Wooddust

While you are in the timber and have a lot of time to ponder whats going on around you, take time to observe behavior and surroundings that will guide you next season in your habitat efforts.

What are your deer doing? Do they feed in your hunting area? Or is it a travel lane? Or a bedding area?

If they feed, what are they eating? That can tell you what they like and what you need more of.
If they just hang out, bed in the area...where do they feed and what do they eat when they get there? Its not likely that some magic mix is your answer. Use what Morher nature provides if you can.
If they are using your area as a travel lane, can you give them something to nibble on while going to and from?

Look at the ground. If you have grasses and weeds in a spot in the timber, that tell you you have soil and enough light to support a habitat improvement without a lot of heavy clearing.

Look at the trees. This is a great time to judge timber density and tree quality. Are you seeing a lot of spinly small trees that are tall?...To many trees. Are you seeing no small seedling and varuous age classes of quality trees?...Maybe too thick on the mature trees and you should consider doing some harvest. What species do you see. Are you in a good diverse area? Diversity in species is a sign of timeber health. A lack of plant diversity will ultimately be a low value area for wildlife diversity as well.

Did you hear any quail....if not, you need to focus some effort on quail habitat next year.
How were your turkeys doing?


Oh...and dont forget a prayer of thanks that you are lucky enough to be where you are, doing what you are doing, in the best place in the world to do it in.

North Texan

Good post. I was thinking about quail the last time I went coyote hunting. The population seemed to be getting real thin. I had gone for several years without seeing a large covey. Then this year we had excellent rainfall. I noticed I could hear a "bob, bob-white" coming from nearly every direction. Very encouraging.

BrutalAttack

This is somewhat incorrect I'm afraid. While your partially correct...the scale at which your thinking is incorrect. Things don't work that way so much.

Some pure stands of one tree species can be vitally important to numerous wildlife species. Wildlife typically do not use one type of habitat for everything and they certainly do not use one stand of trees for everything. Many species mate in one type of cover, feed in an entirely different type of cover and den in yet another.

So saying that increased plant diversity is an indicator of wildlife diversity is not entirely true. Some species for example REQUIRE single species stands of old growth white pine for breeding and they may prefer a regenerating clear cut or multi storied shrub/tree mix for feeding.

So what you should be looking at is the types of cover you have at the forest scale, not the number of species within a stand of trees. The ideal for most types of wildlife habitat would be a mosaic of many different types of cover/stands in a natural layout (ie. not square blocks of one type etc).

More often than not the critical factor which determines if a wildilfe species uses a certain area has much more to do with the AGE of the stand rather than the species composition or a combination of AGE and SPECIES COMPOSITION. So making your land entirely of one cover type is a bad idea, you should want to promote many different timber stands, boggy areas, a few old fields etc...diversity of form/age not neccesarily diversity of species within a stand though often a land with many cover/stand types WILL have more species diversity at the landscape scale. There may be a few stands of nothing but oak, but next door may be a marsh or a shelterwood cut with many different shrub species.

Does this make sense? Maybe you were saying this and I totally misunderstood.

I also take isse with your statement that tree diversity is a sign of timber health. Not true. Pure stands of old growth are arguably some of the most resiliant, disturbance resistant stands in existance. Also, many many forests in the west are almost complete monocultures of lodgepole pine. Those types of forests function normally in natural cycles without much species diversity and are quite healthy until the cycle nears an end and the disturbances that drive forest sucession come into play.

I'm not trying to lecture just stating some things that I feel need to be said. It's great that people are thinking about these things in the context of wildlife management.

Another thing you hit on that is vitally important: the need to manage for WILDLIFE rather than just managing for one or two species. Many people fall into this trap by managing for only one species to the detriment of numerous other species.

farm hunter

I like your post - and the comments thus far are though provoking. In the last 4 years - I've become facinated with trees. Like "Why do Beech grow here but no oaks" or "how come we have good stands of hemlock, but no cedars or spruce"?

In building our cabin on a 20 acre fallow field - I have like a BLANK SLATE upon which to ponder - and I often do. I've planted several species of pines, spruce, oaks, birch, apples, and transplanted sugar maples. I've let other sections grow wild. and I've planted food plots for deer.

My goal is to bring in some local woods - that we lack (like oak, birch, and hickory) and also to set up a 2 acre "orchard" section in front of the cabin with apples, plum, pears, grapes, various berries and a 30-40 tree sugarbush on the high spot above the cabin. I imagine the day when my grandchildren's kids pick the apples and talk about hunting coming up in the old cabin that was built many, many years ago on the property.

Our property is not that large (My dad's 90acres and his brother's 90 acres) - I hope to never reduce it less than a 90 acre parcel - I have a 50 year plan for the property - and I hope I make it till then- I'm 4 years into the program and I'm 36 now. The land has been in our family since 1829 - and though the old farmhouse burnt in the 1940s - the legacy of the land is still all around me.

Too often, I think people take for granted what is before our eyes. Some people have the best properties going - but don't even recognize the fact, others wouldn't know a good one from a bad one - take Woodust's advice -
STOP - look around and spend real time understanding/considering your surroundings - I've had alot of fun learning about trees this year. If nothing else - when you are out hunting, take the time to notice something interesting - and learn all you can about it.

North Texan

Farm hunter, you sound like you've been doing lots of planning!