Latest / Wired To Hunt Podcast / Ep. 899: Adopting a Land Steward Mindset with Ethan Tapper

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Ep. 899: Adopting a Land Steward Mindset with Ethan Tapper · Wired To Hunt Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: the White Tail Woods, presented by first Light, creating proven
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Light Go Farther, stay Longer, and now your host, Mark Kenyon.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week on
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: the show, I'm joined by Ethan Tapper, a Vermont based
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: forrester and the author of the book How to Love
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: a Forest to discuss the importance of adopting a land
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: steward mindset and so much more. All right, folks, welcome
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: back to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: by First Light and their Camel for Conservation initiative. And
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: today we are continuing our Habitat series and we've got
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: a great one today about the philosophies and mindsets and
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: maybe attitudes that we might be able to adopt as
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: we grow as land stewards and habitat managers and wildlife managers.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: I think there's there's lots and lots of podcasts out
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: there these days about tactics, what to do to plant
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: a better food plot, or how to do an effective hingecut,
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: or what the best approach to you know, you know,
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: specific timber stand improvement practices, or planting a better pollinator strip,
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: whatever it might be. And those things are good and valuable,
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: and I'm glad we've got them, and we do plenty
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: of those kinds of episodes here on Wired Hunt as well.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: But sometimes I do think it's useful to zoom out
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: a little bit and talk about though, why and the
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: slightly broader how, maybe not on the ground, but how
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: we go about making decisions about what matters and where
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: to focus our efforts. And that's that's I think what
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: a lot of our conversation today is about. Because I'm
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: speaking to a guy by the name of Ethan Tapper.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: He is a forester out of Vermont, and he's also
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: the author of a relatively recent book called How to
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: Love a Forest, The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World.
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: And this was I thought, a really interesting book that
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: explores so many things that I think we as hunters
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: and land managers can relate to when it comes to,
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: you know, trying to do right by the land and
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: by the critters, and trying to decide how to make
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: things better, what that looks like, what that means, the
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: sacrifices you need to make the choices you need to
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: make along the way. How we can both you know,
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: love and kill deer, How we can both appreciate and
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: cut down trees, How we can try to steward a
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: landscape while also recognizing that we are putting an impact
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: on it too. All of those kinds of things are
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: inherent in being a hunter and a manager of a landscape,
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: and I guess even more generally just just being a
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: human being on this planet. And we talk about all
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: that today with Ethan. I think you're gonna enjoy this chat.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: I really did. I think Ethan's got a lot to
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: share a terrific perspective. So if you own land, or
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: if you manage land or lease land, or hunt on
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: a piece that other people are managing, and you're wondering
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: more about, you know, kind of some of these bigger
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: questions around how to do this kind of stuff in
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: a way that helps your hunting, It helps your deer,
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: but it's also helping everything else, which I think has
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: been a general theme that we've been exploring more and
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: more over the years. Then this is a great book
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: to take a look at, and this is a great
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: conversation to start with. I think I might leave it
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: at that. Ethan and I cover a lot of different ground,
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: everything from you know, managing your forests, to what healthy
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: habitats and what a healthy forest looks like, to how
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: we can bail you know, making management improvements versus leaving
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: some things untouched. We talk about the impacts of hunting
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: and the impacts of deer and so much more. So
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: check it out. I hope you enjoy this episode. Ethan's
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: got a lot of great content to share in his
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: social media platforms as well. He shares a lot of
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: short videos with information about management practices and ideas for
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: better understanding your forest and improving it and managing it.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: So check out his Instagram or TikTok whatever your thing
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: is if you want more of this kind of stuff too. So,
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: without further ado, let's get to my chat with mister
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: Ethan Tapper. All right, joining me now is Ethan Tapper.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the show. Ethan, thanks you having me Mark,
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: You're very welcome, glad that we're getting to do this.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: It's been I don't know, might be a year now,
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: maybe more, since I've been kind of following you from Afar.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: I think it was a friend of mine who is
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: also a forester, who first turned me on to your work.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: He said, hey, you should be following this guy, keep
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: tabs on him, and so I have been. And as
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: soon as I was aware that you had this book,
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: How to Love a Forest, as soon as that came out,
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: I picked up a copy, and so I have been
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: quietly behind the scenes watching what you've been sharing with
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: the world and appreciating it. From afar, So I want
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: to kick things off at first saying, great job with
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: the book, great job with your message and everything you're
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: putting out there. Thanks for doing this kind of work.
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: Thanks so much.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: I have been enjoying it. It's a perfect fit for
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: this month of podcast episodes that we're doing, Ethan, because
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: we did a month of March that was focusing on
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: conservation more broadly, and then this month of April we've
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: been kind of dialing it in a little bit more
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: to speak, a little bit more about on the ground,
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: habitat work, stewardship, and a lot of this is coming
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: from the perspective of, you know, what most of our
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: listeners are doing on a day to day basis, which is,
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: you know, hunting deer, managing deer, maybe managing a farm
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: that they lease or own for wildlife and recreation. But
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: you bring this unique perspective in that you are a hunter,
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: but you are also a forester and someone who's who's
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: really looking at things from a very high level perspective.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: So that's that's kind of where I want to start
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: with this, Ethan, How do you define being a good steward?
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: I hear you talk about stewardship a lot, or at
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: least you're you're kind of referring to that in a
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: lot of your work. What does that mean?
• 6:44
  Speaker 4: I think that I started using that word steward for
• 6:46
  Speaker 4: a few different reasons. I think one thing that's neat
• 6:50
  Speaker 4: about it is that it sort of contains this idea
• 6:53
  Speaker 4: of a temporary nature, that our time on this land
• 6:57
  Speaker 4: is temporary, right, that we're all passing this land on
• 6:59
  Speaker 4: to someone in the future, future generations. But also this
• 7:04
  Speaker 4: idea that I think if you were to read the
• 7:06
  Speaker 4: book or listen to check out some of my content,
• 7:10
  Speaker 4: you would be like, oh, this guy is a proponent
• 7:13
  Speaker 4: of forest management, and that's really not what I'm talking about.
• 7:17
  Speaker 4: What I'm talking about is something that is like much
• 7:19
  Speaker 4: broader and more holistic, which is this concept that I
• 7:22
  Speaker 4: call stewardship, which encompasses when we're going into these forests
• 7:27
  Speaker 4: and we're doing things like controlling non native invasive plants
• 7:30
  Speaker 4: and cutting trees, doing what we call logging, right, and.
• 7:34
  Speaker 3: Also so much more.
• 7:35
  Speaker 4: If you all are, you know, out there, if you
• 7:37
  Speaker 4: want a piece of land, you know that taking care
• 7:39
  Speaker 4: of that piece of land and tails trail management, boundary
• 7:43
  Speaker 4: line maintenance, habitat management, a lot of time where you're
• 7:46
  Speaker 4: just sort of like walking around, checking stuff out, seeing
• 7:49
  Speaker 4: what's going on. Like that's all part of stewardship. That's
• 7:52
  Speaker 4: all part of how we take care of this land.
• 7:53
  Speaker 4: And I think that the way that I think about
• 7:55
  Speaker 4: the role of active management, like when we're actually in
• 7:58
  Speaker 4: there creating habitat, cutting trees, that's just one component of
• 8:02
  Speaker 4: this of this bigger thing that's really what we want
• 8:05
  Speaker 4: to do.
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, how did that? How did you grow into a
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: realization that that's important? Did you know, like from an
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: early age that you know this was an important way
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: to live with the land and to participate it with
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: it in an active way, or do you have a
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: moment at some point in your history where all of
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: a sudden you realized, oh, Wow, there's a different way
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: to do this. What did that look like for you personally?
• 8:29
  Speaker 3: I really got into it, you know.
• 8:31
  Speaker 4: Well, so part of my story is that I have
• 8:34
  Speaker 4: a different experience than I think a lot of folks
• 8:36
  Speaker 4: who are in this line of work, which is that,
• 8:38
  Speaker 4: you know, you always hear these stories about folks who
• 8:41
  Speaker 4: are biologists and ecologists, hunters, land stewards and different shapes,
• 8:45
  Speaker 4: you know, and kinds, and I feel like always they're
• 8:48
  Speaker 4: like I was always the nature kid, you know, like
• 8:50
  Speaker 4: I was always into this stuff. I always knew that
• 8:53
  Speaker 4: I wanted to be spending all my time out in
• 8:54
  Speaker 4: the woods. That wasn't my experience at all, And actually
• 8:57
  Speaker 4: I had like no idea that that's what I wanted
• 8:59
  Speaker 4: to do. And what ended up happening is that I
• 9:03
  Speaker 4: got a scholarship to go to the University of Vermont,
• 9:06
  Speaker 4: and I didn't know what I wanted to study. And
• 9:08
  Speaker 4: my first serious girlfriend, my high school girlfriend, ended up
• 9:11
  Speaker 4: going on this wilderness expedition that was like five months
• 9:14
  Speaker 4: long with this program, and she came back and she
• 9:18
  Speaker 4: had had this like huge life changing experience and I
• 9:22
  Speaker 4: had not. I'd just been like, you know, hanging out
• 9:24
  Speaker 4: in my dorm room doing what nineteen year olds do,
• 9:26
  Speaker 4: and then it was we weren't connecting, and I thought
• 9:32
  Speaker 4: we're going to break up. It was freaking me out,
• 9:34
  Speaker 4: and so I was like, well, you know what I'm
• 9:35
  Speaker 4: going to do is I'm going on a wilderness expedition.
• 9:38
  Speaker 4: And that same program was offering one one that left
• 9:40
  Speaker 4: in two weeks and it was six months long and
• 9:43
  Speaker 4: we were going to ski north for three months, build
• 9:46
  Speaker 4: a canoe, and canoe back down. And you know, I'd
• 9:50
  Speaker 4: never camped outside in the wintertime before, didn't know how
• 9:54
  Speaker 4: to ski, never really canoed before, and I just ended
• 9:58
  Speaker 4: up doing it and it ended up being this like
• 10:01
  Speaker 4: life changing experience, I should say, you know, in retrospect,
• 10:05
  Speaker 4: I did it ostensibly, like for no reason.
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: The relationship didn't work out.
• 10:09
  Speaker 4: But after that all I wanted to do was just
• 10:11
  Speaker 4: be in the woods and I ended up working as
• 10:14
  Speaker 4: a wilderness guide. I lived in this like uninsulated year
• 10:17
  Speaker 4: in the woods of main with a ferbough floor for
• 10:19
  Speaker 4: a year. I ended up working with draft animals draft horses,
• 10:23
  Speaker 4: did a little bit of horse logging.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: And.
• 10:27
  Speaker 4: Then after that I had to go back to school
• 10:29
  Speaker 4: that I was going to lose my scholarship, and then
• 10:30
  Speaker 4: I just kind of picked forestry because I had the
• 10:33
  Speaker 4: word forest in it, and it seemed like, you know
• 10:35
  Speaker 4: what little I knew about it, that it was a
• 10:37
  Speaker 4: pretty cool thing. So what happened to me was that
• 10:41
  Speaker 4: when I was coming from this this world of like
• 10:44
  Speaker 4: the kind of like the primitive skills guiding world, I
• 10:47
  Speaker 4: really had this kind of leave no trace attitude where
• 10:49
  Speaker 4: I was like, all we gotta do is just like
• 10:52
  Speaker 4: keep our hands off this thing that we call nature
• 10:54
  Speaker 4: and leave it alone, and everything's going to be fine.
• 10:56
  Speaker 4: And then once I went to forestry school, I started
• 10:58
  Speaker 4: to realize that actually, like a lot of these forests
• 11:01
  Speaker 4: that I thought of as just like perfect and pristine,
• 11:05
  Speaker 4: utopian places were actually dealing with this incredible amount of
• 11:09
  Speaker 4: threats and stressors, like they were not okay at all,
• 11:14
  Speaker 4: and that there were all these these actions that we
• 11:16
  Speaker 4: could take, this stuff that we could do to help
• 11:18
  Speaker 4: them out, you know, to help out forest, to help
• 11:20
  Speaker 4: out wildlife.
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: And so that's sort of how I got into forestry
• 11:24
  Speaker 3: in the first place.
• 11:25
  Speaker 4: And I can talk about, you know, I had some
• 11:27
  Speaker 4: more experiences in like different parts of forestry, but the
• 11:30
  Speaker 4: thing that really drove home this like stewardship idea for
• 11:33
  Speaker 4: me was when I became the owner of my own land,
• 11:37
  Speaker 4: which is this one hundred and seventy five acre piece
• 11:38
  Speaker 4: of land here in Vermont that I call Bear Island.
• 11:42
  Speaker 4: And that was when I was like started to realize
• 11:45
  Speaker 4: the power that like an individual person can have on
• 11:49
  Speaker 4: a piece of land to really you know, take this
• 11:51
  Speaker 4: forest out of my case, was super degraded and we
• 11:55
  Speaker 4: needed a lot of help and really like steer it
• 11:58
  Speaker 4: into a better future.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, it's funny what you described there. I
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: think is probably common for a lot of us in
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: that we until we know otherwise, when we head out
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: and we walked through the woods or we drive through
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: the country, we don't realize. We might think it's pristine
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: and healthy and great, until all of a sudden you
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: start learning a little bit more. There's there's a certain
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: blissful ignorance that comes along with not really understanding what's
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: going on. Yeah. I always quote, you know, Leopold when
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: he talks about the curse of an ecological education being
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: you know, realizing that you live in a world of wounds,
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: and it's so true. But there's this a little bit
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: of a shifting baseline thing going on too, in which
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: you know what you and I were raised under when
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: we looked at what the forest landscape looked like around
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: us and you know, the Northeastern and the Midwest. You know,
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: this is all I've ever known, and I've always thought like,
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: oh gosh, this is pretty good. And then you start
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: to realize, oh, what I think is healthy and prisione
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: maybe isn't. So I think this is a challenge for
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: a lot of folks. Your average American or outdoorsman or
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: landowner doesn't even know what healthy actually looks like. What
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: does a healthy forest or healthy landscape look like?
• 13:17
  Speaker 4: Ethan, boy, It's a tough question, right because it's it's
• 13:21
  Speaker 4: a different answer no matter where we are, right where
• 13:24
  Speaker 4: we have. You know, I do a lot of I
• 13:26
  Speaker 4: create social media content that people like all over this continent,
• 13:29
  Speaker 4: maybe all over the world see, and you know, I'll
• 13:34
  Speaker 4: do stuff like talk about the beauty of having lots
• 13:37
  Speaker 4: of dead wood on the ground, you know, which is here.
• 13:39
  Speaker 4: It's just like such an it's a foundational habitat structure.
• 13:43
  Speaker 4: It's important to regulating forest hydrology, it's important to building soils.
• 13:46
  Speaker 4: And then you know, you get a forester from California,
• 13:49
  Speaker 4: who's like, you should be thrown in jail putting that
• 13:51
  Speaker 4: dead wood on the ground like that. So it's different.
• 13:55
  Speaker 4: You know, in there are areas like I know that
• 13:57
  Speaker 4: a lot of a big struggle that a lot of
• 13:59
  Speaker 4: folks in these in these traditional grassland ecosystems and savannah
• 14:04
  Speaker 4: ecosystems deal with is you know, with the loss of
• 14:06
  Speaker 4: fire the messification of their forests, which is just these
• 14:10
  Speaker 4: historic grasslands being not burned, and so they get taken
• 14:13
  Speaker 4: over and what was sort of this open grassland ecosystem
• 14:17
  Speaker 4: becomes a forest, right, which is really not what we
• 14:20
  Speaker 4: want in that system. So it's so one thing I
• 14:23
  Speaker 4: would sort of hedge it by saying that it depends
• 14:27
  Speaker 4: and on the quality that I that I think about
• 14:31
  Speaker 4: more and more to judge the health of our forest though,
• 14:35
  Speaker 4: is resilience. So resilience is is a really cool word.
• 14:40
  Speaker 4: Basically in its most basic sense, it means the ability
• 14:43
  Speaker 4: of something, an ecosystem, a person to experience adversity and
• 14:50
  Speaker 4: then to bounce back from it, to respond to it.
• 14:53
  Speaker 4: And that's you know, in the medical community, increasingly people
• 14:57
  Speaker 4: use that as a definition of health. It's not about
• 15:00
  Speaker 4: like how many you know how fast your heart beats,
• 15:03
  Speaker 4: or like what your body fat percentage is as much
• 15:05
  Speaker 4: as it's about the ability of your entire body when
• 15:08
  Speaker 4: it experience experiences some kind of adversity, some health adversity,
• 15:12
  Speaker 4: to like respond and to be okay in a holistic way.
• 15:15
  Speaker 4: And so that's what I think about with our forests now,
• 15:17
  Speaker 4: in the forest here in the Northeast, what we look
• 15:21
  Speaker 4: at as a sort of indicator of what a you know,
• 15:24
  Speaker 4: quote unquote healthy forest might look like is to look
• 15:27
  Speaker 4: at our remnant old growth forests, which we have somewhere
• 15:29
  Speaker 4: between one tenth of one percent and one half of
• 15:32
  Speaker 4: one percent remaining, which is yeah, and it's a symptom
• 15:36
  Speaker 4: really of the pretty widespread I think this is common
• 15:39
  Speaker 4: across a lot of the Eastern US, widespread land clearing
• 15:43
  Speaker 4: that took place here, especially in the eighteen hundreds where
• 15:46
  Speaker 4: you are, that those days might be a little different,
• 15:49
  Speaker 4: but you know, we just have this, these very few
• 15:52
  Speaker 4: examples of what a forest would have looked like even
• 15:54
  Speaker 4: just three hundred years ago. But the interesting thing about
• 15:57
  Speaker 4: that is if we're defining for holistically as more than
• 16:02
  Speaker 4: just trees, but as actually like trees, wildlife, even natural processes,
• 16:07
  Speaker 4: all of these different pieces and parts. Then what it
• 16:09
  Speaker 4: means for that entire system to be healthy, you know,
• 16:12
  Speaker 4: it requires a lot of different things. When we look
• 16:15
  Speaker 4: at these old growth forests, what we're seeing is the
• 16:17
  Speaker 4: conditions that all of the native species that live in
• 16:22
  Speaker 4: that system have adapted to for thousands of years. You know,
• 16:26
  Speaker 4: all the trees, all the plants, all the animals lived
• 16:30
  Speaker 4: in what we would now call old growth forests or
• 16:33
  Speaker 4: whatever the version of that would be in the part
• 16:35
  Speaker 4: of the world where you are for thousands of years.
• 16:37
  Speaker 4: And so when we don't have the conditions that we
• 16:40
  Speaker 4: find in those old growth forests in our modern forests,
• 16:43
  Speaker 4: which we uniformly here in the Northeast do not, we're
• 16:46
  Speaker 4: missing habitats, and we're missing important natural processes, like things
• 16:51
  Speaker 4: that are important to things like soil formation, right, which
• 16:54
  Speaker 4: is how we grow future generations the trees. So like
• 16:57
  Speaker 4: here in the Northeast, when we look at our old
• 16:59
  Speaker 4: growth force or's, what we see is that they have,
• 17:01
  Speaker 4: as you can imagine, some big old trees, often not
• 17:04
  Speaker 4: a lot like ten to twelve big trees per acre.
• 17:06
  Speaker 4: They're equally defined by this quality that in the ecological
• 17:09
  Speaker 4: parlance we call structural diversity or structural complexity. I call
• 17:14
  Speaker 4: more often than not multi generationality. Many different sizes and
• 17:18
  Speaker 4: ages of trees. They're equally defined by the presence of
• 17:21
  Speaker 4: deadwood on the ground. So all of those qualities are
• 17:24
  Speaker 4: underrepresented today as a result of that land use history
• 17:27
  Speaker 4: which has given us these forests that are relatively young,
• 17:31
  Speaker 4: often dominated by a single age of trees, missing deadwood
• 17:34
  Speaker 4: on the ground, missing that multigenerationality, missing those big old trees.
• 17:39
  Speaker 4: So yeah, so with my definition, I'm sort of like
• 17:42
  Speaker 4: thinking about that whole system and looking at those old
• 17:45
  Speaker 4: growth for us and saying, Okay, so this is a
• 17:47
  Speaker 4: system that is diverse, and that diversity gives it a
• 17:52
  Speaker 4: lot of resilience, meaning that no matter what happens to it,
• 17:55
  Speaker 4: there's kind of different pathways that it can follow in
• 17:57
  Speaker 4: different ways that it can respond. And and then also
• 18:00
  Speaker 4: that it's providing habitat for all of these native species
• 18:03
  Speaker 4: which are also part of the forest.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: So if I'm listening to this and I'm hearing you
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: say all this, and I'm thinking to myself, Okay, I
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: come to this conversation first and foremost as an outdoorsman
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: or a woman who you know has gotten into the
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: outdoors and caring about these things because of hunting. Let's say,
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: whether it's deer or turkeys or upland birds or whatever
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: it might be. Let's let's just say that's what brought
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: me to the table here, and maybe I have looked
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: at my management of my land again hypothetically from the
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: perspective of how do I make my hunting better or
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: how do I get more of X animal? To that person,
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: how would you pitch them on kind of zooming out
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: a little bit more and looking at things from the
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: perspective that you just described, looking at this from a
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: from a forest health or ecosystem health health perspective, how
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: might that make sense for this person?
• 19:00
  Speaker 4: I think, you know a lot of times I'll say
• 19:04
  Speaker 4: something right like everything's connected, which sounds like this like
• 19:07
  Speaker 4: woo wooee.
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: Thing, and that's sort of how I used to think
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: about it.
• 19:11
  Speaker 4: But then I'm like, you're learn about these ecosystems and
• 19:13
  Speaker 4: it's actually true, right, So you know, there's some of
• 19:17
  Speaker 4: these interesting kind of like paradoxes that you deal with
• 19:21
  Speaker 4: one of them. So an example of this is like
• 19:23
  Speaker 4: the case of oak. So oak is a species that's
• 19:26
  Speaker 4: foundational to providing food for lots of different wildlife species,
• 19:30
  Speaker 4: deer in Turkey among them. But in places where we
• 19:33
  Speaker 4: have too many deer, the deer eat all the little
• 19:37
  Speaker 4: oaks and you never get the big oaks that become
• 19:39
  Speaker 4: the trees that provide the acorns for future generations a deer.
• 19:44
  Speaker 4: Oaks are also, you know, a species that is really
• 19:47
  Speaker 4: important to providing habitat for songbirds. They host these very
• 19:50
  Speaker 4: dense and diverse populations of invertebrates songbirds or species that
• 19:56
  Speaker 4: are important to regulating populations of forest pests. So because
• 19:59
  Speaker 4: they eat so many insects, one of the things that
• 20:02
  Speaker 4: they do is lower the populations of these insects that
• 20:05
  Speaker 4: are low level defoliators of trees. And what we've seen
• 20:10
  Speaker 4: is that when birds and bats are actually removed from forests,
• 20:13
  Speaker 4: some of these insects that are super benign have low
• 20:17
  Speaker 4: populations in the forest. They do to foliate trees a little bit,
• 20:19
  Speaker 4: but it's not a big deal. Suddenly their populations increase exponentially,
• 20:24
  Speaker 4: right and suddenly they become like a legit forest pest that,
• 20:28
  Speaker 4: especially when combined with other stressors like drought and stuff
• 20:32
  Speaker 4: like that, can legitimately stress out our trees. So you know,
• 20:37
  Speaker 4: you start to like enumerate all these connections between different
• 20:40
  Speaker 4: trees and you start to see that actually, in order
• 20:43
  Speaker 4: to have anything we want, we sort of need to
• 20:46
  Speaker 4: be thinking about forests in terms of, you know, as
• 20:49
  Speaker 4: being these complete ecosystems that if we want deer, in
• 20:52
  Speaker 4: a weird way, we also want birds. Right, if we
• 20:55
  Speaker 4: want deer, we also want areas that you know, deer
• 20:59
  Speaker 4: aren't going to be able to eat every single one
• 21:01
  Speaker 4: of those little oaks. Or maybe we want a population
• 21:03
  Speaker 4: of deer that's small enough that it can grow deer
• 21:06
  Speaker 4: that are big and healthy, but that also will allow
• 21:09
  Speaker 4: this forest to produce food for future generations of deer.
• 21:14
  Speaker 4: And so yeah, so I think it's if we look
• 21:17
  Speaker 4: at it in a really simplistic way, some of the stuff.
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: That we might do to care for the species.
• 21:23
  Speaker 4: That we also want to hunt and eat and you know,
• 21:26
  Speaker 4: cultivate like deer that you know, lowering that population might
• 21:30
  Speaker 4: seem like something that's really counterintuitive. But then when you
• 21:33
  Speaker 4: sort of look at what we're trying to do, which
• 21:34
  Speaker 4: is not just to every year, you know, harvest the
• 21:38
  Speaker 4: biggest deer of our lives, but to really do that
• 21:41
  Speaker 4: in a way that we can do it, our children
• 21:44
  Speaker 4: can do it, our grandchildren can do it, and that
• 21:47
  Speaker 4: we can also be growing at the same time, growing
• 21:49
  Speaker 4: turkey and growing other stuff that we like to hunt
• 21:51
  Speaker 4: and grow, and other stuff that we like to see,
• 21:52
  Speaker 4: like these other songbirds and stuff like that.
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: It becomes a little bit more complex when we look
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: at it a little bit more closely.
• 22:00
  Speaker 4: You start to see how you kind of have to
• 22:01
  Speaker 4: make these compromises to do all the stuff we want
• 22:03
  Speaker 4: to do at once.
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you write a lot and you talked about this
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: idea of complexity too, both kind of in the case
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: of you know, this whole concept a conceptual framework, but
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: then also as actual on the ground habitat, Like complex
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: habitat is typically better for wildlife, right, you alluded to
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: it to a little bit. Could you expand a little
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: bit more on just you know, what a complex force
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: looks like compared to a simple one, because again, I
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: think there's gonna be a lot of people listening who
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: are thinking, Okay, what does my forty acres look like? Okay,
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: is there deadwood on the ground? He mentioned that, is
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: there multi is there multiple generations? But again, people trying
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: to diagnose the health of their back forty or whatever.
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: I think a little bit more criteria there might be
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: helpful for people as they start thinking, you know, am
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: I doing right by the land? What does this look like?
• 22:58
  Speaker 4: So complexity, and you can think about it as many
• 23:02
  Speaker 4: different layers of diversity, like layered atop each other. So
• 23:08
  Speaker 4: what we really want to see is just like a
• 23:10
  Speaker 4: lot of different things in the same place at once.
• 23:13
  Speaker 4: We want to see a lot of different conditions in
• 23:15
  Speaker 4: the forest. We could think about that in terms of
• 23:17
  Speaker 4: lots of different species of trees, lots of different sizes
• 23:20
  Speaker 4: and ages of trees, lots of different structural conditions of trees.
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: So we might have.
• 23:23
  Speaker 4: Areas of young trees, areas of older trees, areas of
• 23:27
  Speaker 4: all those different sizes and ages of trees mixed together.
• 23:31
  Speaker 4: We might have areas that have a lot of dead
• 23:32
  Speaker 4: wood on the ground in a certain way, and areas
• 23:35
  Speaker 4: that have a little bit of dead wood on the
• 23:37
  Speaker 4: ground area. You know, there's you could enumerate all these
• 23:40
  Speaker 4: different things again and again and again. I think that
• 23:43
  Speaker 4: one thing when we're talking about creating complex habitats, what
• 23:48
  Speaker 4: that does is basically allow us to provide the most
• 23:52
  Speaker 4: habitat that we possibly.
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: Can in a given area. So, like an example that.
• 23:56
  Speaker 4: I'll give is that if we have for us, like
• 23:59
  Speaker 4: we often that are a lot of trees we call
• 24:02
  Speaker 4: them even aged forests, a lot of trees that are
• 24:04
  Speaker 4: all like all the same size, all about the same age.
• 24:08
  Speaker 4: Oftentimes that the canopies of those trees are growing very
• 24:11
  Speaker 4: closely together, and so there's not much light reaching the
• 24:13
  Speaker 4: forest floor, and that combined with maybe a little bit
• 24:16
  Speaker 4: of deer overpopulation or something else, is causing there to
• 24:18
  Speaker 4: be nothing going on in the understory. So in that forest,
• 24:22
  Speaker 4: we're providing habitat for a few species. The species that
• 24:26
  Speaker 4: will utilize that kind of close canopy forest, the species
• 24:30
  Speaker 4: that will utilize the habitats provided by those tall trees.
• 24:33
  Speaker 4: Of those species, you will not see that any other
• 24:37
  Speaker 4: species that need other things. Species that might utilize you know,
• 24:43
  Speaker 4: like for in the case of here, like blackberries that
• 24:46
  Speaker 4: need to eat raspberries, and blackberries aren't going to be there.
• 24:49
  Speaker 4: There's no raspberries and blackberries there. They might pass through there,
• 24:52
  Speaker 4: but it's not going to hold that species right. And
• 24:54
  Speaker 4: same thing with like you know, a species like some
• 24:57
  Speaker 4: of our songbirds, species that nest in the understory, forage
• 25:00
  Speaker 4: in the understory, any species that utilizes a different habitat condition.
• 25:04
  Speaker 4: So what we see sometimes when we cut trees is
• 25:06
  Speaker 4: suddenly you take this forest that's providing this one kind
• 25:10
  Speaker 4: of layer of complexity, this one canopy level, you know,
• 25:15
  Speaker 4: this one thing, and suddenly we cut some of those trees.
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: We let the forest regenerate.
• 25:20
  Speaker 4: Maybe we do that a few times, and suddenly we
• 25:22
  Speaker 4: have young trees, middle aged trees, old trees, canopy gaps,
• 25:27
  Speaker 4: young forest shrubs or baceous plants, all of these things
• 25:31
  Speaker 4: in the same place. And it feels like even though
• 25:33
  Speaker 4: essensibly you like took something away, you know, you cut trees,
• 25:37
  Speaker 4: you kill trees, what you've actually done is just massively
• 25:41
  Speaker 4: increase the volume.
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: Of habitat that's there.
• 25:44
  Speaker 4: You still have all the habitat associated with, you know,
• 25:48
  Speaker 4: for all those those species that like that upper closed
• 25:51
  Speaker 4: canopy forest and those.
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: Tall trees, but you also just like have so much more.
• 25:56
  Speaker 4: One one thing that I often tell people about this
• 25:59
  Speaker 4: concept of wild life cover that we talk a lot
• 26:01
  Speaker 4: about is that we run into this situation where, for
• 26:05
  Speaker 4: whatever reason, intuitively, a lot of people want to see
• 26:10
  Speaker 4: this very simple forest, simple habitat. They want to see
• 26:14
  Speaker 4: a forest where like they have these evenly spaced trees
• 26:17
  Speaker 4: and there's really nothing in the understore.
• 26:19
  Speaker 3: You can just look right through and you can see
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: a long ways.
• 26:21
  Speaker 4: Well, you have to know that basically any wildlife species
• 26:26
  Speaker 4: that isn't totally comfortable having you or another predator see
• 26:30
  Speaker 4: it is just not going to be there. The fact
• 26:33
  Speaker 4: that you can see through the understory that forest is
• 26:35
  Speaker 4: the exact reason why you're not going to have many
• 26:39
  Speaker 4: of our different wildlife species. There's no where for them
• 26:41
  Speaker 4: to hide. Why would they be there? And so it
• 26:45
  Speaker 4: requires us interestingly to kind of like reimagine and reassess
• 26:50
  Speaker 4: what we think a good looking forest looks like, because
• 26:52
  Speaker 4: in order for us to provide that cover that we need,
• 26:56
  Speaker 4: we might need to make a forest look less kind
• 26:58
  Speaker 4: of intuitively good to us.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the stories you tell in your book
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: that I think illustrates us really well is of that
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: that windstorm that came through when you went and visited
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: a landowner's property and you walked her property with her,
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: and she seemed so dismayed by how everything looked and
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: how destroyed it felt to her. But you were continually
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: trying to show her this is going to be amazing. Someday,
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: this is going to be terrific for wildlife and everything,
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: but it's going to take a minute. That's a hard
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: thing to get across to people when you know, when
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: you do management in the moment, it sometimes does look
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: like a bit like a wasteland. Yeah right, right at first?
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah it does. Well, sorry, yeah, go ahead.
• 27:52
  Speaker 3: I was gonna say, yeah, it does.
• 27:53
  Speaker 4: And that's really I believe, you know, a lot of
• 27:58
  Speaker 4: times people they are so scared of that moment and
• 28:03
  Speaker 4: of that feeling of that freshly managed forest that it
• 28:05
  Speaker 4: prevents them from actually helping their forest get to a
• 28:08
  Speaker 4: better place.
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: As a shade.
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: Now here is a dilemma that I have wrestled with
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: a lot in thinking through all this coming from the
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: world I live in. Active management is a pretty popular
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: thing within the wildlife management world because a lot of
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: folks are recognize exactly what you just described, which is
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: that actively managing a landscape where forest leads to more cover,
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: leads to more you know, food and everything you need
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: at the wildlife level. You know, in the case of deer,
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: like having this kind of thing is going to be
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: great for them in the moment. But then there's so
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: there's there's that side of my world in which I'm
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: constantly hearing about the value of active management. But then
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: there's this other side of the of the you know,
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: of the wildlife caring world, who would talk about, you know,
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: the need and the necessity of and the value of
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: old growth forest and how important that is for some species,
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: and carbon sequestration and wilderness values and all of those
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: different things. And I can understand and see many of
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: those perspectives too, And so I naturally think to myself, well,
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: we need both, we need some of both, and I've
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: heard you talk about that too. But what I have
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: a hard time putting a finger on is how do
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: you figure out how much is enough of either one?
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: Or where's the right what's the right place for what?
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: You know? This is like on a macro level, if
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: you look at, for example, all the debates around our
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: national forest system. I think this is a huge thing. Right.
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: There's people saying, well, we got to cut more because
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: we need active management, and then you have the other
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: side of folks saying we've got to protect these places.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: We need to preserve the last little bit of old
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: growth we have I'm throwing a lot at chrig right here,
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: you think, because I've been I've got a lot of questions. Yeah,
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: what are your thoughts on kind of this old we're
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: all issue that I'm laying out.
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think so. One of the things that.
• 30:07
  Speaker 4: It's it's such a so much of this stuff requires
• 30:10
  Speaker 4: us to be so nuanced, and which is really hard
• 30:13
  Speaker 4: because it's so much easier just to.
• 30:16
  Speaker 3: You know, accept.
• 30:17
  Speaker 4: Whatever is the easiest to believe, you know, or the
• 30:20
  Speaker 4: easiest to understand a little sound bite and then we
• 30:23
  Speaker 4: like we're like, Okay, we figured it out, we learned this,
• 30:25
  Speaker 4: we heard this one little sound bite, we get it now,
• 30:28
  Speaker 4: and then that's it. And one thing that I feel
• 30:30
  Speaker 4: like a lot of my work is I feel like
• 30:33
  Speaker 4: I spend more time talking to people who care about
• 30:38
  Speaker 4: forests and are sort of like seduced by this all
• 30:44
  Speaker 4: wilderness all the time attitude than I do by people
• 30:48
  Speaker 4: who like exploit for us, you know, or maybe are
• 30:50
  Speaker 4: on the other side of the spectrum they're seeing for us,
• 30:52
  Speaker 4: like as commodities. I think that, you know, wilderness is important,
• 30:59
  Speaker 4: and it's important for variet of different reasons. It's important,
• 31:02
  Speaker 4: I believe for cultural reasons, and it's you know.
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: It's cool to have these areas. And certainly I would
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: say if we.
• 31:08
  Speaker 4: Have legit old growth for us that's still out there
• 31:12
  Speaker 4: on the landscape, that should be protected, no questions asked,
• 31:16
  Speaker 4: because it's just so rare.
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: There's just not enough of it left. It's precious. However,
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: you know a lot of the stuff.
• 31:22
  Speaker 4: That I hear being called old growth is not old growth, right,
• 31:26
  Speaker 4: And it's just you know, for us that for whatever reason,
• 31:30
  Speaker 4: people are uncomfortable with the idea of it being managed,
• 31:33
  Speaker 4: and so we come up with all these instead of
• 31:35
  Speaker 4: like asking, you know, really interrogating that question and ask
• 31:38
  Speaker 4: these real questions about like, you know, maybe is the
• 31:41
  Speaker 4: fact that I'm uncomfortable about forest management maybe not the
• 31:44
  Speaker 4: best indicator of whether or not this forest should actually
• 31:48
  Speaker 4: be managed. Instead of asking those questions, a lot of
• 31:50
  Speaker 4: times we tend to do this thing we call confirmation bias, right,
• 31:54
  Speaker 4: which is we already know what we believe, and then
• 31:56
  Speaker 4: we try to like backfill that with stuff that supports
• 31:59
  Speaker 4: what we already think and.
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: So guilty of it.
• 32:02
  Speaker 4: So my like I get a little almost like triggered
• 32:04
  Speaker 4: by this idea of wilderness because I so frequently hear
• 32:08
  Speaker 4: people get excited about that idea, and it's so much
• 32:10
  Speaker 4: easier to accept that if we care about ecosystems we
• 32:13
  Speaker 4: care about for us.
• 32:14
  Speaker 3: The way that we care about.
• 32:15
  Speaker 4: Them is just leave them alone, get people out of them,
• 32:18
  Speaker 4: and that's all we got to do. And so that's
• 32:20
  Speaker 4: such an easier idea to accept that people care about forests.
• 32:24
  Speaker 4: They're just like, okay, got it, figured it out. That's
• 32:27
  Speaker 4: what we do, and it's not right. It's something that
• 32:31
  Speaker 4: we do strategically, and we know that we want on
• 32:34
  Speaker 4: our landscape to have some forests that are unmanaged, but
• 32:36
  Speaker 4: we also know that, like number one, we have lots
• 32:39
  Speaker 4: of different values that we're trying to manage for and
• 32:41
  Speaker 4: just to know, you know, this no management situation doesn't
• 32:46
  Speaker 4: help us with all of them. Number Two, there are
• 32:50
  Speaker 4: situations that we're in with our forests right now where
• 32:53
  Speaker 4: I would argue that to not manage them because of
• 32:55
  Speaker 4: the volume of threats and stressors that they face, they're
• 32:58
  Speaker 4: just not going to get over on their own own
• 33:00
  Speaker 4: and ever be an old growth forest without a little
• 33:02
  Speaker 4: bit of help. I would argue that in that case,
• 33:04
  Speaker 4: no management is irresponsible.
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 33:07
  Speaker 4: Number three, we have to think about some of these
• 33:09
  Speaker 4: these resource issues, like where are we getting stuff from?
• 33:12
  Speaker 4: I think that a lot of times what can be
• 33:14
  Speaker 4: kind of baked into this attitude is a kind of
• 33:17
  Speaker 4: not in my backyard thing where people are comfortable consuming
• 33:20
  Speaker 4: resources produced at great ecological cost somewhere else in the world,
• 33:25
  Speaker 4: but not comfortable you know, dealing with the that maybe
• 33:29
  Speaker 4: the esthetic and you know, the way it makes them
• 33:32
  Speaker 4: feel to see these resources produced at home, which is
• 33:35
  Speaker 4: just something that we need to get over. Yeah, that's
• 33:38
  Speaker 4: a doozy so but yeah, as far as like how
• 33:41
  Speaker 4: much you know, there are a lot of you know,
• 33:42
  Speaker 4: smarter people than me who are who are answering these questions.
• 33:46
  Speaker 4: And then the tricky thing is like here at the
• 33:48
  Speaker 4: in Vermont Green Mountain National Forest, we've been answering this question.
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: Right now.
• 33:52
  Speaker 4: There's a project called the Telephone Got Project in the
• 33:54
  Speaker 4: Green Mountain National Forest, and what they're doing there is
• 34:00
  Speaker 4: exactly trying to figure this out, being like, you know,
• 34:02
  Speaker 4: how to get all of these values, to provide habitat
• 34:05
  Speaker 4: for all these species of concern, to provide local renewable
• 34:09
  Speaker 4: resources in our working landscape, to manage for even things
• 34:13
  Speaker 4: like old growth conditions, helping our younger forest be more
• 34:16
  Speaker 4: like old growth for US century sooner than they can
• 34:18
  Speaker 4: develop these qualities natural naturally, and you know, having some
• 34:23
  Speaker 4: areas set aside to be unmanaged in perpetuity, like they're
• 34:25
  Speaker 4: doing all that stuff at the same time, and and
• 34:29
  Speaker 4: that's like, that's that's it. They're doing it, you know,
• 34:32
  Speaker 4: that's what were that's what we want to do. Really,
• 34:34
  Speaker 4: But then the part of that that involves active management
• 34:37
  Speaker 4: is so confusing and so counterintuitive that then we have
• 34:40
  Speaker 4: groups suing the US Forest Service saying that, oh, they
• 34:43
  Speaker 4: don't you know, they don't care about any of these values.
• 34:45
  Speaker 4: They're just you know, they're just clearcutters, right, they all
• 34:49
  Speaker 4: they're just in it for the money and they're just
• 34:50
  Speaker 4: in bed with industry, which is just you know, total boloney.
• 34:55
  Speaker 4: But there are you know, there are smart people who
• 34:58
  Speaker 4: are like who are trying to figure these things out.
• 35:00
  Speaker 4: And you know, folks in the conservation community. Everybody that
• 35:03
  Speaker 4: I know here in Vermont who's in this world, who
• 35:06
  Speaker 4: works for nonprofits, work from a government agencies.
• 35:08
  Speaker 3: All they want to do is just answer that question. Yeah,
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: but it's complex.
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: So for a landowner you described, we kind of talked
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: about one bucket of landscape, which would be, you know, understanding,
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: do I have a simple forest or a complex forest,
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: and that being one indicator of what I might need
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: to do as someone who's trying to manage this. But
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: then you just describe two other options, which is either
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: one maybe you have a particular set of circumstances that
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: warrant you leaving it alone, or on the flip side,
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: you have a set of circumstances that is so unhealthy
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: that it'd be irresponsible not to do something. Could you
• 35:46
  Speaker 2: better define those two things so that if I'm a
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: landowner and I'm trying to think about what I have,
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: what might those two far sides of the spectrum look like.
• 35:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and I would say that they're like sort of
• 35:56
  Speaker 4: in relationship with each other in a way, because for
• 36:00
  Speaker 4: a forest to be appropriate for no management, or the
• 36:03
  Speaker 4: term of art that we use now we call passive management,
• 36:06
  Speaker 4: because it is sort of still a management decision, even
• 36:09
  Speaker 4: if the management decision is like hands off. So in
• 36:14
  Speaker 4: order for a place to be appropriate for passive management,
• 36:16
  Speaker 4: it needs to not have any of these sort of
• 36:19
  Speaker 4: external factors that inhibit its ability to become an old
• 36:21
  Speaker 4: growth forest, so that means no non native invasive plants,
• 36:27
  Speaker 4: probably no extreme dear overpopulation either. Those would be I
• 36:32
  Speaker 4: think the big ones. No other factors that are going
• 36:35
  Speaker 4: to prevent it from just being able to develop normally
• 36:37
  Speaker 4: as it would have on this landscape for thousands of years. Now,
• 36:40
  Speaker 4: we can't you know, we can't say that entirely because
• 36:44
  Speaker 4: you know, all these trees, all these forests are going
• 36:46
  Speaker 4: to be faced with some of these non native pathogens
• 36:48
  Speaker 4: like the emerald dashboar, Dutch elms disease, and whatever. But
• 36:52
  Speaker 4: at least we know that if it doesn't have these
• 36:54
  Speaker 4: non native invasive plants, if it doesn't have some of
• 36:57
  Speaker 4: these other issues, that it should be able to develop
• 36:59
  Speaker 4: along this path way and.
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: Eventually become an old growth forest.
• 37:03
  Speaker 4: Now, if you have a forest that, for instance, has
• 37:07
  Speaker 4: non native invasive plants so here that I don't know
• 37:09
  Speaker 4: what we have over there, but here, that would be
• 37:11
  Speaker 4: like honeysuckle buckthorn, Japanese barberry, asiatic bittersweet, Yeah, got them all.
• 37:18
  Speaker 4: So those species, you know, I know you're probably thinking
• 37:22
  Speaker 4: it's just you know, it's just a plant. Who you know,
• 37:24
  Speaker 4: this is what people say to me all the time.
• 37:26
  Speaker 4: Those species fundamentally interfere with forest's ability to do everything
• 37:31
  Speaker 4: that they need to do, you know, and to regenerate,
• 37:34
  Speaker 4: to grow, to develop all of these qualities that will
• 37:37
  Speaker 4: eventually make them an old growth forest. And so you know,
• 37:40
  Speaker 4: by out competing all of our native species, they are
• 37:43
  Speaker 4: gonna make it so that the forest just can't get there.
• 37:47
  Speaker 4: And so that would be a forest that, you know,
• 37:49
  Speaker 4: you could say, I'm going to leave my forest alone
• 37:51
  Speaker 4: to become an old growth forest, but it's never going
• 37:53
  Speaker 4: to do that. And the same could be said for
• 37:58
  Speaker 4: extreme deer overpopulation. So you could have, for instance, you
• 38:01
  Speaker 4: could have an existing old growth forest today that is
• 38:06
  Speaker 4: basically declining, you know, maybe losing many of these qualities
• 38:11
  Speaker 4: that it's had for thousands of years because of an
• 38:14
  Speaker 4: extreme dear over population or something like a non native
• 38:18
  Speaker 4: invasive plant that's preventing it from continuing to be able
• 38:21
  Speaker 4: to regenerate, you know, and develop and restore these qualities
• 38:26
  Speaker 4: that make it such an amazing ecological resource. Another other
• 38:31
  Speaker 4: things to look for, you know, in a forest that
• 38:33
  Speaker 4: maybe you can leave alone, is a lot of times
• 38:35
  Speaker 4: you look for these forests that may already have some
• 38:37
  Speaker 4: of the qualities. So like forest that has a lot
• 38:39
  Speaker 4: of big old trees. And I don't mean like sixty
• 38:43
  Speaker 4: year old pine trees. I mean like, you know, big,
• 38:47
  Speaker 4: big old, like two hundred year old trees. That because
• 38:50
  Speaker 4: those big old trees, as they die, will help to
• 38:53
  Speaker 4: create some of the other attributes of old forests, so
• 38:55
  Speaker 4: that we already have the big trees, which is one
• 38:57
  Speaker 4: part of it, and as they die, they'll tear through
• 39:00
  Speaker 4: the forest canopy, take out all these other trees, create
• 39:03
  Speaker 4: these canopy gaps, right, which will then regenerate and create
• 39:05
  Speaker 4: this multigenerationality, and that tree will be laying on the
• 39:08
  Speaker 4: ground creating that dead wood quality.
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: So that could be another thing to look for.
• 39:12
  Speaker 4: But you know, you can have all the big trees
• 39:14
  Speaker 4: you want if you've got Japanese barber in the understory.
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: It's not going to amount to anything in the long term.
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: It seems like true old growth forest and relatively new
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: or actively managed forest are effectively achieving the same thing.
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: We're just trying. There's two different methods. There's like the
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: way that comes about from hundreds and hundreds and hundreds
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: of years of it being left alone, and you get
• 39:39
  Speaker 2: natural disturbances, natural death, regrowth openings. You naturally create a
• 39:45
  Speaker 2: diverse matrix of an ecosystem and then by actively managing
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: we are trying to do that, but because of all
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: the other crazy things we've done to the land, we
• 39:55
  Speaker 2: have to be more involved in the process to recreate
• 39:59
  Speaker 2: that scenario. If we don't, you get this monolculture of
• 40:02
  Speaker 2: even age stuff invasives that never allows you to reach
• 40:05
  Speaker 2: that natural old growth diversity.
• 40:08
  Speaker 4: Right, yes, yeah, and I think you know there's a
• 40:14
  Speaker 4: there's a bunch of stuff there.
• 40:16
  Speaker 3: I think that.
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: Uh.
• 40:19
  Speaker 4: One of the other things that we should be thinking
• 40:20
  Speaker 4: about is time. Like even if a forest could develop
• 40:25
  Speaker 4: those qualities over time, we think that to develop all
• 40:28
  Speaker 4: the qualities of an old growth forest here in the
• 40:30
  Speaker 4: northeast three hundred years.
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: So you know, when we look.
• 40:35
  Speaker 4: At the numbers of like the species that we're losing,
• 40:37
  Speaker 4: seeing these sort of like widespread declines of wildlife species,
• 40:42
  Speaker 4: I would rather create those conditions in twenty years and
• 40:45
  Speaker 4: we can do it and maybe even if they're not
• 40:47
  Speaker 4: exactly the same. Like one thing example that I gave is,
• 40:52
  Speaker 4: like to the thousands of species of living things that
• 40:55
  Speaker 4: will utilize the habitat provided by a dead tree on
• 40:58
  Speaker 4: the ground, you think that any of them care if
• 41:01
  Speaker 4: that tree fell over if I cut it down right, No,
• 41:05
  Speaker 4: they don't. And so like, we can also do it
• 41:08
  Speaker 4: in small measures, like even if it's not a true
• 41:11
  Speaker 4: old growth for us, if we're providing that multigenerationality, you know,
• 41:15
  Speaker 4: by cutting trees strategically, if you ad a time creating
• 41:17
  Speaker 4: all these pockets of regeneration, we are providing some of
• 41:20
  Speaker 4: those benefits. If we are putting dead wood on the
• 41:22
  Speaker 4: ground and forests that have naturally a lot of dead
• 41:25
  Speaker 4: wood on the ground, we are providing some of those benefits.
• 41:27
  Speaker 4: If we're leaving some big old trees in the forest,
• 41:30
  Speaker 4: we're doing the same thing. So I think one of
• 41:33
  Speaker 4: the things that I often say about myself is that
• 41:37
  Speaker 4: one of my superpowers is that I'm not a purist, right,
• 41:41
  Speaker 4: and so it allows me to instead of getting just
• 41:44
  Speaker 4: totally bogged down in like trying to do the perfect
• 41:47
  Speaker 4: thing and create a perfect old growth forest, I'm like,
• 41:50
  Speaker 4: how's about we just do what we can right now
• 41:54
  Speaker 4: to create the habitats that we need right now. And
• 41:58
  Speaker 4: you know, if we want to, good news is we
• 42:00
  Speaker 4: don't have to do all of any one thing. Like
• 42:02
  Speaker 4: you said, we can also have areas where we're just
• 42:05
  Speaker 4: doing this past and management thing. We're letting them do
• 42:07
  Speaker 4: their own thing, but where we can, like, let's do
• 42:10
  Speaker 4: what we can and not be afraid so afraid that
• 42:12
  Speaker 4: we don't do anything.
• 42:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So the hunting community, i would say broadly, is
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: very comfortable talking about, you know, adding things to the
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: landscape that will make for better wildlife habitat and better
• 42:28
  Speaker 2: wildlife populations and hunting opportunities. Right, anyone listening to this
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: will be all for Hey, you know, yeah, let's let's
• 42:36
  Speaker 2: do some timber works, some timber stand improvement. That'll get
• 42:38
  Speaker 2: some more critters out there. That sounds great. But the
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: white elephant in the room, or the elephant in the room,
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: or how Howards sing go, is the fact that sometimes
• 42:50
  Speaker 2: removing something might actually be the most important thing to
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: creating this healthier ecosystem, which is the critter that a
• 42:59
  Speaker 2: lot of us really like a lot and like to
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: see and hunt, which is deer. Yeah, and you you write,
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: you write very well about this topic in your book,
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: exploring this topic and exploring the impacts that deer have
• 43:15
  Speaker 2: on the landscape negatively. And this one is a tough
• 43:19
  Speaker 2: one for the deer hunting community here because a lot
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: of people want more deer. I want to see more deer,
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: or I want to see a bigger deer, or whatever
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: it is. Can you can you help me understand from
• 43:29
  Speaker 2: a forester's perspective and from someone who has seen many, many,
• 43:33
  Speaker 2: many different wild places and forested landscapes, and you've seen
• 43:38
  Speaker 2: the good, the bad, and the ugly. What does an
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: overpopulation of deer due to a forest and what's the
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: ripple effects of that on the ecosystem.
• 43:49
  Speaker 4: It's such a it's such a profound question. It's actually interesting.
• 43:52
  Speaker 4: You mentioned all the Leopold he blew the whistle on
• 43:56
  Speaker 4: deer overpopulation in like the nineteen twenties, right in the
• 44:00
  Speaker 4: essay Thinking like a Mountain, we talked about you know,
• 44:03
  Speaker 4: he shoots a wolf, right, and then he talks about
• 44:05
  Speaker 4: the impact of that, the loss of those predators and
• 44:07
  Speaker 4: the landscape. And still I think that we don't, you know,
• 44:12
  Speaker 4: a as a people, we don't really understand it that well.
• 44:17
  Speaker 4: So here in Vermont we have, you know, we think,
• 44:21
  Speaker 4: let's say, in an average eastern forest that we can
• 44:24
  Speaker 4: sustain maybe twenty deer per square mile, which is not
• 44:26
  Speaker 4: a lot a square mile, six hundred and forty acres,
• 44:29
  Speaker 4: so we might have here, you know, twenty five to
• 44:33
  Speaker 4: thirty deer per square mile on average. So what we
• 44:37
  Speaker 4: see is that you know, sort of the first levels
• 44:40
  Speaker 4: of the impact of deer over population. I call it
• 44:44
  Speaker 4: like early stage deer overpopulation, which is where you know,
• 44:47
  Speaker 4: deer are smart and they have preferences for the stuff
• 44:51
  Speaker 4: that they like to eat. They will always eat the
• 44:53
  Speaker 4: most nutritious food first. Interestingly, when they're in environments with predators,
• 44:57
  Speaker 4: that's not always true because in addition toretors lowering their populations,
• 45:01
  Speaker 4: it also really changes their behavior, so they can't always
• 45:04
  Speaker 4: get to the most nutritious food first, right, because the
• 45:08
  Speaker 4: predators are making them go to areas that are where
• 45:10
  Speaker 4: they have escape paths and other things. So that's another
• 45:13
  Speaker 4: impact of not having predators on the landscape is just
• 45:15
  Speaker 4: that they are free to you know, eat whatever then
• 45:17
  Speaker 4: the most nutritious food is without having to worry about
• 45:19
  Speaker 4: predators that much. So they eat the most nutritious food
• 45:24
  Speaker 4: those preferred browse species and they leave behind less preferred species.
• 45:29
  Speaker 4: So as there's more and more deer in the landscape,
• 45:31
  Speaker 4: you see fewer and fewer of those preferred browse species unfortunately,
• 45:35
  Speaker 4: which are also often the same species that we want
• 45:38
  Speaker 4: to grow for wildlife, for timber and other values. So
• 45:41
  Speaker 4: here that species like the oaks, sugar maple, yellow birch,
• 45:46
  Speaker 4: and you know, the more deer there are, the less
• 45:48
  Speaker 4: and less of those species you see, and the more
• 45:51
  Speaker 4: of other species that you see, species that deer don't
• 45:53
  Speaker 4: like to eat because they don't have very nutritious foliage.
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: So that'll be species like beach.
• 45:59
  Speaker 4: Hophorn, beam, ironwood in non native invasive plants which hazel
• 46:05
  Speaker 4: to a certain extent, straight maple, some of these other
• 46:07
  Speaker 4: species that are also typically sort of considered weeds. So
• 46:11
  Speaker 4: what they're doing, the reason that this is a problem
• 46:15
  Speaker 4: is that through their browsing habits, they're fundamentally changing the
• 46:19
  Speaker 4: composition of that forest and all the benefits that it's
• 46:22
  Speaker 4: providing to all the other things that live there and
• 46:25
  Speaker 4: to us as well, right as we also get things
• 46:27
  Speaker 4: from the forest.
• 46:29
  Speaker 3: So they're making it.
• 46:30
  Speaker 4: So that those little trees, those little oaks, those little
• 46:32
  Speaker 4: sugar maples, never get to be big trees that go
• 46:34
  Speaker 4: up into the canopy and make this beautiful, healthy, diverse forest. Now,
• 46:39
  Speaker 4: as you get into higher and higher deer over populations,
• 46:42
  Speaker 4: you see this impact increase. So you see that, you know,
• 46:47
  Speaker 4: you might get to a place where you don't have
• 46:49
  Speaker 4: any woody species, no shrubs, no young trees in the understory.
• 46:54
  Speaker 4: You might only have like grasses Japanese still grass or something,
• 46:58
  Speaker 4: or you might have nothing. This is a process that
• 47:03
  Speaker 4: we call and this is at the extreme ends of
• 47:05
  Speaker 4: the overpopulation spectrum. Like some of these forests that I've
• 47:09
  Speaker 4: been on this speaking tour and touring through the mid
• 47:11
  Speaker 4: Atlantic and seeing places like outside of Riding Pennsylvania three
• 47:15
  Speaker 4: hundred and fifty deer per square mile their target eight
• 47:19
  Speaker 4: Maryland two hundred deer per square mile their target probably
• 47:23
  Speaker 4: less than fifteen. You know, it's like really wild and
• 47:27
  Speaker 4: there's just nothing there, right, And that might you know,
• 47:31
  Speaker 4: create a forest that looks good because there's there's no understory.
• 47:34
  Speaker 3: Again, you can see right through it. But where are
• 47:37
  Speaker 3: the future.
• 47:38
  Speaker 4: Generations of oaks right that are going to replace those
• 47:40
  Speaker 4: oaks in the canopy that will eventually die. Where are
• 47:43
  Speaker 4: those other species, those are bacious species in those shrubs
• 47:46
  Speaker 4: that deer are also going to feed on during the
• 47:48
  Speaker 4: summer at other parts of their life cycle, right, Where
• 47:51
  Speaker 4: is the cover that they're going to hide their fawns
• 47:53
  Speaker 4: in right like where there are so many other things
• 47:56
  Speaker 4: that are required to protect this species. And what we're
• 47:59
  Speaker 4: seeing is where that deer overpopulation gets extreme. You know,
• 48:04
  Speaker 4: we think about it forester or is kind of curse
• 48:06
  Speaker 4: it deer because they prevent us from growing future generations
• 48:09
  Speaker 4: of trees. But in preventing forests from growing future generations
• 48:12
  Speaker 4: of trees, you fundamentally prevent forests from just being resilient
• 48:17
  Speaker 4: and being able to grow and being able to provide
• 48:19
  Speaker 4: habitat not just now but also in the future. So
• 48:24
  Speaker 4: you know, we also see it. I know that in
• 48:25
  Speaker 4: the Midwest deer eat a lot of food out of
• 48:27
  Speaker 4: crop fields, which is less the case here, So you
• 48:30
  Speaker 4: might still see big deer even when you have an
• 48:34
  Speaker 4: extreme overpopulation, and that's because you know, normally what happens
• 48:38
  Speaker 4: is they eat all the most utricious food out the landscape,
• 48:40
  Speaker 4: and the deer get smaller and smaller and smaller. Where
• 48:42
  Speaker 4: you have this like soybeans and stuff like that for
• 48:45
  Speaker 4: them to eat, it sort of like disrupts that feedback.
• 48:49
  Speaker 4: But normally what you see is deer get smaller and
• 48:51
  Speaker 4: smaller and smaller, they get less and less healthy. But
• 48:54
  Speaker 4: there seems to be no external checks on their population, right,
• 48:59
  Speaker 4: Like I can get to three hundred and fifty deer
• 49:01
  Speaker 4: per square mile, you know this thing, it's not just
• 49:04
  Speaker 4: like it's going to magically correct itself.
• 49:06
  Speaker 3: I don't know when it would.
• 49:07
  Speaker 4: Maybe when they get to a thousand per square mile.
• 49:10
  Speaker 4: And so we have to then step into this role
• 49:12
  Speaker 4: of recognizing that, like it or not, we are the
• 49:15
  Speaker 4: predator of this animal, and it's our job to maintain,
• 49:19
  Speaker 4: you know, not the highest level of deer in our landscape,
• 49:22
  Speaker 4: but a sustainable level of deer in our landscape so
• 49:24
  Speaker 4: that we can have future generations of deer and everything else.
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: And you know, you spoke about this earlier, and you
• 49:42
  Speaker 2: know at length within the book this fact that we
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: are living amidst a long drawn out but very impactful
• 49:52
  Speaker 2: mass extinction event where we are losing many, many species,
• 49:56
  Speaker 2: or at least they're there the amount I'm lack of
• 50:00
  Speaker 2: struggling to think of the word I'm looking for here,
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: but we are losing a lot of critters. And while
• 50:05
  Speaker 2: deer seem particularly weedy and resilient and they can deal
• 50:09
  Speaker 2: with anything, there's a lot of other species out there
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: that can't. And so what's happening here is that we're
• 50:14
  Speaker 2: getting crazy high deer populations that are doing what you
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: just describe to the forest or the grasslands or the suburban,
• 50:23
  Speaker 2: you know, interface whatever it is, and they're mowing down
• 50:26
  Speaker 2: all of this other vegetation and herbaceous content that songbirds
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: and pollinators and all sorts of other species that are
• 50:34
  Speaker 2: struggling neat. So it's and then as you said earlier,
• 50:37
  Speaker 2: it's all connected. So all that stuff eventually is going
• 50:39
  Speaker 2: to come back around and hurt whatever the thing is
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: you care about, whether it's deer or turkey's or quail. Right,
• 50:47
  Speaker 2: and too many deeri is not a good thing.
• 50:48
  Speaker 4: And it's easier to make that argument here in the
• 50:50
  Speaker 4: Northeast because because we don't have the level of agriculture
• 50:54
  Speaker 4: that folks in the Midwest have, Like we see a
• 50:57
  Speaker 4: very clear connection where the more deer they are there are,
• 51:02
  Speaker 4: the smaller they are. And you know, and that's like
• 51:05
  Speaker 4: a very clear story that we can doesn't mean that
• 51:07
  Speaker 4: everybody takes that on board, right, but it's a it's
• 51:12
  Speaker 4: it makes it a little bit a little bit more clear,
• 51:15
  Speaker 4: and uh, you know, we want to grow bigger deer.
• 51:17
  Speaker 4: You know, I think a lot of hunters out there
• 51:19
  Speaker 4: would rather kill fewer, bigger deer right than a lot
• 51:23
  Speaker 4: of little teeny tiny deer. They're not like, you know,
• 51:26
  Speaker 4: I'm I'm a I'm a different one in that I'm
• 51:28
  Speaker 4: I'm like totally a meat hunter. So I will kill
• 51:31
  Speaker 4: you know, more little tiny does from a population control
• 51:35
  Speaker 4: perspective and put them in the freezer. But but most
• 51:38
  Speaker 4: people are not like that, and I think that we
• 51:44
  Speaker 4: you know, it's it's interesting actually, as a side note,
• 51:47
  Speaker 4: that the reason that the deer gets smaller is not
• 51:50
  Speaker 4: because they're like physically crowded, but because they're actually stripping
• 51:55
  Speaker 4: all of the most nutritious food off the landscape. And
• 51:58
  Speaker 4: as there are more and more deer, there's and less
• 52:00
  Speaker 4: of that nutritious food that's there. Yeah, and that nutritious
• 52:04
  Speaker 4: food is also like, you know, plants that just aren't
• 52:08
  Speaker 4: there anymore because deer have eaten literally all of them,
• 52:12
  Speaker 4: and that's why they're getting smaller.
• 52:14
  Speaker 2: So what's your ask of hunters? Is it as simple
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: as just shoot more deer or is there more to
• 52:21
  Speaker 2: it or more thought to be put into it?
• 52:23
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it depends. You know, here in Vermont again,
• 52:27
  Speaker 4: where we have this deer population that's in most parts
• 52:31
  Speaker 4: of the state. We also have like a northeastern part
• 52:33
  Speaker 4: of the state that's pretty boreal that is not really
• 52:35
  Speaker 4: overpopulated in some areas in the mountains that are not.
• 52:37
  Speaker 4: But a lot of the state we think we are,
• 52:39
  Speaker 4: you know, somewhere like twenty five plus percent overpopulated. If
• 52:44
  Speaker 4: we just had enough hunters and we had them hunting
• 52:47
  Speaker 4: in the right way where they were willing to target dose,
• 52:50
  Speaker 4: especially these really, really really good hunters, the best hunters,
• 52:54
  Speaker 4: most of whom are like totally focused on bucks, and
• 52:57
  Speaker 4: we got them to like, you know, be willing to
• 52:59
  Speaker 4: play a few dos out of there, we could lower
• 53:02
  Speaker 4: this population to a sustainable level. But we're you know,
• 53:05
  Speaker 4: we're sort of it's not working out on both counts.
• 53:08
  Speaker 4: On one count, like we're losing fifty percent of our
• 53:10
  Speaker 4: hunters per decade, which you can think of as like
• 53:13
  Speaker 4: and that's because of demographics, right, They're just getting older
• 53:15
  Speaker 4: and younger generations aren't picking up that mantle. One thing
• 53:18
  Speaker 4: that I'm really trying to do is to message this
• 53:22
  Speaker 4: idea of you know, trying to get new people who
• 53:25
  Speaker 4: maybe would not typically think of themselves as hunters into
• 53:27
  Speaker 4: hunting and using different entry points, Like it's not just
• 53:30
  Speaker 4: about you know, you grew up hunting with your with
• 53:33
  Speaker 4: your grandpa or whatever. It's also about you want a
• 53:35
  Speaker 4: sustainable source of meat, best source of meat imaginable that
• 53:39
  Speaker 4: you can harvest. Well, you're solving an environmental problem, right,
• 53:42
  Speaker 4: and then also trying to you know, have these new
• 53:45
  Speaker 4: ideas about taking dose, which when I grew up that
• 53:48
  Speaker 4: was sort of like considered taboo because it was the
• 53:51
  Speaker 4: population you see, less deer, and it's also like a
• 53:54
  Speaker 4: macho you know, you want to kill these big big
• 53:56
  Speaker 4: bucks and whatever. So so change that culture as well
• 54:01
  Speaker 4: in some of these other areas though, and the research
• 54:04
  Speaker 4: suggests that it's about forty deer per square mile. Once
• 54:07
  Speaker 4: there's about above forty deer per square mile, traditional recreational
• 54:10
  Speaker 4: hunting is no longer effective at actually reducing those populations
• 54:14
  Speaker 4: to a sustainable level. And so that's when we need
• 54:17
  Speaker 4: to think about some like real shifts in like the
• 54:20
  Speaker 4: rules of how we do this in some places that
• 54:23
  Speaker 4: could look like a culling, like hiring sharpshooters. I'm really
• 54:27
  Speaker 4: interested instead of doing that in seeing if we can't
• 54:31
  Speaker 4: wrap our heads around market hunting so thinking about if
• 54:35
  Speaker 4: we had those hunters among us. I'm sure some of
• 54:37
  Speaker 4: them are listening right now. Imagine if hunting was your job,
• 54:42
  Speaker 4: you know, And imagine if we recognize the fact that,
• 54:46
  Speaker 4: you know, we have this incredibly sustainable source of meat
• 54:50
  Speaker 4: that we can that is beautiful and delicious, and that
• 54:52
  Speaker 4: we can harvest while solving all these problems, and that
• 54:55
  Speaker 4: we made it legal for it to be sold in
• 54:57
  Speaker 4: supermarkets and restaurants.
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: That's a lot of food.
• 55:00
  Speaker 4: And at the same time that we're doing that, we
• 55:02
  Speaker 4: could be you know, if we did it in the
• 55:03
  Speaker 4: right way, we could be uh, you know, having healthier ecosystems.
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I can see the appeal to that idea.
• 55:16
  Speaker 2: At the same time, it scares the hell out of me,
• 55:18
  Speaker 2: I know, because the details, the slippery slope that market
• 55:22
  Speaker 2: hunting let us down, you know, one hundred and fifty
• 55:25
  Speaker 2: years ago, two hundreds of years ago. So I sure
• 55:29
  Speaker 2: hope that we as a hunting public can pick up
• 55:33
  Speaker 2: the the burden the responsibility of taking care of this
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: ourselves before it ever gets to that point. Yeah. So
• 55:39
  Speaker 2: then I think we jump on it and do it.
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: I think what we need.
• 55:42
  Speaker 4: To do then is like those of you who are
• 55:44
  Speaker 4: like really good hunters start plugging them doughs man. Yeah,
• 55:48
  Speaker 4: And I think that, like, like if you you know,
• 55:52
  Speaker 4: there are there are a lot of food shelves that
• 55:54
  Speaker 4: would love to take your meat and even if it's
• 55:56
  Speaker 4: more meat than you can stand, and it's just such
• 55:58
  Speaker 4: a beautiful thing. So like think about it as like
• 56:02
  Speaker 4: this is the way that we, uh, you know, this
• 56:05
  Speaker 4: is the way that we that we protect everything really
• 56:08
  Speaker 4: and if you're a hunter, I think it's a responsibility
• 56:11
  Speaker 4: to be targeting dose in a different way.
• 56:13
  Speaker 3: And I know that.
• 56:13
  Speaker 4: Like then the other part of it is is getting
• 56:17
  Speaker 4: new people into it, right, which is something we want
• 56:20
  Speaker 4: to do anyway to protect our culture and our traditions,
• 56:24
  Speaker 4: so like we don't want to see hunting die, and
• 56:27
  Speaker 4: so part of that might be, like you know, reaching
• 56:30
  Speaker 4: out to people who you know would traditionally think of
• 56:33
  Speaker 4: themselves as hunters and trying to get them into it,
• 56:35
  Speaker 4: no matter who they are or how they're coming at it.
• 56:38
  Speaker 2: It's incredibly rewarding. It's it's not just practically necessary, which
• 56:43
  Speaker 2: it is it is. It's a necessity now we need
• 56:46
  Speaker 2: to do what you're saying, but it's also a lot
• 56:47
  Speaker 2: of fun like I've been able to be a part
• 56:49
  Speaker 2: of this now for quite a while, helping new hunters
• 56:52
  Speaker 2: who who come from different backgrounds, who haven't done this
• 56:54
  Speaker 2: kind of thing before, and to see the the joy,
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: the surprise, this kind of you know, I've heard from
• 57:02
  Speaker 2: so many people who came to it just as you described, like, Hey,
• 57:04
  Speaker 2: I want to have a deeper connection to my food,
• 57:06
  Speaker 2: but I grew up in the city or whatever, but
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: I've been intrigued and then they finally get out there
• 57:10
  Speaker 2: and they had this experience. And maybe you've heard this too,
• 57:13
  Speaker 2: but so many people I've talked to describe it as
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: reconnecting with something that was like deep inside of them, like,
• 57:20
  Speaker 2: oh wow, this feels so right. This all of a
• 57:22
  Speaker 2: sudden feels like I'm doing something that I was born
• 57:24
  Speaker 2: to do in some kind of strange way, and then
• 57:27
  Speaker 2: eating that meat and feeling a totally new sensation and
• 57:31
  Speaker 2: experience when consuming a meal, you know, having that from
• 57:35
  Speaker 2: beginning to end connection to it. Man, it's so rewarding
• 57:39
  Speaker 2: to help someone experience that for the first powerful stuff.
• 57:43
  Speaker 3: You know, And it's for me.
• 57:46
  Speaker 4: My dad was my dad quote unquote taught me to hunt,
• 57:51
  Speaker 4: and then I learned as an adult when I got
• 57:53
  Speaker 4: back into it that everything you taught me was basically wrong.
• 57:57
  Speaker 4: He had been mentored by these other people. So it
• 58:01
  Speaker 4: took me a while to really get good at it.
• 58:03
  Speaker 3: And it was my.
• 58:04
  Speaker 4: Fault because what I didn't do was seek out mentorship.
• 58:08
  Speaker 4: But I think that it's also incumbent upon us, who
• 58:10
  Speaker 4: now know our way around this thing, to to not
• 58:15
  Speaker 4: just like accept people who want to learn from us,
• 58:17
  Speaker 4: but to seek them out right and and to really
• 58:20
  Speaker 4: try to like bring along that that future generation.
• 58:23
  Speaker 3: I don't think it's just gonna happen.
• 58:25
  Speaker 4: Like the demographically we're seeing that we're just fewer hunters
• 58:29
  Speaker 4: all the time, So we need to be like proactively
• 58:32
  Speaker 4: reaching out to people to share this knowledge that we have.
• 58:36
  Speaker 4: And you know, again, like might be different kinds of people,
• 58:39
  Speaker 4: Like I don't know why we don't have like a
• 58:43
  Speaker 4: whole contingent of hunters who are just like folks who
• 58:46
  Speaker 4: are concerned about the morality of eating commodity meat. Like
• 58:51
  Speaker 4: if you don't like the way beef is produced in
• 58:53
  Speaker 4: this country and you want to eat meat, like go.
• 58:56
  Speaker 3: Kill and kill some deer.
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: No better.
• 58:59
  Speaker 4: Yeah, And it's like the most sustainable meat imaginable and
• 59:03
  Speaker 4: again you're helping out an ecosystem or you know, people
• 59:06
  Speaker 4: concerned about, uh, the way the ability of our forest
• 59:10
  Speaker 4: to sequester in store carbon. You know what prevents forests
• 59:12
  Speaker 4: from sequestering in store carbon when they're collapsing because there's
• 59:16
  Speaker 4: too many deer. So yeah, it's just it's just everything
• 59:20
  Speaker 4: and same thing. I'm a birder too. I'm like, why
• 59:22
  Speaker 4: aren't these birders hunting deer? All these birders telling telling
• 59:26
  Speaker 4: me this stuff about you know, all these birds that
• 59:28
  Speaker 4: rely on this certain type of habitat in these areas
• 59:31
  Speaker 4: with deer overpopulations, those birds just aren't there anymore.
• 59:34
  Speaker 3: And I'm like, well, what are you going to do
• 59:35
  Speaker 3: about it?
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: You know?
• 59:38
  Speaker 2: Great, it goes the other way too.
• 59:40
  Speaker 4: By the way, just just as a shout out to birding,
• 59:43
  Speaker 4: I think that every hunter should become a burder because
• 59:45
  Speaker 4: for me, it scratches a really similar itch to hunting,
• 59:49
  Speaker 4: where it's like you're you're like stalking this thing, you know,
• 59:53
  Speaker 4: and then you're you're trying to get it. And what
• 59:55
  Speaker 4: you're trying to do is, you know, not just know
• 59:57
  Speaker 4: what it is by ear, but but to lay eyes
• 59:59
  Speaker 4: on it or get oars on it and then once
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 4: you've got your binoculars on it, it's like you got
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 4: your shot.
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 2: That's the funny. I always I overlooked birds, I guess
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 2: in some ways for a lot of years until I
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 2: had kids. And my children and my wife kind of
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 2: have rekindled this awareness in me and this interest because
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 2: now the kids are so excited that they see the
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 2: world through new eyes, right, and so blue jay is fascinating.
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 2: A red throated thrasher is you know, is incredible. And
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 2: so now all of a sudden, we have bird books
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 2: everywhere and binoculars at all the windows of the house,
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 2: and we go hiking. We're carrying that stuff with me
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 2: and my son is drawing pictures of the different birds
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 2: he's seeing, and you know, we're you know, also to
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 2: the new technology now that can help you identify birds
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 2: by their song. All of it has been really eye
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 2: opening and really neat to just start seeing these different
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 2: layers out there on the right.
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 4: Well also because like the you know, the bird, every
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 4: species bird utilize this habitat that's a little different, right,
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 4: So it's a really good way to sort of conceptualize
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 4: the benefits provided by that complexity where you have bird
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 4: species that are really closely linked with like deadwood on
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 4: the ground, you know that nest on the root balls
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 4: of uprooted trees, or that nest in the understore or
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 4: forage in the understore, or you know, live in these
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 4: areas of young forests like woodcock and rough grouse, and
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 4: you know flycatchers that utilize canopy gaps and nuthatches that
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 4: forage on the bark of big trees and all of these.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 4: You know, it seems like for every quality in the
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 4: forest that we want to create, there's a bird that
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 4: lives in that thing. And so it's a really good
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 4: way of understanding just like all the stuff that we
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 4: need to be taken care of when we care for forests.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 2: So when we're looking at prescriptions, we've already talked about
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 2: one of them that being we need to seriously manage
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 2: our deer herds. That's that's an easy win, right because
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: we like to hunt. The people listening to this right
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: now are already we're on board with hunting. We know
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 2: how to do it. Here there's the easy one. But
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: prescription number two and beyond might be what could we
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 2: do with our landscape. We've talked generally about how adding
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 2: diversity and complexity is important, and yeah, a great way
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 2: to move forward. But can you can you give me
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: a couple ideas for someone who's listening, who owns a chainsaw,
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: you know, who could go out there and do something
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 2: on their twenty acres or eighty acres or whatever it is.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 2: Could you give us an idea or two that, from
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 2: your perspective, is a great way to start managing our
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 2: force a little bit better. That's going to help our
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 2: goals as hunters and wildlife managers. But then also the
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 2: whole ecosystem. I've read about you talking about patch cuts
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 2: and all sorts of different things. But what might you recommend?
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 4: Yeah, this is exciting too because both with with hunters
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 4: and birders. Actually, I've I've really wanted to like infuse
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 4: a little bit more complexity into the way we talk
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 4: about forestry. Like, so my buddies, buddies are good hunters here,
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 4: you know, they're like I went and there was a cut,
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 4: you know, I went to Maine and there was there
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 4: was a cut there, and I'm like.
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 3: What does this mean? You know where birds are?
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 4: Like they logged and I'm like, okay, you know that
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 4: could mean anything. A lot of times people talk about
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 4: clear cutting and selective cutting, and selective cutting, I guess
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 4: is just anything that's not a clear cut, like if
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 4: there's any trees, you know, which could mean a million
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 4: different things. I think as for your landowners, the most
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 4: impactful and most efficient tool that you could use, the
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 4: most efficient prescription, we would call it type of cutting
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 4: that you could do, is what we call crop tree release.
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 4: So crop tree release is basically your crop tree is it?
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 4: You know, it doesn't it's not a tree that has
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 4: to produce a crop like timber, but just any tree
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 4: that you want to encourage. Oftentimes, you know, if we're
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 4: thinking about deer, it's producing a crop like acorns, right
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 4: or hickory nuts. So what you do is instead of
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 4: going into your forest and doing what we all do initially,
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 4: which is like look for any tree that is something
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 4: wrong with it and go cut it, any tree that
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 4: is a defect that just seems like it's not healthy.
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 4: Instead we like laser focus on our healthiest trees. And specifically,
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 4: if you're thinking about wildlife habitat, you know, and producing
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 4: those those hard mass species like acorns, you could be
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 4: laser focused on oaks and hickories, say, or any other
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 4: species that's producing a mass that you want to encourage
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 4: for wildlife. And what you do is you cut the
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 4: trees that are competing with those crop trees individually. So
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 4: you go up, walk up to your crop tree, your oak,
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 4: you look up in the canopy, you see what other
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 4: trees are touching the canopy of your.
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 3: Crop tree, and you cut them.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 4: And the reason that this is such a good technique
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 4: is because it makes it so that every single cut
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 4: that you make is actively proactively encouraging the health of
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 4: your healthiest trees. Right Whereas for most of us landowners
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 4: it's like it's like an efficiency thing. We only have
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 4: so much time and so much energy, and so we
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 4: need to make the work that we do in the forest,
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 4: whether we're just working with a chainsaw or pulling out
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 4: our firewood for the year or whatever, the most impactful.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 3: And that's how you do it.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 4: But you don't want to just have only crop trees,
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 4: like you'll want to also if you can look for
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 4: areas of unhealthy trees, pockets of unhealthy trees, or pockets
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 4: that are maybe overtopping areas of really good regeneration, like
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 4: a bunch of young oaks and you can create some
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 4: gaps in the canopy as well, you know, and they
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 4: could be all different shapes and sizes, and you can
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 4: do that at the same time that you're managing your
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 4: crop trees. One thing that you can do to sort
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 4: of help the deer not ruin their own future is
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 4: that when you cut those trees down, you can leave
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 4: them on the ground and don't cut them up, or
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 4: just leave the tree tops on the ground, don't cut
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 4: the tree tops up and create this like big jumbled
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 4: tangled mess that then is going to provide a little
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 4: bit of structural protection for those seedlings that are there
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 4: or that are going to establish there to be protected
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 4: from deer bras. So that's one thing you can also do.
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 4: We also know that we need across the landscape, we
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 4: need areas of young forest. So in addition to having
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 4: our forests, you know, these young civil forests that haven't
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 4: really had time to develop this complexity sort of this
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 4: within the forest complexity, we also have landscapes that, because
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 4: of their landscape history, haven't had time to develop landscape
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 4: level diversity. So one thing that we're sort of always
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 4: concerned about is not having enough young forest, which you know,
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 4: early early successional habitat. You might have also heard it
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 4: called which is what's created when you create a larger opening,
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 4: and that in that case, we're talking about two acres
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 4: at a minimum, right, and it could be much larger.
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 4: One thing that we can do to make that early
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 4: successional habitat even better is by leaving you know, some
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 4: retention within that big area, some cover for wildlife so
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 4: they don't have to like to cross it to cross
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 4: a giant expanse. If there are a species that worries
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 4: about that kind of thing, you could lead eve oak
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 4: trees and other mass producing species in there to see
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 4: future generations of trees, and also just to provide a
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 4: little bit of complexity as that young forest grows up,
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 4: so it's not just producing another simple, even aged forest.
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 4: It's producing, you know, a young forest that also has
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 4: some areas of older trees in it as well.
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 3: So with that it's a little bit trickier.
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 4: What I would recommend that you do is sort of
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 4: think about your landscape, you know, think about looking at
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 4: not just your property but the properties of all all
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 4: around and trying to.
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 3: See if you could have of the forests that are there.
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 4: You know, it'll depend on where you are, but maybe
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 4: like five percent in that young forest condition, and if
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 4: you already have that, maybe you don't need to create
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 4: that condition. But if all your forests around you are
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 4: like older, it might be that you can provide this
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 4: really important habitat that's useful to all kinds of critters
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 4: from far and wide.
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 2: Love it does all seem you know, if you those
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 2: are all things you can do without big, fancy equipment.
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 2: There are things that you can do without being you know,
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 2: rich or particularly uh particularly well, you know, supplied with
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 2: with money or equipment, a chainsaw, some basic safety understanding,
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 2: and the willingness to uh to sweat a little bit,
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 2: you can make a big difference out there.
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 4: Yeah, And can I just say one other thing, which
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 4: is that you know, for landowners who can't do that right,
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 4: maybe you don't have those skills, or your you know,
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 4: your health doesn't allow you to do that, or for
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 4: whatever reason you don't want to do that.
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 3: You got other stuff to do.
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 4: This is one of the things that's so amazing about
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 4: the fact that we you know, where we have mills
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 4: and markets and loggers and truckers foresters that we can
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 4: do this work commercially because it's just like a lot
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 4: of this work it you know, forest management logging doesn't
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 4: have to be solely about resource extraction. You can you
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 4: use these loggers as this tool in a way where
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 4: you can create a healthier, more diverse forest. You can
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 4: produce local, renewable resources and income while doing the right thing.
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 4: And the thing about that that's so amazing is that
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 4: it allows you to really do this work at scale.
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 4: You know, you might be able to cover hundreds of
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 4: acres a year instead of relying on a landowner who
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 4: can do a couple acres a year or pay somebody
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 4: to do a couple acres a year. Suddenly you're like, well,
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 4: I can create these openings and I can create these
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 4: forest conditions that are really amazing. And you know, that's
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 4: not to say that logging isn't done in ways that
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 4: are you know, harmful sometimes, but it's to say that
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 4: it can be done in ways that are like incredibly positive,
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 4: that provide really amazing habitats and conditions for wildlife and
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 4: that really make forest healthier.
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and you I think it was the last chapter
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 2: of your book you were just talking about, you know,
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 2: a key thing to making that all possible is just
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 2: aligning your goals with the loggers that are going out
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 2: there or the forester that's you know out there. It's saying, hey,
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 2: here the things that I really care about, here's that
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 2: I want done. You know, if you let a logger
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 2: just run rampant, maybe they will do it in a
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 2: way that's not aligned with your goals. But oftentimes, from
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 2: from my experience, the folks have talked to and of
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 2: course you know what you're telling us that if you
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 2: if there's a clear understanding across the board of what
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 2: you're trying to achieve, there's usually a prescription that can
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 2: get you there that's good for the wildlife and can
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 2: usually be a win win for someone on the commercial
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 2: side too.
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 4: Yeah, So what I say is like loging, logging ain't logging.
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 4: You know, it's not a monolith. It can be the
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 4: all different kinds of ways. And the example I give
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 4: in the book is like, you know, I use these
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 4: loggers that I know had done unethical things in the past,
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 4: but I also had a relationship with them where I
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 4: knew that they were honest and trustworthy people and that
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 4: they would do what I asked them to do. So
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 4: the difference was just you know, having them be supervised
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 4: and you know, sort of like targeted in the right
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 4: way by a forester. In this case myself, that that
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 4: allowed me to utilize them in a way that was
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 4: beneficial to their business, but then also that you know,
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 4: beneficial to my objectives as a landowner and as a forester.
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 4: And so I would say that, you know, definitely work
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 4: with a forester. The job of the forester is to
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 4: represent your interest as a landowner, and also make sure
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 4: when you hire a forester that it's it's not like
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 4: hiring any old, you know, professional where they're all the same.
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 4: My my old boss and mentor, Dave Paganelli, he was like,
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 4: hiring a forester is like hiring an artist to paint
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 4: your portrait.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 3: A hundred of them would do it in a hundred
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 3: different ways. And so what you should do.
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 4: Is like pick the right ones, take the time to
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 4: like have a conversation with that forester and make sure
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 4: your values are aligned so that you know that you're
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 4: getting the person who's gonna manage those loggers and that
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 4: use in the.
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 3: Best way possible.
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's great advice. So with that in mind,
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 2: then we're just scratching the surface here. I feel like
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 2: of a lot of things, there's there's so much more
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 2: to to explore or to discuss. So if somebody wants
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 2: to connect with you your content, your book, social media, anything
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 2: like that, where can they go plug it all for
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 2: us real quick?
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 3: Sure?
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 4: So I'm on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 3: At how to Love a Forest, just like the title
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 3: of the book.
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 4: And the book's called How to Love a Forest, The
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 4: bittersweet work of tending a changing world. It should be
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 4: out pretty much anywhere. If it's not at your local
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 4: independent bookstore or your library, asks for it and I'll
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 4: get it for you. It's also an audiobook. And yeah,
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 4: and actually just had a children's.
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 3: Book come out.
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 4: It's called Willow in the Storm, which is largely about
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 4: you know, one of the building blocks of like helping
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 4: people do the right things for forests is sometimes getting
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 4: them to understand how the death of a tree could
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 4: ever be something positive, and you know, seeing people just
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 4: not be able to wrap their heads around that. So
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 4: I wrote a children's book that was about both tree
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 4: death and person death.
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 3: Cool idea of end of life.
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 4: This little girl who sort of like is dealing with
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 4: this disturbance in her for us and also death in
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 4: her family. So that's called Willow and the Storm. And
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 4: you know, I hope that I'm in some small way
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 4: that will help us have a better, better relationship to
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 4: to uh doing what we got.
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 3: To do to help make forests healthier.
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 2: That's perfect.
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and yeah, I think that that's it. Yeah, Ethan
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 4: Tapper dot com. If you want to bring me, you know,
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 4: I do these speaking tours now all the time. If
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 4: you want to bring me to where you are, just
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 4: reach out to me through you through Ethan Tapper dot com.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 2: Awesome, well, Ethan, I appreciate the work you're doing, the
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 2: message you're sharing. I think it's I think it's needed.
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 2: I think it's it's really well presented. I think a
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 2: lot of folks are going to enjoy this chat. And
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 2: I'd certainly encourage people to pick up a book and
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 2: the new book for the kids too. That sounds great.
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 2: I'm gonna have to check that out.
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 3: Thanks so much, Thank you.
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 2: All right, and that will do it for us today.
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 2: Appreciate you joining us. Thank you for being with me
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 2: on this journey this past month or so as we
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 2: explore habitat management improvement conservation, both on private land and beyond.
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 2: It's important stuff, and I appreciate the fact that so
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 2: many of you people are doing this good work on
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 2: the landscape yourselves. I'll give you one quick plug if
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 2: you're listening to this one of this episode just dropped.
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 2: A brand new film film of mine, came out on
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 2: the meat Eater YouTube channel. It's about my Alaskan sick
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 2: Co blacktail deer hunt. It's out today. Tuesday, April fifteenth
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 2: is the date it drops, so check it out on
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 2: the meat Eater YouTube channel and stay tuned. We'll have
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 2: much more to come on that infrequent or not frequent future.
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 2: This is the word I'm looking for in future episodes
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 2: of this podcast. So that said, thanks again, I appreciate you,
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 2: and stay wired to Hunt.