: if you can demonstrate yes and you meet this certain
Speaker 6: threshold of age for the appropriate to the forest type.
Speaker 6: But you also have to show that is not just
Speaker 6: a couple of big old trees that just escaped harvest
Speaker 6: or other disturbance, but that there's been no human disturbance
Speaker 6: for that long period of time. And then you look
Speaker 6: for other things like the presence of down trees in
Speaker 6: all diameter classes, not just little twigs on the ground,
Speaker 6: but big trees, you know, in various stages of decay.
Speaker 6: So you know it's all the parts and pieces that
Speaker 6: are considered when and I think most I think it's
Speaker 6: fair to say that's the a conventional approach to kind
Speaker 6: of defining or creating a threshold for what is or
Speaker 6: isn't an old forest.
Speaker 4: Had a couple real interesting days of hiking in northwest
Speaker 4: Montana here last week, and it was really gorgeous. But
Speaker 4: it all changed for me once I kind of realized
Speaker 4: what was happening is I was looking for this roost tree,
Speaker 4: like I knew these turkeys were in this area, and
Speaker 4: you know, typically a lot of landscapes is not that hard,
Speaker 4: like if you have a general area where the gobbles
Speaker 4: are coming from early in the morning.
Speaker 1: Oh to be like, yeah, I bet they're hanging out
Speaker 1: on that tree.
Speaker 4: Exactly like that one right. Well, because all of a sudden,
Speaker 4: I'm looking through this new lens, I started looking around
Speaker 4: this forest that was previously like very pretty and pleasant,
Speaker 4: and I'm like, there is not a tree here that
Speaker 4: is a different age class. Every single tree, you know,
Speaker 4: it was like the same. And it just it just
Speaker 4: like totally changed my experience because of that. Yeah, because
Speaker 4: it was just like it whoever was doing the forest
Speaker 4: try in that area, Like I mean, it was amazing,
Speaker 4: It was beautiful, it was wonderful. But there was no
Speaker 4: mistaking that everything had been touched by the hand of man, right.
Speaker 3: I was just like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 4: I am in like a city park almost, you know
Speaker 4: what I mean?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was just big silver culture. Yes, let's get
Speaker 1: to the one everybody here wants to talk about. What's
Speaker 1: the difference between sat wood and heartwood.
Speaker 6: I can't go anywhere without people asking me that one. Steve, Uh,
Speaker 6: it's all wood.
Speaker 1: And you're gonna tie this into making light lighter material?
Speaker 6: Sure, okay, Uh, sat you know what I'm talking about,
Speaker 6: pine knots and whatnot.
Speaker 1: Is that tie into this or not?
Speaker 6: No? Not? Those are nots u and all like.
Speaker 1: The stuff that's got all the resident What the hell
Speaker 1: were Yeah?
Speaker 7: You had?
Speaker 6: Yeah, fat fat wood.
Speaker 1: I want to do satwood, heartwood.
Speaker 6: And Okay, so sapwood.
Speaker 1: Let's start with fat wood story where it makes most.
Speaker 6: Okay, we started with heartwood and sapwood. So I go there.
Speaker 6: And heartwood is is the wood in the inside of
Speaker 6: the tree, the oldest all of the oldest, the oldest
Speaker 6: wood within a tree. And the sapwood is the outermost
Speaker 6: ring of wood inside the bark. So we got to
Speaker 6: go anatomy one oh one here, and you've got xylum
Speaker 6: is the word that's just it's just a fancy name
Speaker 6: for wood. And you know, the cambium is this thin layer,
Speaker 6: a veil of living cells really near the just under
Speaker 6: the bark that divides and multiplies. It's it's really where
Speaker 6: tree growth happens. In diameter shoot growth is different. That's
Speaker 6: that apical bud that's extending the length of the tree.
Speaker 6: But diameter growth of the stem and the twigs that
Speaker 6: all comes from the cambium producing woods cells to the
Speaker 6: inside of itself and bark cells to the outside of itself.
Speaker 6: Go ya okay, And so as the tree and think of.
Speaker 1: The action is all happening at that layer, at.
Speaker 6: That layer exactly, and every year the tree puts on
Speaker 6: a layer. And you best way I think to think
Speaker 6: about this is like highway pylons, you know, traffic cones,
Speaker 6: like you stack them on top of each other. That's
Speaker 6: how the cone of growth is formed on a tree
Speaker 6: as well. So that why when you imagine cutting stacking
Speaker 6: up ten twelve highway cones on each other and then
Speaker 6: sawing through it transversely, you know, horizonally through. What would
Speaker 6: you have countain rings? You'd have rings. And that's how
Speaker 6: it works with trees. They lay down a layer of
Speaker 6: growth every year, and it's wood on the inside, bark
Speaker 6: on the outside. Well wait a minute, wait, how come
Speaker 6: there isn't this whole chunk of bark out there? Right?
Speaker 6: You got wood adding on every year. The quick answer
Speaker 6: there is that the bark sluffs off, it's exposed, and
Speaker 6: it it you know, So you have this relatively relatively
Speaker 6: thin layer of bark on the outside even though it's
Speaker 6: been created, just like the wood gets created on the
Speaker 6: inside people usually.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, so let's say you're talking about a four
Speaker 1: hundred year old tree. Yeah, okay, the oldest part presumably
Speaker 1: is like down at the bottom of the tree, dead center. Yes, okay,
Speaker 1: that's the oldest part, right, So on a four hundred
Speaker 1: year old tree, how old do you think.
Speaker 6: The bark is? That's you know, the bark that's there
Speaker 6: is only it depends on species and where so it
Speaker 6: will range. But it's way less than four hundred huh right,
Speaker 6: way like like more like tens I would think. Yeah,
Speaker 6: so you got wood on the inside, bark on the outside,
Speaker 6: and then the wood on the inside keeps adding, and
Speaker 6: so the innermost portion, which is the pith, the first
Speaker 6: formed wood on the center of the tree that usually
Speaker 6: gets crushed and kind of dissolves or whatever. The rest
Speaker 6: of those wood layers, they just become kind of their
Speaker 6: structural It's like it's the structure for the photosynthetic apparatus
Speaker 6: up top.
Speaker 1: They're live in some way. They're not like hair, like
Speaker 1: human hair.
Speaker 6: This is what's great. Most of a tree is dead, really, yeah,
Speaker 6: so including most of the.
Speaker 1: Wood, nothing's going on in there.
Speaker 6: Now I didn't say that it's but it's it's dead.
Speaker 6: And so that's that heartwood, which is the dead wood
Speaker 6: on the inside, is still a place where the growing
Speaker 6: points on the outside they send through. So if you
Speaker 6: if you look at a stump, sometimes you can see
Speaker 6: like a like spokes almost like they're called rays, and
Speaker 6: those are they allow this transport of stuff from the
Speaker 6: near the bark side of the tree to the center.
Speaker 6: That's kind of like the dumping ground for waste products.
Speaker 6: And that's why in your walnut you're speaking of earlier,
Speaker 6: the prized wood is the dark wood, right, that's a
Speaker 6: product of phenols, terpenes, other kind of secondary compounds and products,
Speaker 6: chemicals that get sort of sent there and they discolor
Speaker 6: the wood. They place some t microbial kind of role,
Speaker 6: I think anti fungal roll, but they they discolor the wood.
Speaker 6: And and that's why the value in black walnut is
Speaker 6: all heartwood, because it has this thin band of relatively white,
Speaker 6: light colored wood around the outside. That's the most recently
Speaker 6: laid down, last few years worth of wood. That's still
Speaker 6: most of the cells there are dead, but there have
Speaker 6: some live cells within them, and that's the plumbing system,
Speaker 6: the vascular system of the tree that pumps water from
Speaker 6: and nutrients from the from the ground up and takes
Speaker 6: carbohydrates formed by the leaves and sends it to the
Speaker 6: roots and storage and through the stamato growing points. So
Speaker 6: that's mostly all happening just inside the bark, just inside
Speaker 6: the cambium, those the last several years, and it varies
Speaker 6: widely by species, so I'm generalizing, but it's the last
Speaker 6: it's the most recent wood near the outside of the tree,
Speaker 6: but still on the inside of the cambium that is sapwood,
Speaker 6: and it tends to be light colored, and where all
Speaker 6: this translocation is going on, and it's the center wood
Speaker 6: is the heartwood, which is kind of mostly structural. It's
Speaker 6: just allowing. It's like the telephone poll on which all
Speaker 6: the living cells just continue to elevate and try to
Speaker 6: access sunlight and outcompete their neighbors. It has some other
Speaker 6: stuff going on, as I mentioned, the storage, the discoloration,
Speaker 6: et cetera. So that's heartwood on the inside, sapwood on
Speaker 6: the outside of the inside, and then cambium and then
Speaker 6: bark outside that fat wood is it's not I should
Speaker 6: just you know, this is a Southern thing. Not my expertise,
Speaker 6: but my understanding is this is from softwoods, Southern yellow pines,
Speaker 6: pitch pine, lob lolly shortly, if I think, in particular,
Speaker 6: which are very big on resins, and in soft woods
Speaker 6: that's often inside that you know, in these these rays
Speaker 6: and other places where you have resin ducts that are
Speaker 6: kind of used to stop infection, keep insects at bay,
Speaker 6: et cetera, you have these deposits of that stuff which
Speaker 6: is really combustible, and so you split that kind of softwood,
Speaker 6: those those those pines that have that are high in
Speaker 6: those pitch compounds and they become just great kindling. It's
Speaker 6: dry and it has this extra flammable stuff in it.
Speaker 1: Where'd you get that big ol'pile that you had.
Speaker 4: I was suspecting it was from a fur. Well, just
Speaker 4: gives the shape of the base.
Speaker 6: So it's interesting about fur. Now, Doug fur is not
Speaker 6: a true fur. So if it was Douglas in my world,
Speaker 6: Doug fur is a fury because yeah, right, so it's
Speaker 6: called pseudo suga menziesia I is the Latin name because
Speaker 6: it's it's a it's that would be false. Yeah, well
Speaker 6: there's we could do a whole podcast on really fun names.
Speaker 6: Latin names they often mean something, right, But anyway, No,
Speaker 6: Douglas fur is not a true fur. It's not a fur.
Speaker 6: It's just that's why it's Douglas dash fur. It's a well,
Speaker 6: it's a false hemlock. It's uh, it's in its own
Speaker 6: kind of category. And so but all of those so
Speaker 6: it would have resins in pitch, whereas what do you
Speaker 6: have white fur, white bark? What's the white white fur?
Speaker 1: White?
Speaker 6: That's a pine. So the furs you have like you
Speaker 6: you have pines. Yeah, those wouldn't have the stuff. They're
Speaker 6: just owing to the peculiarities of of true fur wood.
Speaker 4: And then uh, where's where's like Tamarak fall.
Speaker 6: Another awesome species. Uh, and uh Western larch hyeah another name,
Speaker 6: it's its own genus. And uh, you know we have
Speaker 6: an Eastern tamarack, Eastern larch, there's Japanese larch. They're commonly planted,
Speaker 6: but they all have they're different because they're they're built differently,
Speaker 6: and they largely the exonomic differentiations based on reproductive parts,
Speaker 6: and they differ, but does also to translate they bring
Speaker 6: along other anatomical and physiological differences as well, so they're
Speaker 6: all kind of different in there grouped. So spruces are
Speaker 6: different from pines, are different from furs, are different from
Speaker 6: false furs are different from larches and tamaracks, and the
Speaker 6: way they it's usually it's for those to tell them
Speaker 6: apart by the cones that's and then you go from
Speaker 6: there to other characteristics that we kind of correlate with
Speaker 6: those differences too, so they all translate into different wood
Speaker 6: properties that end up being different for structural use, for
Speaker 6: for visual appeal, and for these ecological differences.
Speaker 4: For this fat would high of us that we're talking about,
Speaker 4: because you can light anything on fire with it, right,
Speaker 4: it's crazy, crazy, flammable. In my experience, it is a tree.
Speaker 4: Not that I've been around for this entire story, mind you,
Speaker 4: but it's what I've what I've put together from what
Speaker 4: I've discovered on the ground, right, is it's a tree
Speaker 4: that stood for a long time, dead, dead standing tree.
Speaker 4: All that resin has migrated down and super condensed at
Speaker 4: the base at the base, and then eventually that tree
Speaker 4: tips over and then those shards are super easy to
Speaker 4: harvest in sometimes very large chunks. But they are very,
Speaker 4: very dance, super heavy, right, And that's that's like if
Speaker 4: they're it's almost fossilized, like to me, like the really
Speaker 4: good stuff is it's got almost like a plastic sheen
Speaker 4: to it. Yes, very dance, very heavy.
Speaker 6: Yes, you should ask him, Calves all over this? Did
Speaker 6: I mention I don't know a lot about this?
Speaker 1: You did a little bit, Yeah, because you put it
Speaker 1: to another people, you put it to the acre and people.
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly. But I and I don't mean to suggest
Speaker 6: that it doesn't exist in your western conifers. And it
Speaker 6: sounds like you've experienced that here, cal And that's that's
Speaker 6: all stands to reason to me, And I can't refute it.
Speaker 4: My my identification is piss poor like western large.
Speaker 6: No problem, right, yeah, you probably you've probably got.
Speaker 4: Cedars, yeah, no problem. Yeah, but I gotta get I
Speaker 4: gotta get better, gotta spend more time with seth.
Speaker 6: We can, we can help you with that. Yeah, it's
Speaker 6: knowable and it's good to know those difference, yes, yeah,
Speaker 6: for sure, quick side you know. And back in dendro uh,
Speaker 6: dendrology study of trees. The naming thing, it's kind of
Speaker 6: basic in a forestry course of study. Right. I was
Speaker 6: lucky to have a couple of really great professors. Uh.
Speaker 6: One of them hinto thing. It stuck with me forever.
Speaker 6: He said, when we go out and lab you know,
Speaker 6: you do with the lectures, but then you go out
Speaker 6: and you look at stuff. And he'd said, the last
Speaker 6: thing I'm going to tell you about this tree is
Speaker 6: what its name is. I'm going to tell you what
Speaker 6: it's doing here, how it got here, what it relates
Speaker 6: to everything else around it, the critters, et cetera. Because
Speaker 6: you know, that's what matters. And then we give it
Speaker 6: a name, and that's the handle and the way we
Speaker 6: speak about it. And I think that was a really
Speaker 6: important lesson for me and countless others, it's like, this
Speaker 6: is why I've said similarly, we like to say that,
Speaker 6: you know, we talk about forest ecology and people kind
Speaker 6: of well immediately start to get nervous, like that sounds
Speaker 6: hard or that's going to hurt. I think it's really
Speaker 6: helpful to think of forests more as a verb than
Speaker 6: a noun, like forest is like not forested or foresting,
Speaker 6: but like a forest because it's it's they're just defined
Speaker 6: by function and we're really connected to it. Even though
Speaker 6: we've lost that connection in a big way, which is
Speaker 6: a whole other topic. Maybe we can get to it,
Speaker 6: but I think it's really helpful to start with what
Speaker 6: are they doing? And that's what you're all about. You're
Speaker 6: noticing that out there, and you're probably more tuned into
Speaker 6: that than the names. You're like, oh, I'm bad at that.
Speaker 6: But my guess is because of what you do and
Speaker 6: your passion for spending time out there, you've got all
Speaker 6: kinds of knowledge about function that you don't even know
Speaker 6: about that you're just putting together. And that's what's really cool.
Speaker 6: I think about the woods, there's a lot of that
Speaker 6: going on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, what's eating that?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Exactly, what's whatever?
Speaker 4: Reason something likes to sleep there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, what sort of dude with the musket is camped
Speaker 6: out inside there? But I just I offer that as
Speaker 6: kind of a helpful kind of premises. Think about them
Speaker 6: more as functional and connected. And when we the more
Speaker 6: and better we do that, the more and better pretty
Speaker 6: much everything else will be about our relationship with for us.
Speaker 4: Oh, it's so yeah, you're you're so spot on, because
Speaker 4: like you know, I can run through like a field
Speaker 4: of wild flowers and name a handful, but when whoever
Speaker 4: I'm hiking with, when I'm like and that's larkspur poisonous
Speaker 4: to cattle, They're like, holy shit, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 6: Exactly.
Speaker 1: You remember how we had that conversation about how some
Speaker 1: stuff just is. Yeah, right, I think that maybe Ghoul
Speaker 1: or one of those guys even called with that just
Speaker 1: stuff that is it seems like paper birches being white
Speaker 1: maybe isn't just is?
Speaker 6: You're right, what's with that? I mean, they so stand
Speaker 6: out and everything's kind of green and brown, and then
Speaker 6: they're there, they are being all super white, and uh,
Speaker 6: where do they get off? Yeah? So, uh, the thinking
Speaker 6: here is that this one may maybe just no reason
Speaker 6: for it to go away.
Speaker 1: But there's a compelling case.
Speaker 6: There's a really compelling case that has been made that
Speaker 6: this is about where they live. Think about paper birch.
Speaker 6: It's transcontinental, it's circumpolar. It's one of those tree species
Speaker 6: that exists all around the North Country.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a band of latitudes, and no matter where
Speaker 1: you go on the planet, at that band of latitudes,
Speaker 1: you'll find that tree.
Speaker 6: Yes, and that latitude tends to be what in a
Speaker 6: general way.
Speaker 1: Around the fifties, well cold, Okay.
Speaker 6: Let's about the latitude, but the condition's there, right and uh,
Speaker 6: And so the short answer here is it's been positive
Speaker 6: that that. And it's true for other associates. You caught
Speaker 6: your asss here at higher elevations. They're kind of light barked, too,
Speaker 6: thin and light barked. Is uh suggested to be a
Speaker 6: mechanism to reflect solar radiation? Why would a tree ever
Speaker 6: want to push away? You say, it's thin and white,
Speaker 6: and this is to keep them from heating up in
Speaker 6: winter with solar radiation.
Speaker 1: It's like the opposite of what you think, right, But you.
Speaker 6: Know, I was just recently saw a piece of a
Speaker 6: black piece of paper on a wall and a white
Speaker 6: piece of paper next to it and said, you know,
Speaker 6: on a sunny day, go ahead and touch it. And
Speaker 6: you put your hand on the black, it's hot. Put
Speaker 6: your hand on the white, it's cool. And so like
Speaker 6: it really makes a difference. Why does this matter to
Speaker 6: the paper birch tree? Uh? In the winter in those
Speaker 6: cold climates, you don't want to they have there's green
Speaker 6: living cells tissue underneath that bark, and they're ready to
Speaker 6: rip if if the conditions are right. You don't want
Speaker 6: to warm up and then be like, oh, let's let's
Speaker 6: start some cellular activity here and then have right and
Speaker 6: then have a cloud move over and then it's back
Speaker 6: to you know, fifteen degrees and those cells die. So
Speaker 6: this is presumed to have evolved as a mechanism to
Speaker 6: allow them to live in these super cold environments and
Speaker 6: not turn on growth when it gets a little warm
Speaker 6: on the stem because the sun is hitting it for
Speaker 6: a while, which happens, so it's reflecting away that incoming
Speaker 6: solar radiation in the winter to avoid that damage that
Speaker 6: would ensue if they tried to get going.
Speaker 1: And what backs it up is you look at other
Speaker 1: northern deciduous trees and you start seeing that yeah, like
Speaker 1: they all get a little lighter.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they tend to exactly like.
Speaker 1: You get alders that have You get alders that are
Speaker 1: like not quite as dark aspens a northerly tree not white,
Speaker 1: but definitely not dark.
Speaker 6: Lighter exactly, whereas lower latitudes the propondence or trees have
Speaker 6: dark bark. Because maybe just the opposite. It's kind of
Speaker 6: good to get to stay warm when it's kind of
Speaker 6: cool out. You can heat it, you can warm up
Speaker 6: and you know, optimize your sort of metabolism and other
Speaker 6: physiological activity in in one a cool day because you're
Speaker 6: you're actually able to absorb a little warmth more warmth
Speaker 6: from the sun.
Speaker 1: Got one more for it, And I think Crane might
Speaker 1: have one. You know how old guns like you know,
Speaker 1: Clay was just Clay has got to see speaking acorns.
Speaker 1: Clay has got to see davy crockets, actual gun Betsy, Uh,
Speaker 1: what's that where some family owns it? Okay, you're talking
Speaker 1: about curly maple? Is curly and birds eye maple the
Speaker 1: same thing?
Speaker 6: Or no? No, not not as I understand that it's
Speaker 6: very similar as this, you know, particular grain pattern in
Speaker 6: the wood of particularly maples, sugar maple, hard maple where
Speaker 6: you get this tiger curly. Uh, is this wavelike pattern
Speaker 6: in certain views of the wood. That's just you know,
Speaker 6: it's just cool. It's favored, it's highly prized, and.
Speaker 1: It doesn't they'd like it for guns because it doesn't split.
Speaker 6: It's dense. It's right, it's not uniform in the direction
Speaker 6: of the grain. It's not all like, and so that
Speaker 6: would make it much harder to split. It's like a
Speaker 6: burrel that's kind of like almost like cells growing out
Speaker 6: of control.
Speaker 1: His references are genuine buck bowed and burl.
Speaker 6: Exactly, uh, which is beautiful and uh, that's that's like.
Speaker 1: He'll spot those from his airplane now and then nice,
Speaker 1: he'll spot a good one of them's airplane. You can
Speaker 1: go find it later.
Speaker 6: But it's important for your listeners to know the bulls
Speaker 6: don't grow on those trees. The burls doing there. So uh,
Speaker 6: you know that's so that's this you know, atypical Uh,
Speaker 6: cellular division in growth atypical with particular respect to direction
Speaker 6: of how it grows. And you get these funky growth
Speaker 6: patterns that are beautiful and they're really hard to split
Speaker 6: because it's kind of it's denser, probably, right, and so
Speaker 6: I write about here bird's eye, which is a particular
Speaker 6: type yet again of figure you might even say disfigure
Speaker 6: in maple wood.
Speaker 1: That's not a kind of maple, Like it's not a
Speaker 1: kind of maple in any maple or no, it tends
Speaker 1: to be.
Speaker 6: I think it's really limited to sugar maple. Let see,
Speaker 6: I don't know that I've ever seen or heard of
Speaker 6: it in a red maple or a silver maple. For
Speaker 6: But so it's this odd growth in terms of wood development,
Speaker 6: uh that it results in these little that little figures
Speaker 6: that look like bird's eyes. That's why it's called bird's eye.
Speaker 6: And when you have like a like a spray of
Speaker 6: them across a surface, it's quite beautiful and striking. And
Speaker 6: there's legend about you know which trees have the bird's
Speaker 6: eye in it, because you know it commands a premium price.
Speaker 6: When you sell a tree, a log that has bird's eye,
Speaker 6: you're gonna pull that and put in a different pile.
Speaker 6: And you know you're gonna put your veneer sort, your
Speaker 6: bird's eye sort, your firewood sort, your regular so sort,
Speaker 6: you know, and you're gonna market those differently. And this
Speaker 6: is the highest And there's little of it, so that
Speaker 6: accordingly there was this this this great you know, there's
Speaker 6: traditions of you know, I knew one landowner once he
Speaker 6: was convinced Canadians from Quebec were coming down marauding and
Speaker 6: stealing his his his uh with machetes were hacking away
Speaker 6: to look at the base of trees to look for
Speaker 6: evidence of bird's eye.
Speaker 1: Canadians.
Speaker 6: That's the Canadians, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it'll surprising one bit.
Speaker 4: No, everybody knows a Canadian and a hand.
Speaker 6: I mean, I don't think George was really accurate on
Speaker 6: that one. But you know, this is the kind of
Speaker 6: lure and the.
Speaker 1: Things that that till tale hack mark.
Speaker 6: I had one forester who helped me. We were looking
Speaker 6: and and he he's convinced that there's this like coke bottle,
Speaker 6: the old fashioned coke bottom coke bottle that at the
Speaker 6: bottom it's one diameter, but then it tapers and then
Speaker 6: it comes back up again. And then he would see
Speaker 6: that in certain sugar maple stems near the base and
Speaker 6: he'd say, oh, let's look at that, and he he
Speaker 6: has a correlation there, and yeah, and he's looking for
Speaker 6: bird's eye. Yeah, and everyone's got their way of doing it,
Speaker 6: you know, and it's a really low percentage of the
Speaker 6: trees that have it. It is it's not really well
Speaker 6: understood why, but it basically comes from any kind of
Speaker 6: a ding in the tree that can it's an injury.
Speaker 6: It could be could be a bird pack, it could
Speaker 6: be somebody getting crazy with their lawnmower, you know, whacking it,
Speaker 6: uh uh, or any number of things that go wrong
Speaker 6: out there that can in the young life of a
Speaker 6: tree can ding it and then that little the wound
Speaker 6: response that trees have can result in this in this
Speaker 6: particular case of like this this odd, gross pattern that
Speaker 6: then results in you know, ironically enough, highly valuable wood
Speaker 6: that was from damage.
Speaker 1: When that when that term first caught my interest, I
Speaker 1: was reading something in the Great Lakes region about what
Speaker 1: was floated down a river and it named species of trees,
Speaker 1: but then included in the list was that they would
Speaker 1: float birds, eye maple down the river, and I thought
Speaker 1: it was peculiar that they were like grading it, right,
Speaker 1: And then someone took note of that that that specifically
Speaker 1: is what they're sending down the river, right, because it's
Speaker 1: no you know, maybe maybe it was what maybe that's
Speaker 1: too dense to float, and they wouldn't send it down
Speaker 1: the river, but they were like sledging it out whatever
Speaker 1: the hell it was. It was like it was like
Speaker 1: white pine or whatever, white pine, oak, birds eye, maple, right, you.
Speaker 6: Know, and that's to be you know, that's reflecting. It's
Speaker 6: its economic value. That's like way more than your garden
Speaker 6: variety saw timber.
Speaker 4: I got a real broad question for it, and we
Speaker 4: can skip it if you don't want to tackle it.
Speaker 4: But do you have anything you want to say about fire?
Speaker 4: Like I'm just interested in regards like how we do
Speaker 4: with fire in the US right now, in regards to
Speaker 4: our forests.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there's a lot here and I'm happy to speak
Speaker 6: to it. Recognizing as a caveat right, I'm from the
Speaker 6: northeast said to be the asbestos forest. I'll quickly point
Speaker 6: out that, like I think asbestos burns, it just burns
Speaker 6: at really particular conditions. So we have in from Moht
Speaker 6: we had like we have like four hundred acres of
Speaker 6: like wildfire a year, mostly brush burners getting out of
Speaker 6: control at the wrong time. Yere, it's after snow melt,
Speaker 6: before leaf out. So the point is we don't have
Speaker 6: these days great incidents of wildland fire. We had a
Speaker 6: history of it. There's whole paper bird stands in the
Speaker 6: Green Mountains that were originated in the early nineteen hundreds
Speaker 6: with railroads and lack of spark arrestors and a different
Speaker 6: forest type without a lot of spruce slash on the
Speaker 6: ground and how they found it. So we have a
Speaker 6: history of fire, but it's really been very wet relatively speaking,
Speaker 6: and it's known as the asbestos force, whereas out here
Speaker 6: it's a big deal and it has been for some time.
Speaker 6: And I think it was kind of well said that
Speaker 6: somebody I heard say, like smoky light a little bit,
Speaker 6: you know, like fire is a part of these ecosystems.
Speaker 6: There are certain species that what we call serotinous cones.
Speaker 6: They need the heat of fire to open as an
Speaker 6: adaptive strategy to shoot their seeds out and land in
Speaker 6: that seed bed that's been prepared by fire. You mentioned
Speaker 6: the thick bark, say a giant sequoia. It's fire adapted,
Speaker 6: and so fire is part of the ecosystem. We've done
Speaker 6: an incredibly good job of eliminating it to the detriment
Speaker 6: of the ecological kind of functioning. And now we have
Speaker 6: monocultures and we have the clear cut and plant and
Speaker 6: keep fire out. And this is just a recipe for
Speaker 6: disaster and you're seeing it now and now it's exacerbated
Speaker 6: by climate change. Mountain pine bead and this is this
Speaker 6: perfect storm. And again I should say, you know, remember
Speaker 6: I'm from the Northeast. Uh, you know, I don't. I
Speaker 6: don't live it. And there's a lot here, as you're
Speaker 6: all well aware, and it's very intense. But I think
Speaker 6: for me, I'm willing to say we have a problem
Speaker 6: in having excluded fire for so long that now we
Speaker 6: have a whole new approaches to fuels management, fuel load
Speaker 6: reduction that's going to require, you know, people getting involved
Speaker 6: and actually doing stuff and thinking differently about fire. We
Speaker 6: do use controlled burn prescribe fire in certain natural community
Speaker 6: types in the Northeast because they've evolved with it. Pitch
Speaker 6: pine sandplane communities for example, need that fire. And we
Speaker 6: go out and set fires and it's really not popular
Speaker 6: with the neighbors, you know, with smoke and everything else
Speaker 6: is dangerous and it's really carefully controlled. So there needs
Speaker 6: to there's a role for fire naturally and now because
Speaker 6: everything's so unnatural over you know, decades, centuries really or
Speaker 6: at least a century. We're we're in a position where
Speaker 6: we're vulnerable and it's kind of meeting up with these
Speaker 6: other forces climate change, drought, et cetera that are exacerbating it.
Speaker 6: And it means intervention is called for and new approaches
Speaker 6: to forest management that think differently about wildland fire. And
Speaker 6: now we have more and more people living in that
Speaker 6: urban wildland fire interface, right and you know, fire wise communities,
Speaker 6: like we've we've had to shift a lot of things
Speaker 6: because of it. I don't know, there's there's a lot here.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, and uh and I think it's easy to say,
Speaker 6: you know, kind of like we need more fire, but
Speaker 6: not if you live there. I mean, it's people's homes, livelihoods.
Speaker 6: It's it's a it's a hot mess really in a
Speaker 6: lot of ways. But even ecologically, I think there's a
Speaker 6: case it's made that we got to get this right,
Speaker 6: and we were a long way from being right there.
Speaker 1: Now you ever feel bad for a tree sawing into it?
Speaker 6: No, you know, honestly, And I'm really glad you asked,
Speaker 6: because all these things are balance and balance is a
Speaker 6: poor word. It's it's no balance when humans are involved.
Speaker 6: We have a incredible footprint on this planet. We ask
Speaker 6: a lot of these forests. And that's that's a big
Speaker 6: thing for me, is just that we are so disconnected
Speaker 6: generally as a as a culture from our daily consumption
Speaker 6: of wood products. You know, we're really into things like
Speaker 6: the burrow bowl and that don't hurt tree, you know,
Speaker 6: but but we use an awful lot of woods, do
Speaker 6: I get? I will tell you that when I when I,
Speaker 6: you know, cut a tree and you put a saw
Speaker 6: into a tree, I think about it. I'm like, and
Speaker 6: when I'm out there with the paint gun marking trees
Speaker 6: for harvest, I'm like, really, what am I going to
Speaker 6: make this place better?
Speaker 3: Really?
Speaker 6: And then so I think the premise for me is
Speaker 6: forests don't need us, but we really need them. In
Speaker 6: the in the history of people, there's never been a
Speaker 6: time when people weren't utterly dependent on wood for shelter, fuel, tools.
Speaker 6: You know, where's the evidence that it's ever going to change.
Speaker 6: In fact, we're moving back to wood from plastics and
Speaker 6: all kinds of cellulostic applications that basically anything made from
Speaker 6: plastic was once or could be made from wood, which
Speaker 6: is renewable if you do it right. It's not automatic.
Speaker 6: So we have to look at our just acknowledge our
Speaker 6: consumption of wood, and then we have to probably dial
Speaker 6: it back a little bit, and then we need to
Speaker 6: think about a new relationship with the land and how
Speaker 6: we obtain our wood and do it differently so that
Speaker 6: it and I think it's really possible. And that's what
Speaker 6: really excites me and keeps me going is and to
Speaker 6: somewhat to some extent a proselytizer, I suppose about an
Speaker 6: ecological forestry that is available to us now, and that
Speaker 6: can that's honest in that it meets our needs. And
Speaker 6: so every article I've read, we discussed this a bit, Kren.
Speaker 6: They go on about, well we need trees and the
Speaker 6: biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis. It's all true, but
Speaker 6: every one of them, I don't know that. I don't
Speaker 6: know that I've ever seen one that that that didn't
Speaker 6: stop short of saying, yeah, it's because of us, like
Speaker 6: we So I'm seeing documentaries that say it's because we're
Speaker 6: we're cutting these trees down and turning them into two
Speaker 6: by fours, and they stopped there, as if we're just
Speaker 6: doing that for a joy ride. We're putting them into
Speaker 6: two by fours because people are we need human habitat too, right,
Speaker 6: And so what's the deal here? We got to get
Speaker 6: past this very convenient Uh. The answer trees are we've
Speaker 6: we've The pandemic showed us how important it is for
Speaker 6: people to get outside historic spikes in outdoor recreation. That's
Speaker 6: really good. It puts pressure on certain places, but it's
Speaker 6: really good. It also showed us that is the pandemic
Speaker 6: showed us this how vulnerable we are in this global
Speaker 6: supply chain of wood products. In Vermont, in the immediate shutdown, forestry,
Speaker 6: logging and manufacturing wood products was not considered essential, and
Speaker 6: as Commissioner and the Deputy Commissioner and I our phones
Speaker 6: were ringing off the hook for about a twenty four
Speaker 6: hour periocing, you gotta be kidney. We have hospitals that
Speaker 6: are heated with wood. A third of from our school
Speaker 6: children go to schools heated by wood. All the Amazon
Speaker 6: packaging it comes from trees, man tongue depressors, it swabs,
Speaker 6: and all this medical supplies that were made from wood
Speaker 6: that were needed now in a big way in the pandemic.
Speaker 6: And yet we weren't be so two things, the pandemic
Speaker 6: for its shining a light on the importance of people
Speaker 6: getting outside and connecting with nature. And it's shone a
Speaker 6: light on our vulnerability and our dependence on wood, and
Speaker 6: our vulnerability and a global supply chain that we don't
Speaker 6: control everything. That combined with climate change, which has put
Speaker 6: a bright light on the importance of forests as our
Speaker 6: last best hope at mitigating atmospheric CO two and conferring
Speaker 6: enormous landscape resilience in a changing climate. You'd think that
Speaker 6: those two things putting all this new light, they'd be
Speaker 6: being like these forestry people were right all along.
Speaker 1: We really give them more money.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and you know, and now it didn't. In turn,
Speaker 6: what it turned out is we gotta stop logging upub
Speaker 6: I got sued as a commissioner I've personally named in
Speaker 6: a lawsuit saying we're illegally logging, which is just the science,
Speaker 6: the settled law of the land, and the you know,
Speaker 6: economic realities, don't they all say something different. But the
Speaker 6: reaction to these things is let's trees are good, let's
Speaker 6: leave them alone. And that's fine if you don't have
Speaker 6: any need for them. So I'm back to Forrest's met
Speaker 6: forest don't need us, we need them. With one exception,
Speaker 6: forests do need us when we've commed them up significantly,
Speaker 6: invasive species, all the fire thing. So we do have
Speaker 6: to kind of get back in there. But generally it
Speaker 6: begins with and we need them. And until we confront
Speaker 6: that massive need and consumption, we're not gonna get anywhere
Speaker 6: in policy. And we need a culture that is of
Speaker 6: the land from the land. And I feel like this
Speaker 6: is a real strong parallel with your conservation work and
Speaker 6: the mission at the Meat Eater for being realistic about
Speaker 6: food and about where it comes from and and honest
Speaker 6: league acquiring it and in a way that's you know,
Speaker 6: the North American model, and like it's a way of
Speaker 6: conservation and it's it's this is a very parallel story
Speaker 6: real Finally, I'll tell you what the Commissioner of Fishing
Speaker 6: Wildlife previously when I was there, he was getting a
Speaker 6: lot of flak from Protect our Wildlife bills to you've
Speaker 6: written about them, anti trapping, anti hounding, a lot of
Speaker 6: anti hunting, fishing stuff going on right now in the Northeast,
Speaker 6: and he was saying, you know, we'd go out and
Speaker 6: co miserate and have dinner a beer or something, and
Speaker 6: he'd say, you know, it's over and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 6: it's a drag man, it's over for you. And he's like, well,
Speaker 6: won't Joe, it'd be too comfortable. They're coming your way.
Speaker 6: And I was like, no, No, people get trees and
Speaker 6: wood and we use it. And you know what, I
Speaker 6: think he was right. It's like it's like, it feels
Speaker 6: like it's kind of over, and maybe we just have
Speaker 6: to go this really dark period of disconnection from the
Speaker 6: land before things are going to really go bad, and
Speaker 6: then maybe someday we'll get hip to it and come
Speaker 6: back around.
Speaker 1: I think that there's a there's a little bit of
Speaker 1: a mental trap into and I'm guilty of it too,
Speaker 1: where I'm comfortable looking at a piece of wildlife habitat.
Speaker 1: I'm going to use a tree analogy, which is going
Speaker 1: to confuse things, But I'm comfortable looking at a piece
Speaker 1: of wildlife habitat as an apple tree, an ache, an oak, okay.
Speaker 1: And when you kill a bear, kill a deer, you're
Speaker 1: picking up acorns, meaning you maintain the integrity of the tree.
Speaker 1: The tree is going to continue to drop acorns. You
Speaker 1: can use these acorns in a measured way and the
Speaker 1: tree stays there. So it's the thing I try to
Speaker 1: explain to people often about why hunters spend so much
Speaker 1: time talking about the well being of habitat. Conservation minded
Speaker 1: individuals spend a lot of time talking about the well
Speaker 1: being of habitat, but they don't spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time talking about the well being of an individual deer. Right,
Speaker 1: the fewd is expendable, a product of the bigger thing.
Speaker 1: But man, like I have a play that's it's old
Speaker 1: growth coastal rainforest. Okay, in my yard, so to speak,
Speaker 1: we have cedars that are what are they said, six
Speaker 1: seven feet I don't know, yeah, or diameters bigger. I'll
Speaker 1: shoot all of deer in the world, not all dew
Speaker 1: in the world, but at a measured pace, with giving
Speaker 1: them time to replace. I'd be comfortable with getting deer
Speaker 1: the rest of my life. I could not. I could not,
Speaker 1: And it's just me. I'm not condemning someone that does.
Speaker 1: I personally would not be able to stick.
Speaker 6: A song onto that tree, right, and I wouldn't.
Speaker 1: I don't know why, Like I don't, but I don't
Speaker 1: know why it's like because that thing's been there since
Speaker 1: before the country was a country.
Speaker 6: And that's it. That's the answer. And they're damn few
Speaker 6: of those, and especially in association with others in this
Speaker 6: functional unit, like that's special. And so, don't get me wrong,
Speaker 6: I'm not arguing that we need to just mow down
Speaker 6: every acre hilly or fly. I get what I'm saying
Speaker 6: we need to have, but where you're going to need
Speaker 6: to meet it, and it's possible. There's this sort of
Speaker 6: triad model that's been put out there this years ago.
Speaker 6: It's actually a professor of wildlife biology at the Universe
Speaker 6: Humane coined this idea of the triad approach to kind
Speaker 6: of land use. That there's intensively managed areas with maybe
Speaker 6: even clear cutting plant in his day, and then there's
Speaker 6: wildland reserves they need to be part of the mix.
Speaker 6: And then the vast space in between is an ecological
Speaker 6: forestry that's you don't cut all those, maybe you don't
Speaker 6: cut any of those, and it's the site dependent and
Speaker 6: and it's about natural regeneration and retaining you know, the
Speaker 6: great Alder Leopold, he said, right, the first precaution of
Speaker 6: intelligent tinkering is to keep every cog and wheel. Doesn't
Speaker 6: mean keep all the trees, but keep all the representatives
Speaker 6: of the different types and like keep the function alive.
Speaker 6: So that's what modern forestry is in my mind. It's
Speaker 6: beautiful and it's needed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just I don't like. I don't like where I
Speaker 1: left my comment because I failed to acknowledge like another
Speaker 1: part of the being that that as a hunter, I
Speaker 1: can look at the habitat and be the integrity of
Speaker 1: the habitat will be able to put off game. But
Speaker 1: I like what you're proposing that the integrity, If the
Speaker 1: forest's integrity is kept intact, it'll continue to put off
Speaker 1: forestry products, meaning the same way that a deer. You'll
Speaker 1: be like, well, no, that deer is expendable as long
Speaker 1: as the big broad mechanism is capable of making more
Speaker 1: of them in perpetuity. So like, yeah, but like what
Speaker 1: you're what you're looking at with forest cares is the tree.
Speaker 1: That tree, it's older than a deer significantly, but those
Speaker 1: trees can come out and that forest can maintain its
Speaker 1: integrity and make more. The time scale is very different.
Speaker 1: Work here is done the time scale, it won't be
Speaker 1: ready for harvest in a year, but it'll be ready
Speaker 1: for hart.
Speaker 6: It's great stuff and there's a lot here. Uh.
Speaker 1: The book we've been talking about is Woodwise, woods Wise,
Speaker 1: Wo's wise. I looked at that title for a couple
Speaker 1: minutes trying to figure out it should have been punctuated
Speaker 1: differently or anything. But I think you nailed it all right.
Speaker 1: Man hardly wanted to put like a an apostrophe, but
Speaker 1: it would have been an impostor yeah, it would have
Speaker 1: been an impost apostrophe. Woods Wise, an Exploration of Forests
Speaker 1: and Forestry by Michael Snyder. Can you buy us on
Speaker 1: Amazon and all that kind of place?
Speaker 6: You sure can. We like to support local bookstores, but
Speaker 6: you know, just.
Speaker 1: Be listen, me too, me too. If I know that
Speaker 1: some people you don't have access to it, and they're
Speaker 1: not you know what I mean?
Speaker 6: And I hope people will look.
Speaker 1: We got people to listen to the show an Interior Alaska.
Speaker 1: It's like, this is not it's just an option for him.
Speaker 6: God bless him. And yes it is available on Amazon
Speaker 6: and by all.
Speaker 1: Means, if you if you got a way to do it,
Speaker 1: if you've got a way to do it, UH, help
Speaker 1: out local bookstores because you can go down there and
Speaker 1: find books you know about and it's great. But I'm
Speaker 1: like I said, yeah, I also want people just to read.
Speaker 6: Exactly what it takes. Remember I used to say, like
Speaker 6: you got to think out of the box. I think
Speaker 6: we need to lower like I think we just need
Speaker 6: to think where you're thinking. Like let's not get like,
Speaker 6: let's we'll get to that, like where are you thinking?
Speaker 6: So can we get some thinking going on?
Speaker 1: Uh, it's a lot of fun. Woods Wise and Expiration
Speaker 1: of Forrest and Forest Street. Michael Snyder, Michael, thanks for
Speaker 1: coming on the show man my pleasure, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 9: Thanks, Thanks Michael, Seal Gray shine like silver in the sun.
Speaker 3: Right right, Oh my.
Speaker 7: Life, sweetheart, We're done, beat this damp horse to death,
Speaker 7: taking a new one and ride away. We're done, beat
Speaker 7: this damn horse to death, so take a new one
Speaker 7: and ride on.