TUNXIS STATE FOREST
DEP Forestry Information Page

Brought to you by David Irvin, Forester, CT DEP

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CT DEP Forestry Division

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Past Entries

February 14, 2012 February 9, 2012 April 30, 2011

February 14, 2012

Hello once again, Hartland residents, friends, fellow outdoor enthusiasts and Land Trust members!  It was just days ago that I finally posted my second entry on the DEEP Forestry Division information page here on the HLT site.  And now I have another announcement to make.  There is a second state forest timber harvest beginning at Tunxis later this week.  This one is at the end of the Pine Mountain Spur Road.  For those of you who may not know the forest roads so well, Pine Mountain Road begins at the state forest wooden shield sign on Route 179 in Barkhamsted.  The Spur Road forks to the right off this main forest road about one mile down.  The Spur Road is dead end, and that’s where the harvest is taking place, on 41 acres of mixed forest. 

The objective of this harvest is to salvage hemlock dying from elongate hemlock scale attack and to thin other areas in what I am calling a “pre-shelterwood thinning”.  This will be the last time any thinning takes place in this stand (a “stand” is a grouping of trees of similar character, such as same age or similar species composition), composed of hemlock, white pine and mixed hardwoods.  The next time Forestry actively manages the same area, the objective will be regeneration of a new even-aged stand for the next generation of trees.  A “shelterwood” system does this in two or three phases over a period of a few years.  The first cut removes all of the understory smaller trees to open up the forest floor to full sunlight, which the regeneration needs to become established and survive.  As much as half the overstory canopy of larger trees is removed for sunlight, and some overstory is left strategically to provide both a seed source and partial shade for the seedlings.  This system works particularly well to regenerate oak.  The final phase of harvesting under the shelterwood system removes the remaining overstory trees to fully release the young regeneration, which by then should be over head height and stocked at hundreds of stems per acre. 

Elongate Hemlock Scale

This regeneration will get an early head-start in this phase of cutting due to the heavier than hoped hemlock salvage, however.  Unfortunately, the elongate hemlock scale is taking hold in the Hartland area and has begun to cause the decline of hemlock in numerous areas of Tunxis State Forest.  Like the better-publicized hemlock woolly adelgid, the scale is an exotic insect from Asia.  You can find the tiny insects by looking on the underside of flattened hemlock needles.  The scale will appear as tiny tan or brown elongated flecks.  Some needles can host more than a half-dozen of the insects, which is a sign of heavy infestation.  Even during the height of hemlock losses to adelgid a few years ago, the worst damage was in areas of both scale and adelgid attack.  But only recently has scale seemingly been killing trees in nearly complete absence of adelgid.  Woolly adelgid is now difficult to find at Tunxis, as the insect will be repeatedly “killed back” during cold winter spells where the temperature drops at or below zero Fahrenheit, something relatively common in this area.  But scale has no such winter limitations and few predators of any effectiveness.

Hemlock Woolly Adelgid

One predator that is known to feed voraciously on the exotic scale insect is the twice-stabbed ladybug.  These are the size of the better-known red and black ladybugs, but have a jet black shell with two small orange or red spots, one on each wing.  If you see one of these beetles in your backyard, let it go to continue being the valiant little warrior for our forests! 

U.S. Forest Service research has shown that salvage of trees dying from attack can slow the progress and rate of spread of the scale insect.  In addition, the sooner these trees are harvested, the sooner a new forest can begin to occupy their space, as hemlock chemically inhibits growth in their understory. 

This operation is beginning in mid-February and will probably go on hiatus for spring mud season.  It is expected to resume to completion in mid-summer.  It is the first of a series of efforts to salvage those areas of hemlock that are beyond survivability at Tunxis.  Pine Mountain Road is closed to the public in winter due to snow and ice, but if venturing down the road later in the year, all are advised to avoid the Spur Road while the harvest and trucking is in progress, for safety. 

Twice-stabbed Ladybug

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

David Irvin, DEEP Forestry Division

February 9, 2012

Happy winter to all Hartland Land Trust members and Hartland residents!  Sure looks different from this time last year, doesn’t it? 

It’s been a long time since I posted my introductory entry for the HLT website to launch what was supposed to be “regular” updates.  But it was a busy and unpredictable year in the Forestry Division, as it was for most of state government.  In fact, Forestry is now part of an all-new merged department.  D.E.P. is now D.E.E.P., the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.  But our mission in Forestry to manage and protect our native forest resources continues.  In State Lands Management, D.E.E.P. foresters have the objective of managing state forests to produce a diversity of native ecosystems, which includes a diversity of wildlife habitat, forest cover types and age classes across the landscape.  Diversity helps protect our forest resources from severe damage that can result from catastrophic storms, insects and disease.  The results of these impacts in a forest that is roughly the same type and same age is far more devastating, and therefore the goal of breaking up this “monoculture”.  Although not everyone in Hartland saw the worst impacts in backyard woods, it is doubtful that few can argue the potential for damage in the wake of 2011’s Irene, followed by the October snowstorm.
  
It is also our mission to sustainably  provide a source of local Connecticut Grown wood products for our economy as a by-product of forest management activities.  Besides the recreation and positive benefits of watershed protection we all enjoy, our local state forests also serve as places for a wide variety of research on forestry techniques, plant and wildlife species, and many other environmental parameters that can vary from insect life cycles to global climate change effects.  The serve as demonstration areas for forestry that can be practiced elsewhere in Connecticut and beyond.  And they serve to protect culturally and naturally significant sites, rare ecosystems, and endangered, threatened and special concern species on both the state and federal levels.

For more information on our state forests and the services the Forestry Division has to offer, you are encouraged to visit our website at www.ct.gov/deep, and go to the “Environmental Protection” side of the website, or you can try the link provided at the side of this page.

I would like to announce that a timber harvest that was on hiatus for the past year will be resuming approximately Tuesday Feb. 14.  This operation may continue through the remainder of this winter and most of the summer before concluding.  It is located off the north side of Walnut Hill Road and the Old Route 20.  Most of the cutting and hauling of wood will now come from Old Route 20, which begins just past the intersection of Pine Street and Walnut Hill Road.  Therefore residents may find that this old road (which now only accesses state forest and MDC property) will soon be posted as closed while the timber harvest is in progress, for public safety.  Logs will be hauled out of the woods up part of this old road on a machine called a forwarder and hauled away by truck.  The forwarder will be making its way out of the woods on the old roadbed known as Emmons Grove Road, which connects to Old Route 20.  Emmons Grove is also Tunxis Trail, a Blue-blazed Trail managed by the Connecticut Forest and Park Association (CFPA).  This section of trail will be posted as closed to the public while harvesting is in progress for the next few months, and residents and visitors are strongly recommended to abide by this closure for your own safety.  This closure notice is also posted on the CFPA website.  The section that will be closed starts at Old Route 20 and goes north about 3,000 feet to Morey’s Brook, before the Balance Rock Road area.  We realize that this is an inconvenience to anyone wishing to “thru-hike” the area, but want everyone to just be safe and realize that this harvest is a temporary inconvenience that will be over this year.  Then the area is likely to be left alone for years to come.

The objective of this harvest is to regenerate 85 acres into a young mixed forest, with as much white pine and hemlock as possible in the new stand.  This is the final phase of the multi-phase regeneration harvest that began a decade ago.  The operation has been on hold for a long time, first due to the deep snow last winter which made safe logging difficult.  Then most of 2011 and early this winter has provided an abundance of rainfall and unusually muddy ground conditions, which also have not been conducive to harvest work.  The timber harvest is being operated by Carl Clavette Logging of Harwinton, which utilizes mechanized harvest equipment that operates more efficiently and safely to harvest trees, and generally does so with less impact to the soils, residual trees and regeneration.  Commercial timber harvests on state land are put up to competitive bid among approved and certified Supervising Forest Products Harvesters and Foresters that may represent themselves or companies such as lumber mills.  Loggers, as well as foresters in Connecticut, must be certified by the state and only certified practitioners can bid on state timber sales.  Certification entails passing a written examination and maintaining professional standards of conduct, as well as obtaining regular Continuing Education classes and workshops relating to the profession.

All timber harvests like the one off Walnut Hill are specifically prescribed in long-term forest management plans developed by D.E.E.P. foresters.  The first step is to design a forest inventory of an entire state forest or major block of the forest, and collect a wide variety of data at numerous random sample points throughout the forest.  “Stands” are delineated to divide up the forest into smaller parts based on common cover types, age classes or other characteristics that make some areas distinctly different from others.  Data collected in each stand, such as density and overall health, is “weighed” against the same information collected in the other stands, and priorities are determined as part of the planning process.  For example, some areas may have many trees in decline from insect attack, and this would be an area that deserves more immediate attention.  A stand may have many healthy, quality young trees but it’s too crowded and needs to be thinned.  Those areas that need attention the most would be prescribed for work in the next 10 or 20 years under the long-term management plan.  Harvests that you see in our state forests are not at all arbitrary.  Usually, the work was planned years ago, and in some cases perhaps a couple decades ago.  Stands may be managed in a cutting cycle of work that involves regular harvests every 20 years, and there are stands in our state forest system that have been managed for more than a century. 

Thank you for your attention today, and if you have any questions about the ongoing timber harvest or anything else discussed in this entry, please feel free to contact me!  As always, you can reach me at the Pleasant Valley Field Office, 117 W. River Road, PO Box 161, Pleasant Valley, CT  06063-0161, phone (860) 379-7085, e-mail david.irvin@ct.gov  .  Unless, of course, I’m out in the forest somewhere.

See you in the woods,
David Irvin, EP Forester I

April 30, 2011

Welcome to a new regular posting on the HLT website presented by the DEP Division of Forestry. My name is David Irvin and I am the forester responsible for management of the majority of Tunxis State Forest, which at nearly 10,000 acres, has a prominent place in the landscape of Hartland. I want to thank the Hartland Land Trust for providing this opportunity, as I spend a great deal of time working in the woods of your community, and I think of everyone in Hartland as mine and DEP’s neighbors.

It is my hope that this site will become a place that land trust members, local outdoor enthusiasts, and curious neighbors can turn to find out the latest happenings and plans regarding Tunxis State Forest in their backyards. As a forester in the State Lands Management program, my primary duties are writing and implementing long-term forest management plans for state forests, which includes collection of extensive forest inventory data, maintenance of property boundaries, firewood permitting, and administration of timber sales on state land. There are likely few in the community that are not already aware of the fact that DEP carries out timber harvests in different parts of the state forest on a regular basis, but few may understand or realize the reasoning and objectives behind this work that has proceeded on a sustainable basis for decades. I hope to help by providing a broad understanding of the goals of DEP in actively managing forest land, as well as discussing specific objectives of each harvest that begins at Tunxis in the future. This will be a place to check for notifications of harvests starting and concluding, and for any trail closures that may be a direct result, for public safety. Any Blue-blazed Trail closures or cautionary advisories will also be posted on the Connecticut Forest and Park Association’s (CFPA) website at www.ctwoodlands.org.

DEP Forestry hopes to manage forests to produce a greater diversity of healthy, native forests and native ecosystems across the landscape. This means promotion of a variety of forest types, tree species, age classes, and a greater diversity of wildlife habitat, from closed canopy mature forest to early successional habitat such as grass and saplings/brush. It follows that this entails a wide variety of management techniques and harvests, from doing “nothing”, to selection cutting to prescribed fire and clearcutting. Many harvests artificially mimic natural disturbances that have historically helped maintain a diverse landscape. Careful management of natural resources today is increasingly more important as a larger population places greater and greater demands on a limited state forest resource, and development pressures continually reduce the area of unfragmented natural environment that can provide for representative native ecosystems. For example, early successional habitat is a type most lacking in Connecticut as most of our forests have matured in the past century, something that the state’s Forestry and Wildlife Divisions are both well aware of. In addition, oak forests are not regenerating on a wide basis and are predicted to decline dramatically in acreage in the next century due to a lack of management to sustain them. Oaks are very shade intolerant and disturbance-dependent, and without the heavier types of harvests that favor their regeneration, current oak stands are gradually giving way to birch/red maple/beech forests. For more information on oak management concerns, visit the Ask Dave section of the Burlington Land Trust website.

At present, there are two active timber harvests taking place on the East side of the reservoir, but both are on “hiatus” due to spring mud season. Both involve trail closures during at least part of their duration. One harvest is an 85-acre regeneration cut off Walnut Hill Road, intended to grow a new forest. DEP hopes to regenerate a mixed stand of trees that include mostly conifers (white pine and hemlock), but with some acres primarily in deciduous trees (hardwoods). This harvest should be done during summer or fall 2011 if conditions prove to be reasonably dry. The portion of Tunxis Trail (a Blue-blazed Trail) that heads north from Walnut Hill Road (Old Route 20) through the so-called Emmons Grove area will be closed for public safety beginning sometime this summer if all goes as planned. It will be closed between Walnut Hill and Morey’s Brook to the north.

Another harvest off Route 20 north of East Hartland Center (behind the DOT facility and roadside parking area for the Blue Trail) is taking place to convert 21 acres to uneven-aged management through selection cutting. This area will be harvested every 25 years to produce a mix of 3 or more distinct age classes of trees and a truly diverse forest that is attractive to wildlife which takes advantages of the smaller canopy openings and small-scale disturbances prevalent in this system. In this operation, approximately 600 feet of Tunxis Trail beginning at the Route 20 parking area is currently closed and will remain that way until the conclusion of the logging later this year.

There are plans for other harvests in the near future, which can be discussed during future entries, mostly including thinning work in the forest and hemlock salvage. Hemlock is a very prominent part of Tunxis State Forest, but unfortunately, the nonnative elongate hemlock scale is causing the decline and demise of hemlock is a few areas. Many of these hemlocks fared well during the hemlock woolly adelgid onslaught, but are succumbing to the scale insect that may prove to be even more damaging on a widespread basis in areas of New England where the cold winters limit adelgid but not scale. More of this may be discussed in the future!

I want to thank you for your attention and look forward to our future chats. Note that you may contact me directly at any time for questions or comments at david.irvin (at) ct (dot) gov, call my office at 860-379-7085, or write to us at DEP Forestry, PO Box 161, Pleasant Valley, CT 06063.