This week I got to help Lys and Fred collect data for a prospective purchase. This mostly consisted of taking heights while Lys took the diameters at each plot in a very large stand.

Back at the office, I got a brief run through on how to use ArcMap and GIS to make the basic maps I’ve been using for all of my field work. Luckily, I took a few classes back at UBC on using ArcMap, which made using the program much less intimidating, but I’m very much looking forward to getting more practice with map making and using my own maps in the field.

On Tuesday, Fred took me to a progeny site that is about 40 years old. There, he taught me how to tag trees for thinning.

It seems the last few ice storms have hit this site pretty hard, so my job is to go in and mark all of the trees too damaged to keep growing correctly, or the ones interfering with growth patterns of the other trees.

He also explained to me the goals of this progeny site and how it has done over the years, as well as what will hopefully happen to it in the future. The idea of tracking tree growth from planting to harvest, which takes decades depending on the rotation, is one of the reasons I became so interested in forestry in the first place.

I’m excited to learn more!

Interns for the 2021 summer crew have been hired. Nic Haye began working for Starker Forests early and will be posting a weekly blog about her experiences. Here is her first entry:

Hi, my name is Nic and I am interning at Starker Forests for the summer.

I graduated from the University of British Columbia last spring with a bachelor’s degree in Forest Resource Management. Although I went to school in Vancouver, B.C., I grew up in West Linn. Both my parents are OSU grads so I am familiar with Corvallis, especially Reser Stadium.

The last couple of weeks (Starker forester) Lys has been teaching me how to cruise in some of our recently thinned stands. I’ve just started cruising by myself, and even though the stands have been quite steep (thinned by cable yarding), I’ve been enjoying spending so much time out in the field. It is also fun to see the trails and corridors left by the cable yarding process and piece together how that kind of thinning practice works in a real stand.

I’m quickly learning that the beautiful spring sunshine and warmth also comes with challenges when cruising, specifically in getting heights of trees. In winter, when all of the deciduous trees don’t have their foliage, it’s much easier to see treetops with a laser. Clearly that changes when the leaves come back! It’s a fun new challenge to make sure I’m really getting clear shots and accurate heights for my data collection.

I have also been learning some of the basics of Access, the forest inventory management program we use here at Starker Forests. I’m mostly just doing inventory on the 10-year stands that I, and a few other crew members, surveyed about a month ago. As with most things that involve a lot of data, it is very detail-oriented work, and requires a lot of patience to look through and fix each small error. Though it is very rewarding in the end to have the program fully run through and to receive the information it solved for me!

I’m looking forward to what the next week holds, as well as when the rest of this summer’s internship crew shows up.

Five weeks after the Labor Day Fires and things are getting quiet around the Starker office. The focus has wholly returned to our more regular sequences of forest management: cruising timber, building roads, laying out upcoming harvest units and replanting old ones. All this is happening without the regular help of our 10 summer interns.

September started out very exciting with the Labor Day east wind event and the subsequent fires. As most of you know, Starker properties were largely spared except for a few acres on a small powerline fire outside Alsea. SFI staff and the summer crew assisted ODF in constructing fire line and mopping up the local fire in Alsea before we were sent up to Dallas to help on a 5-acre fire on Weyerhaeuser land.

First, we lost two of our crew as they returned to their families to help battle area fires and clean up. One member’s family lost their home.

“I was very proud of the work of the summer crew,” Tyler said. “Both ODF and Weyerhaeuser expressed their gratitude as both organizations were able to commit folks to more complex incidents near Lincoln City and Molalla. If the recent fires have done anything, I hope they help to convince more of the public about proper fuels management and the need for effective prescribed burning sans prohibitory regulations.”

With the fire season ending this week, woods folk of Western Oregon can look forward to new foliage color pallets, the fall rains, big game hunting and for those attending the College of Forestry – a return to school, albeit virtually. Traditionally, our summer interns are students at Oregon State University, although there have been students from elsewhere, including from the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin.

This time of year always reminds me of arguably the most famous forester from Wisconsin, Aldo Leopold. A student of the grandfather of forestry, Gifford Pinchot, Leopold graduated from the Yale School of Forestry and began working immediately for the U.S. Forest Service on the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. Leopold would go on to lay the foundations of wilderness management in the United States as well as to describe the tenants of the land ethic in his seminal piece, A Sand County Almanac. The book is a quick read describing the changes in the land at different time scales from the annual succession of seasons to the long-term history of conservation in the United States. Leopold describes the timeline of environmental history in the United States relating specific events to the rings of a Wisconsin white oak he’s falling on his farm in rural Southern Wisconsin.

Given the economic and political turmoil facing our country today, I think it is pertinent to look back on the ideas of conservation outlined by figures such as Leopold. Conservation is neither rigid environmentalism and preservation nor the unadulterated pillaging of the landscape, be it through mining, commercial agriculture or logging. Rather, conservation requires the use of a critical lens and realism to understand the landscape and make informed decisions on which components of ecological and cultural systems warrant preserving and which provide surplus from which humans can responsibly extract necessary resources. Leopold’s land ethic challenges human beings with welcoming ecological communities into our own. Using this approach, we humans should view members of ecological communities in a similar way to members of our own community. Just as the diversity of plants and animals use a variety of items from the natural world within which they live, so too should humans. We are an intrinsic part of natural communities, despite our attempts to believe otherwise. Moreover, Native American tribes have included themselves as parts of these communities for time immemorial.

We should remember that the world provides a plethora of natural resources for us and every other member of the community to use. It is our job as foresters and students, whether formally or informally, to recognize the ebb and flow of the landscape and to understand what is truly a sustainable take.

Anthropologists and citizens alike will tell you that to be strong members of any community requires give and take. You, nor your human neighbors would likely think nothing of borrowing or lending a cup of sugar should there be a need and a surplus, but if your neighbor was running low, you might look elsewhere to find that sugar for your pumpkin bread. This logic is extended in sound strategies for forest and wildlife management. True, understanding whether or not a surplus exists in these resources requires a bit more study than texting your neighbor if they have any extra sugar, but like being a good neighbor, understanding the ability of a natural resource to give without harm requires honest communion.

This communion comes from a continuous study of the woods, be it at Oregon State, Wisconsin, Yale or in the pickup truck with your 30-30 across your lap looking for that ghostly blacktail. So happy studying and happy hunting to all and best of luck to our summer interns in school and beyond!

Tyler Peterka, Forester, Starker Forests

Although last week was a four-day week, I made up for lost hours by working on fires.

On Tuesday, a few of us from Starker helped on a fire started by a fallen power line on the side of the road. The fire had been put out by the time we had arrived, but we spent the day mopping up the area. Luckily two streams were near the burned area and they were able to pump plenty of water to help the mop up process.

At first, we spent our time looking at hoses and winding some up. We also found hotspots near the edge of the road. I found a deer shed while doing this. This shed was my largest yet, and my fourth of the summer.

This mop up experience was much different from my later ones working with the rest of the remaining crew. This first experience was filled with a lot more learning than doing, but it was extremely helpful for later days.

Justin and I put water on flames on Wednesday when we were with the Dallas ODF office. Thursday and Friday were spent mopping up the Mill Creek fire that Justin and I had helped on the day prior.

This week is fairly empty because many of the interns have left for the summer.  We are down to four because Andrew was working on a fire. The smoke and ash aren’t horrible, but it still makes cruising a tad uncomfortable.

We remaining interns went with Lys to a pre-harvest cruise. The ash was the worst walking through ferns, but otherwise it wasn’t too bothersome. Later in the day, the smoke came back a touch thicker than the morning because the winds switched again.

Today in the morning looking back over the shop there were some blue skies and clouds. I am looking forward to blue skies consistently again, or at least true clouds and not the residue of lingering smoke.

This is my final week on the Starker 2020 intern team and I am at a loss for words for how amazing this summer has been!

I have learned more than I could have imagined and am extremely grateful to Starker Forests for adding me to the team. Working at Starker this summer has affirmed that I want to work in the woods and am eager to continue my career as a forester. 

There has been a growing number of large forest fires on the West Coast so Starker has been assisting ODF and other forestry companies with the fires in the surrounding area. Some of the other intern teams got sent out earlier in the week but we all got the opportunity to go out on Thursday and Friday to help mop up a smaller 5-acre fire in the Mill Creek area.

The fire was out by the time we got there and it was our job to locate any hotspots left in the ground, stumps and foliage that remained and put them out.

Although the fire was out, it was very surprising to feel the amount of heat that remains in the ground days after the fire is put out.

We used our hand tools to dig into the ground and chop at wood that was still hot, and water to reduce the heat, and put out any sparks or embers that were left. This is an important part of the job as the hotspots may grow if left and any embers can spark up in the wind and start another fire nearby.

It was a lot of work and very long days but knowing that we were able to help made it all worth it.

I really enjoyed getting the fire experience, even if it was just a few days. I am excited to learn more and possibly continue working in wildfire!