00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wire to Hunt podcast, your home for deer hunting news, stories and strategies, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. I'm your host, Mark Kenyan. Is episode number two Hunted and seventy two and today in the show we're joined by Matt Ross and Tim Russell of the Quality Deer Management Association to discuss trees, forests and forestry for deer hunters. All right, welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by Onyx. And today in the show, we're talking about trees and forests and how they impact deer and deer hunting, and how we as hunters can influence those forests to improve deer hunting, and a whole bunch of things like that. So, in other words, we're talking about forestry and timber management for deer hunters. And joining us to discuss this topic is Matt Ross, the assistant director of con serration for the Equality Deer Management Association and Tim Russell, a Forrester in the Young Forest specialist for the Cutiaman. And this is a topic that of course is probably the very most relevant to hunters who get a say in habitat management of the places that they hunt. So if you fall into that bucket, get ready for it. I think it's probably our most thorough deep dive we've ever done into the timber related things when it comes to management of habitat. But I also want to make it clear that I did want to find ways to make this conversation relevant to all hunters, even if you know you're hunting private land by permission or hunting public land. Um so. We talk about things along the lines of, you know, what kinds of forest habitat or age of forest or features of forest can we key in on when we're hunting public land um or. We also talked about, for example, ways that we can influence forestry management and habitat management on public lands. Um so. I think there's something in here for everyone. I'm excited about that. It's a it's a real, like I said, I say, I use this word a lot, deep dive, but it really is a deep dive into this stuff that I think is interesting and not talked about a whole lot. So I'm hoping you guys will enjoy it as much as I did. I talked to Matt and Tim already, but I'm back here now in the future with my co host Dan Johnson, because before we get to the Big Dance, we did want to have a pregame show and uh catch up a little bit on current events in our own white Tail worlds and whatnot. So Dan, what is uh what is new with you, my nine fingered friend. I'll tell you what relating to the topic. I just found out that I think this year or next year, the um the timber that we had that I hunt in is under some forestry preserve type thing where they can go and log a specific type times year, but you can't do any other alterations to certain portions of it. So so I think in the upcoming, like I want to say, a year, I might actually be able to go in and talk to the landowner about maybe doing some hinge cutting and creating some uh some possible habitat work on some like low value trees, identifying low value trees and maybe create some hinge cutting opportunities on the farm that I hunt. And uh so when I when I brought that up to her originally she said, no, I can't allow that because it's in this forestry program. But you know whatever, Now I asked her again about it, and she's like, well, that should that should be up sometime soon. So I think I might be able to do some some habitat work on this farm in uh in the upcoming years. That would be pretty cool. Have you have you has this been something that you've been kind of brain story about. Are there areas where you already have in mind that you really want to try to improve betting? Absolutely, especially on like the wide open pieces of timber that are that are there. I would love to just take a chainsaw in there and uh make a couple of pockets. Yeah, it's it's amazing what you can do with the chainsaw. I've I've only been able to do a little bit of it myself, but when you you hear about some of these other projects that some folks are doing that have you know, full control of their properties, it's it's quite a tool if you you know, got to use it safely, of course, but if you safely, it can the simple the simple change of just getting sunlight to hit the floor can really change the habitat um. Which kind of we bring this up when I when I was talking to Matt about this Originally, we brought up the situation that you had. I don't know, was it three years ago now that your main property got logged and that year you were all stressed about it was kind of messing up your hunting, you thought, And I remember thinking, well, you know, let's wait a year or two though you might be pretty happy about it. Then do you feel like, are you starting to see some positive results from that at all yet? Well, I'll tell you that the places that did get logged, right, there was more sunshine that is allowed to hit the forest floor. The tree tops are still there, and around the tree, uh, tree tops grew all these smaller trees grew all these um you know, because they didn't clean it out like a guy would if he was actually managing for deer. Right, they chopped down the tree, They left the tops, and they pulled the trunk out. That's really all they did. Right. But the places where they did that and knocked down in the sunlight can get in. It is s thick and it is nasty, and it's not in any specific spot. Right. So like if me and you were gonna go into a timber, we would want to do it in specific areas, right, So all they did was go into where the valued trees were at and cut down the valued trees, right, So maybe it's not in the best possible place for a quote unquote betting area. However, it is sticker and it does allow more cover, uh and lower brows for the deer. Did you have you seen increased deer activity around those spots at all last year or previous years? Yeah, but I'm gonna say yes with an asterisk, because i feel like the deer we're still moving through that area. Maybe they just slowed down a little bit because there was some brows there that wasn't there before. Okay, okay, Well to your point, then it would be nice if you could supplement that then with a little bit more targeted spots. And so you're thinking maybe of increasing the cover available in spots that deer already want to bed. It's like a ridge top or something like that. Is that kind of yeah, something something a little bit off the top of the ridge, right and create So there's one specific spot on the farm where there's a pinch point and then there's a diagonal trail up the ridge. You know that doesn't crush the ridge, but it kind of goes up at an angle to the point and then back down the other side. So imagine like a upside down you and uh kind of a line going right through the center of it, and that's that trail. I would love to do some kind of hinge cutting on either side of that trail and maybe make that kind of like a betting area, but at the same time a an edge if you know what I mean to where the deer because we all know dear love working edges, and if I could create a little bit more edge where the wide open meats the thickness, then I feel I can even make that pinge point stronger. Yeah, that seems to make a lot of sense. That's that's a huge, a huge upside of when you can do some small cuts like that, like you said, add that transition that edge, and you can start directing traffic through an area in a way that you otherwise wouldn't have. And I kind of, you know, with some small hinge cutting of my own on one of the properties at Hunt in Michigan. I mean, not a large area, probably I don't know, an acre maybe maybe an acre kind of long, skinny area where I did some some kind of selective hinge cutting through their handful of years ago. Now, UM made what's possibly one of the best betting areas now on one of these properties that I hunt in Michigan. It went from being a spot that I never hunted to now being at least in the top two areas for me to hunt during the rut. It's like the main place I'm saving to hunt during the right now because so many bucks are cruising through there, because that little betting area is holding a couple of Doll family groups now and at least one Doll family group, possibly two on one on either side, and you're always getting bucks cruising through there. And it just took you know, an afternoon with a chainsaw cutting a handful of trees and I even bumped up a nice buck out of there this summer um. So yeah, it's it's an easy way to do some cool stuff. So that's exciting that you might be able to test the water to the right. And the other the other thing is there's a ridge top right and it leads from one that's like more open spot into it was like an old camp. There's an old camp church camp on this property. And I'm what I mean old, I mean like dilapidated, just the foundations there, and it's called kind of grown up and do your frequent this spot as a transition I kind of a transition area between betting and a big egg field. And there's this really big giant tree in there with a huge canopy, right, So what I would love to do and it underneath this canopy like nothing grows, right, There's there's some smaller stuff in there. But what I would love to do is basically clear out an area and plant some kind of kill plot, right, something that's like an acre. That's it, Just something maybe even smaller than that, real small and have the ability to get something to slow down coming through this or maybe go out of their way off the original trail, come ups and check it on their way to main egg And I feel that this spot would be money if I could just trim one big branch off of this this big, bigger tree and knocked down a couple other trees on the edge, letting some more addition, some additional sunlight in. If I could do that, man, another money spot, man, that would be that would be nice. Speaking of those little food plots, I was just working on a little food plot project to my own this past week. Um. Two things of note with that one that we never talked about. But um, the first than did is I've got this main food plot system on my main Michigan property that we've talked about a lot over the years, you know, the spot where I talked about holy Field a lot, trying to kind of fine tune this spot for him. Um, and then ultimately that's where I killed Frank this past year. Uh. Two things. Number one, I frost seated this last week. Familiar with frost eating if you heard that, yea? So so for those who aren't familiar, this is basically a way too to kind of supplement a food plot, or to plant a new food plot without needing to disc or till up an area. So basically, in my situation, I'm just trying to um to kinda what's the word I'm looking here, strengthen a food plot that's been here for a long time. This is a perennial clover food plot that I've had planted in this spot for I don't know, six seven years now. Um, But it's it's it's getting a little bit patchy. There's a bunch of weeds coming in area, so I want to try to fill it out, and I'm doing that by overseating it right now, So this past week we're still frozen ground, but it was going to be thawing out here and get some brain and that was gonna freeze again with some cold nights. It was gonna thought again. And when that happens, if you have seed that you put on top of the ground at this time, as that freeze and thought freeze and thoughts cycle goes back and forth, it kind of heaves and then lowers the soil and soil heaves and then it sinks back down again and that kind of sucks the soil down in incorporate rates it into the soil itself, allowing you get the seed to soil contact you need for those seeds to German name. Um. So it was the simplest going out there and broadcasting the seed over top of the plot and that was it. That's all I had to do to kind of replant this food plot and make it, you know, really nice and lush and thick again. So that was a really easy thing I did. I think it was, I don't know, Wednesday or Thursday this past week. Took me fifteen minutes um. And now that plot is going to be in great shape. This year, I think, But while I was out there, I had kind of an aha moment, dan Um. I was finishing up that plot, and then I looked over to the larger sections. So I don't know if you if you remember, but basically this this plot has his kind of two sections. There's a little clover plot. If you imagine this is like a imagine a pie and you take a quarter of the pie outs you got a quarter piece of the pie missing. That is this food plot, and the at the center of the pie, So the narrowest end of that triangle on my pie piece, that's where the clover plot is. So they got a small, like quarter acre clover there, and then there's a strip of big thick grass that kind of just circles it. And then the rest of the pie piece, so the main portion of the pipe piece extending out to the crust. That is the larger piece of the food plot, which is my brassicas and my oats, which I've used here for four or five years and I rotate them in strips um. So that's what I had planet there. I don't know if you again these little details. I don't know if you remember this either, but last year I made one significant shift to that plot. What I did in the past was that oat and brassica section of the plot that was planted almost right up to the edge of the property line, right up close to it. I was trying to maximize as much food as I get in there. But as you probably recall from the past two years of hunting holy Field, I had numerous encounters where he would kind of get to the edge of it, but would stay on the neighbors and wouldn't cross over into the food plot where I could shoot. Remember, I had a bunch of situations like that. Yeah, I didn't want to step out into the open. So in two thousand eighteen, I thought, well, what if I were to just push the food plot further into my property and then what used to be food plot just let that regrow up into tall grass and brush and brambles and have that cover but on my side. So maybe holy Field or whatever future buck is in here, maybe he would still come into the cover, but it would now be on my property, So he would come in twenty yards onto my side of the property that I could shoot him, but he's not into the wide open where he didn't want to go yet. You know what I mean. So I made that change last year, and then I didn't really think anything about it. The rest of the year. Holy Field disappeared, you know, how the whole thing went. But as I was sitting out there the other day, I'm looking at this and kind of looking around and fiddling, and I got to thinking, WHOA, if I hadn't made that change, if I hadn't pushed that food plot out and let all that cover girl up, I don't know if I would have got the shot at Frank, because Frank came out into that area but stayed inside the tall grass that was not there in two thousand seventeen. But in two thousand eighteen he was able to be on my side of the line, but in the tall grass he felt comfortable stepping out there, walked yards onto my side of the line, and I got the shot. Um. So that was kind of like a lightbulb moment, like Wow, there's an example of one tiny tweak. I made, one small change, um that I made for holy Field. But in this case, you know, that small tweak ended up leading to getting a shot at this other buck. Um. Right, I don't think that's something I brought up in the past, and it kind of hit me again. Yeah, I remember you talking about it, but I also remember past guests on the show talking about softening edges. Right, So when they take a hard edge, like a straight egg field onto a timber right the deer, if there's ever like a buffer strip or something like that, it's almost like they seemed comfortable coming out in the wide open before they hit the main egg. So what they'll do is they'll cut trees down and they'll lay them right in that hard edge. And then what that does is the grass grows up, softens it up, so there's a little bit more of a staging area between this wide open bare ground. And uh yeah, you hear him talk about it all the time, so it's no doubt it worked, right, Yeah, it was. It was cool to see that fleshed out and actually come into reality. Um. And another one of those reasons why when you have the ability to do some habitat stuff, it is cool to be able to, you know, move a chess piece one spot and then wait and see how it changes things. And in this case, it was a chess piece that's moves to the right spot and made a what was a small change made a big difference, I think now and I'm now that i'm thinking back on it more so, Yeah, do you have any other Do you have any other big spring projects coming up for your hunts other than possibly trying to get that plot and possibly doing some some timber. Yeah, so, so the plot is probably not gonna happen, but potentially the timber. Uh, some of the tree trimming might happen. And unfortunately, I don't think it can happen until the because I'd love to do it, get out there and do it right now, but I just don't think it's going to be able to happen until April. If it does happen, and I still have to clear it with her and um, you know, the landowner, and she's she probably has to run it by her family, you know. Uh. So I don't think I'm gonna like I'm optimistic, because she's pretty cool with me doing whatever I want out there. However, when it comes to like lay manipulation, um, you know, they just want to make sure they're there, their investment of their property is producing long term and they you know, they don't want me to cut down any trees that make, you know, get them some value later on down the line. Yeah. Yeah, um so if you're not doing that kind of stuff yet, you are shed hunting though, right. We haven't talked since shed Rally. Look like you guys had a good day there on the Sunday of shed Rally, is that right? Yeah, A couple of people had some good days. Uh. I found one I found. I ended up finding one antler on shed Ralley and it was something fairly small. So I let Ben Harshine's boy Jack. I dropped it on a trail and then I told Ben and his wife would go, hey, I dropped a shed up there. Take take their son Jack, right, I said, take him up there, walk up this trail, and he ended up finding it again. So I walked away. I walked away with zero antlers, found one, but overall, you know, had some fun with that crew that was there, and some other guys walked away with quite a few sheds and uh one big four point side just a hammer of an antler and uh like real long main beam, real long, you know, no junk on it. But other than that, you know, this entire shed season has been crazy. I mean up where I live, there's still snow in the timber, right, and uh, if if it's open, I'm sure people have walked it, and that with the fertilizer on the properties and high water on the river bottoms, all my spots just didn't produce this year. And so I I just I shed hunted lesson. I'm okay with that because I'm busy. Yeah, I saw you, Um you posted this was a couple of weeks ago. I don't think I mentioned it on the podcast, but a couple of weeks ago you uh did a little Instagram video talking about how you went out and you didn't find any sheds at all, and you said that that was the first time in like two or three or four years, the first time in years that you've gone out shed hunting and not found an antler. Yeah, it was nuts, man. I I can every time that I go out right now, I remember I've refined these spots two points where Okay, if I if I've shed hunting a place five or six years in a row and it doesn't produce, more than likely I'm not gonna go walk that piece anymore because of the limited time that i have. Right So, I'm going to my high production spots. I'm going to the buffer strips, the water ways, you know, the the betting areas and like some egg fields and stuff, and if they don't produce, I'm not going into the timber looking for him, especially this year with just the large amount of snow and the water that we've had. So it's the first time in a while where I went to some of these spots and there was no sheds there and I was like, WHOA. So I I was driving back home and I was thinking about I was like, man, that's gotta be two years of shed hunting that I It's like I got skunked that day, right, And I mean me get skunked. I'm not saying like going out with you know when the last time that we went up with that whole crew in northeast Iowa. Um that I I personally didn't find a shed, but the crew did. I count I count that as a win. But me personally, running on a solo mission, I didn't. I didn't find a shed. So it was it was nuts. Yeah. And when I heard you say that on your Instagram story, I just thought to myself, there's millions of people out there who don't have one ounce of sympathy for you. Damn right. I know. I'm thinking of my head man. He has gone two years without going out once without finding one, and I thought to myself, nine times shed hunting, I don't find anything so right. But when I say that is because I mean back in the day, I would go four days, five days without finding a shed, right, and then run into a pocket of them, and you know, find a whole bunch of sheds. Uh. And now I just don't go shed hunting in the I guess the lower the lower statistic areas. I guess is, if that's what you want to say, right, the chances of me finding a shed where I go shed hunting are higher. Smarts work historically the deer of ben So it looked like you sorry. The cool thing is, though, what was it Saturday morning? Right? Like we hadn't had sunshine here in Iowa for a while. Saturday morning was gorgeous and I wanted to get my kids out of the house, my my son and daughter, and we ended up going on a And I'm using my quotations right, my one good hand in my one bad hand, So it looks like a quote in a comma or apostrophe. And uh, so I took I grabbed two sheds out of my like my smaller shed pile, and uh, I ended up I ended up taking my uh my oldest boy and my daughter out and uh we went out in this cornfield, walked around and I dropped two sheds out and they they found him and they were pretty jackman, it was pretty fun doing that. The pictures, that was awesome. Well how did how did Mac react when he picked that up? Uh? So have you ever seen like the only thing that I can remember, like is like a superhero. I'll just use the Incredible Hulk right where he stops and this like this, his face twitches and he gets like that. Like. So we're in this little grassy area and I was like, okay, buddy, it's in here somewhere. I just know it, right, And obviously I dropped it out of my coat, so I know it's there. And both times I dropped the sheds out of the coat, they landed times down, so so it's not like they stood out right. It looked like a a stock of corn. So he's walking around, he's walking around, and finally I go, buddy, you gotta look at the ground. Because every time a bird would sound off or like the geese would fly overhead. He's looking in the air right. Finally I put him on the line. I said, walk straight, there's gotta be one here somewhere. I just have a good feeling, buddy. He runs walks up to it, and he's just like Dad, Dad, I found one. Oh, he was jackman. He was Jack, and he was Jack for about five minutes, ten minutes, you know. And I got a couple of pictures out of the deal, and he ended up he ended up happy. But you know how kids are, right, they lose interest real fast. So instead instead of him scooping every five minutes, I only brought one out when I probably should have brought more than one out. But I did the same thing with my daughter, and she she kicked it with her boot like two times before. Every time she walked up to it, she'd kick it. And then obviously she knows more than me, right, So she's like, Dad, we've covered this area. There's no sheds here. I'm just like, sweetie, and I'm talking about that, like a fifty ft grass strip that's two ft wide along the side of this cornfield. And so she's walking up and down and she finds it. She's like Dad, I got one, she got all she got all excited, and you know, it was something. It was something forty five minutes is all it was, from the time we got there, got out of the truck, got back in the truck forty five minutes. But what I feel that did right there, They're obviously not ready for a four hour shed hunt, right, So I feel what that did was that just small, very small piece of it at a time, getting interested and then maybe the next time we go out for a little bit longer, and maybe the next time I don't put any sheds down, and we teach them about patients, right, yeah, And you know, and just getting them outside is so important and I'm learning that now, right. And the mud was there, and they got dirty, and I had to do some extra things, right, I had to make sure that they had their gloves and their stocking caps and their boots on. And the back of my truck got dirty because they you know, they were kicking the back of the seats after they're stopping in mud. But I really didn't care because I had a blast. I had just as much fun with them. And even though those sheds were stayed staged, right, I had I had an absolute blast just being out there and watching their actions. Yeah, you can't, you can't beat that. I uh, I know what you mean. I'm just starting, you know, to get Everett out there doing those things. And he can walk now, so now that's not so miserably cold and the snows melted. I've been taking him out into the woods now and just letting him kind of walk around out there and explore. I guess the walk around is a stretchy. It's more like he will just stand there. He's a little nervous to walk in the forest for he's just not like comfortable with the uneven ground, I think, and everything. So it takes him a long time to get going. And then sometimes if I hold his hand, then he'll start walking. And once he builds a little confidence, then he'll then he'll go slowly on his own. But you know, he's picking up every leaf. He's pointing at a tree and he says, what's that, what's that? Um? He's grabbing every bush. He brought him up to big rubs and let him like pull out the bark or the you know, the ripped up tree bark shredded off of the rubs. He's grabbing that. Um, So that that's fun. And uh, I think by next year and maybe even I'll take him out here in the next couple of days or something and just put an antler out there and let him grab it, because I know he doesn't really know what's going on, but he does. He does have like a fascinating one of the antlers because you know, in my my kind of man cave room with all the bucks on the wall and stuff, he comes in there and he points every one of them and he says buck, and then he goes over the table where I've got just a bunch of antlers and a big pile, and he's always trying to grab him. Um. So I'm sure if he saw well, I think if he saw one in the woods right and from him, he'd pick it up and get excited. Maybe. So yeah, I think on the test that theory here soon because that would be cool to see. Yeah, and they wanted to. Like my my daughter, if it was just her, I probably would have gotten away with getting into the timber a little bit more. But my son, you know, he's still fairly short, and we didn't have the kind of coats and you know, you know, like how the first ten of a field ed jar they're just briars and thorns, and uh so we I was like, all right, let's go in the timber. And I turned around and they're stuck in the thorns, right, And so I had to say, Okay, well we can't go in there because of the thorns, and uh you know next time, right, yeah, something you can getting early in there. I didn't think about that with God. It's like anywhere you want to get to look for sheds, almost always you have to go through some serious prickers. In our neck of the woods, at least Iowa and Michigan's brutal. But but I guess, I guess this is probably in a bad place for us to wrap it up, get to talking with our main guests about trees and forestry and and all that kind of interesting stuff. And um, maybe about next episode we'll finally have some sheds, because I've had a horrible shed hunting. Your total to how many do you have so far? This I only found two so far this year. Okay, well I'm actually I'm actually ahead of you. Then I found, um, I found five total. Nothing nothing remotely large or nice, but um, but five sheds. Two of which were super old, two were really small, and one was a little four point side. Um, but I am still trying to trying to get that Montana shed hunting trip in on one of these next work trips, I go on, So might that might bring the total up. But but yeah, let's uh, let's plan catching up soon on some other topics and uh finding a few antlers before then. Huh sounds good man. All right, let's take a quick break. All right, I've got now with me Matt Ross and Tim Russell, and let's start with you. Matt, you're a repeat guest on the podcast. Always love getting to chat with you usually. Um, I'm talking to you from the perspective of of your main role, which I think is is oh gosh, associate director of conservation. Is that right? Pretty close assistant? Okay, so talking all things quality dear management. Um, but I've never taken a deep dive with you on this topic of forestry, but I know you've got a background it can you can you hit us off here with a quick background as far as what you're what your history is with with Forrester in this specific topic. Yeah, my pleasure, Mark and and always like being on a show. So for thanks UH, you know in the lead here for having me back, and also were including somebody else from g d M a UM and I was love talking about deer and deer on it. So I started out very interested in wildlife because of deer hunting. And I know we've covered this in the past, but I went to school for wildlife UH and really focused on deer UM. When I was in graduate school in New Hampshire UM, I started doing a little bit more with the forestry side of things I did. I had a degree in wildlife, but I taught forestry class several forestry class related to my my thesis because of what I was researching and UM. At one point when I graduated, I was looking for a job and my initial job right out of graduate school was working for a consulting company UM in New Hampshire covered New Hampshire, Maine UM, and most of what that company did was forestry worked. I was hired as the wildlife biologists on staff to to write prescriptions into the management plans related to to wildlife UH type of goals and I was there for for quite a bit of time and long enough that UM I had a lot of experience working with landowners and loggers and and UH towns for doing the management on side of things, and UH eventually started to go more on the forestry side in terms of what the company was having me do. And by the time I was done working there, I had become licensed as a forester, I was marking timber um, I was working with Cruise on actual sivilcultural prescriptions along with the wildlife side of things, and UH that was really kind of a trial by fire for me from the wildlife side of things where I really was interested in dear and dear management and wildlife. And I realized on all of the properties that I had worked on while I was there at the consulting of me that UH forestry, mostly because that part of the world is dominated by forest Maine in New Hampshire as the most forested seats in the country by land mass, UM really was driving wildlife populations what foresters did. So I really loved it, and UH did a lot in the forestry community, and then eventually left that job and found myself at qd m A. So I am licensed as a forester and have done a lot of forestry prescriptions. Even though I was driven by deer to to begin with. Okay, and so, so Tim, what about you? What's what's your story? So? Uh, I grew up spending a lot of time in the out of doors, and I didn't have the opportunity to hunt when I was younger, which is something that has changed now that I'm adult. Now that I'm an adult, and something I'm very happy about. I loved being outdoors. I knew I wanted to work outdoors, and so I went to school and in Syracuse to h Too sun ees F to study forestry, where I got my degree in forest resources Management. After school, I spent a few years working for a couple of different forestry consulting firms, doing timber inventories, assisting with forest management plans, UH, that sort of thing. And UH, one day I saw a job posting come up that was for q D M A and they were looking to hire somebody to work on the Young Forest Initiative. UH. In UH, the Northeastern United States and much of the United States, we don't have a lot of young forest cover as we used to, and so there's sort of an effort to get landowners involved in creating and maintaining and enhancing young forest on their properties to benefit wildlife, which seemed like something that I really wanted to do and that I'd be able to help with. So, uh today I'm I'm happily with q d m A. So what does that entail? How are you actually going about encouraging and partnering with folks to to encourage that young forest type AVATAH sure well, part of its outreach to to get people aware. Um and we have partnerships with other conservation organizations including National Wild Turkey Federation and Rough Groud Society and National Audubon Society. UM And there are several different different groups working under the umbrella of the the Young Forest Initiative and including our state's Department of Environmental Conservation. But there is funding through the Natural Resources Conservation Service through their Environmental Quality Incentives Program EQUIP that a lot a lot of folks are probably familiar with where they've they've got some funding put aside just to just to help fund those sorts of projects that can uh you know, range from uh heavy density cuttings to to get young forest growing into in phase of plan control to make sure that plans we don't want don't come to to overtake some of these sites. Uh. So it's there are a lot of different partners in this effort, and uh, certainly there are a lot of benefits to the landowners who are interested in in joining in. I definitely want to dive in further into that a little bit later. And and you mentioned some of the government programs, assistance programs. That's something I'm definitely curious about too, but probably before we go down that rabbit hole. UM, I want to just kind of lay a foundation here for folks. UM and maybe Matt, maybe you want to tackle this first. Uh, why does this matter? Why does why does forestry matter for deer hunters? And maybe maybe even take it one step back further. What is forestry? And then why does this matter for for deer hunters? Sure, yeah, I'm happy to jump into that's a big topic. But um, forest give me your elevator pitch. Yeah, okay. Well, forest management is is a way or that we as natural resource managers, landowners and just the public managing private and public lands can steer direction of and the health of a forest. Um. So it's based on making decisions on how many trees to either keep or leave a keep or removed. Um, sunlight to let in. It's a very predictable thing. Uh, forest, forest management, you can actually predict what will show up. Now, Mark, do you have you and your wife have a garden garden at all? Yeah, we didn't pull it off this last year, but usually we have a garden. Yeah, I'm sure I know why. So Uh yeah, guarden gardeners are everywhere, right, And it takes time. Uh, that's what a forest takes it. It needs time. And to get a good crop in your garden or even a farmer would need, you need to make sure that things are well spaced. Right. So, if you were to go out to the store the spring and wanted to put um, you know, tomatoes, pepper and all that stuff in your garden, you bought all those and instead of putting it in in the same square footage that you normally do, you just lumped every thing together and it was really close together. The end result would not be the same as if you gave everything in the space and the nutrients that it needs. A forest is basically a guarden. It's a big crop and as long as you can give good space to the tree so that they can grow and grow straight, especially if you're if you're interested in timber management, getting nice straight trees to grow and the species that show up. UM. That's also very predictable through succession. UM you can, although it's a very long timeline and it's hard to uh to see that if you're not trained in it. And one of the things I was just talking about a few minutes ago was my prior experience, and tim has it as well, is being able to go on properties that have been managed for ten fifty hundred years. That's a pretty interesting thing to have as a manager because it get lets you kind of look back in time and say, Okay, I know what the managers of this property did that time period ago, and say, right, well, now this is what's growing here. So forestry is that taking those things of time and and the spacing of the different trees and altering it so that you can kind of shift it to what you want to grow there. Now. For deer hunters, why is that interesting? Uh? And important? Um? For most deer hunters. Obviously you get into parts of the Great Plains and and even parts of the West where there isn't much of a forest component. But for most deer populations, particularly white tail populations, they live where forests grow. They might not be a dominant part of the landscape, but for most parts of where white tails are, forests are growing. And honestly, they spend a lot of time, as we all know as deer hunters in where trees are. They could be you can call them what you want. In areas where there's a lot of agg, you know, ravines or coolies or creek where trees are growing and shrubs are growing, dear bed in there, they you certainly eat a lot of stuff in there. We can talk a little bit about, you know, what they access. But hunters, no, that's where you're going, right, That's where betting covered typically can be found where forests are in must of the east, where forest is the dominant um part of the landscape, certainly dear rely on that for everything where agg is not a major thing. So by managing forests, we really manage dear health, dear populations um. And that's kind of what I alluded to earlier is as this kid coming out of grad school, I really had driven myself and what I wanted to go for school is wildlife specific and deer specific. I realized once I was walking around these woodlots that foresters were really the ones that were shaping, at least in New England, you know what dear populations were looking like. Yes, obviously land managers and deer managers and the state regulates harvest and that's a big part of it. It's a huge part of it. But on the habitat side, UH, you're really missing out if you're not managing forest for deer um, particularly because they it makes up such a large component of where they live. Even in areas where it's dominated by agg they spend a lot of time where there's cover and trees are typically Yet if you can manage that to promote good dear populations where they're getting a lot of food where they find cover, you can really influence uh a lot of things with dear dear through forestry. So that's why it's important. Now, what about for someone who doesn't actually have the ability to implement changes on a property of their own. What if there's someone listening who is just a deer hunter who hunts maybe some public land, maybe they hunt some private bad permission? Are their concepts related to this topic that are helpful to understand for any hunter that might be be applied anywhere. Yeah, I'll touch on that and I yes absolutely UM and Tim feels flee free to chime in after, you know, but I think most again we're a white tail organization. Uh, most white tail hunting is happening on private land U. Uh. You know, so if you don't own land, most whitetail hunters have access to land that's privately owned. Yes, there's a lot of public land whitetail hunting going on out there and we should talk about that. But for the people that don't own land, I would venture a gas just based on all the statistics out there that most of them have permission on land that's privately owned. UM. So that is important um for them for those even if you don't own those pieces of ground, because you could do it a couple of ways if that person that owns the land is willing to let you, you know, learn or do some habitat management. UM, you can certainly implement some of the stuff we're talking about. You can actually be uh knowledgeable about where to find dear on places that either publicly owned or privately owned, just based on forestry because obviously influences greatly how dear move UM and where they're going to be based on recent operations. If there's a lot of forestry happening where trees are being removed, it'll influence where deer betting and eating UM. So you need to be able to read and predict that just as a deer hunter UM and as well as you know on other other examples, if you're hunting public land, UM being able to do the same thing and tim feel free to to to jump in sure absolutely UH. You know whether forests are being managed for timber production or for wildlife or not at all, is going to have an influence one way or the other on those wildlife of course, including white tails and UH. For people who are near and haunts own public land, I would say, look at what resources are available as far as information. If you can get your hands on the management plan for the state or the federal force that you live near and be able to say, hey, look this is where a clear cut took place in the recent past, that there will be good brows in there, or you know, maybe even more recently, maybe in the past month or so, that you see a schedule that there's going to be a thinning, and now you know that when you're going out in the woods to hunt, there's gonna be a bunch of tree tops on the ground in that stand which can be highly attractive to deer. That that's very valuable information. Apart from that, even those of us who think of ourselves as not owning land are are part owners of hundreds of millions of acres of land as as US citizens. And so it's definitely our duty to uh to pay attention to what's happening on those lands and and make our desires known that. Uh, you know, if if that's the way that we would like to see the property manage and those that's what we would like to see as far as the benefits that we reap off of those public lands, then uh, it's incumbent upon us to communicate that to the to the government officials who are in charge of making these decisions and how those lands are going to be managed. Yeah, that's a great point that there are ways correct me from wrong tim but there are ways that we as the public can influence some of the management that happens in these places, right. I know, for example, there have there have been some debates in certain parts of the United States around you know, managed force versus unmanaged, and some groups want to keep it untouched um, while other groups are saying, hey, there's a value to some management here. Um. That's probably in an instance where we might be able to you know, be participants within those community meetings or comment gathering sessions, um, and speak to like the benefits of that kind of practice. Right, is that correct? Absolutely? And myself being in New York State where I've spent all of my life and most of my career, we actually have very little federal land, but we have a lot of state land that's managed by our Department of Environmental Conservation, And as they prepare management plans, they do hold public meetings where I've had the opportunity to show up and you know, read management planing before the meeting and come to the meeting and ask questions and give suggestions and you know, sort of discussed with the group what it is we'd like to see off of that property before they make those final decisions. That's great, Okay, So so that that will makes a lot of sense. It's good to know that there are some ways that we can influence forestry policy, you know, even in situations where we don't on land, because like you said to him, we are all public land owners. I think that's a great point. Um. Now, throughout the first you know, fifteen minutes or so we've been talking about here, both of you guys have mentioned a handful of different types of habitat and a handful of different types of ways of managing habitat. Um, maybe maybe it'd be helpful to understand a little bit about what dear need from habitat and in relation to forest. Um. Matt, could you speak to this maybe to kick us off a little bit on you know why different levels of forest habit or different ages of forest habitat or different management this is why that's beneficial to deer from from from the standpoint of what they need biologically. Sure, yeah, happy to so. Uh Well, deer really can survive in a lot of different places. We all know that, right. I mean they you can find them in suburban areas where they're uh trees that have never been cut, to the places that have been heavily cut. So in terms of their need, they're very adaptable. They can live in a lot of different places. Um. You know what what is ideal, um is places where within deer at home range the space they use in a year, they can find all all the things that they need. Right, So what what they typically will do on a daily basis of changes seasonally is they are going there their prey animals and their ruminants, so we all know that. And because of that, what they do is they spend most of daylight. In most cases, this is not everywhere UM have been shown through some research, but in most cases year will bed during the day UM during daylight hours, and they're known as fanty term preposcular, which means they're up and moving around dawn and dusk UM. So that's why we see deer UH. And most hunters will try to get out a few hours before dark UM because that's when they're going to see them, or they get out there for their morning hunt before the sun comes up, and you see deer movement those first few hours of daylight UM. So they bed during the day, they will walk to a food source or or we'll try to find a place to eat UM and that's when they're most active. And then during the middle of the night, yes they are active and more so than they are during the middle of the the day, but they are going to bed down again. So knowing that and then over the year it's generally the same pattern, although during the breathing season there there's no more chaos than what they do, and their home ranges definitely expand they're much larger because they're seeking breeding opportunities. You want within a home range of where deer live to have covering food. Um. If you had basically a dichotomy of a hundreds you know, hundred acre block of land and food was in one place and a fifty it across, you know, the lying right down the middle and there was cover on the other side, you would be supporting less dear. Then if you had that same hundred acres and you had it really diverse where covering food was interspersed with a good mix of all of these different things. Um, So you can almost picture it almost like a jigsaw puzzle looking down. Um. You know, if you're on an aerial like an on X or Google Earth or Hunt or something like, then you're looking down. In those environments where there's a nice mix of food and cover, you will support more gear and have more opportunities to manage dear than you would in a place that's less diverse. So from a forestry perspective, um, it's almost better to start with a blank slate with a property that has uh, you know, almost a forest, or even better, something that's got very little forest and a lot of open space where you could start creating a place that's diversed. And the reason I say that is because dear tend to need cover from their very short animals. I mean they're you know, four ft five ft tall, um, you know, so from that six foot mark down you need a lot of thick cover and food so they can reach it. And a lot of that is found early in the successional phase. So succession is that predictable way that we can manage plants. And Tim mentioned it earlier. I talked about a little earlier in terms of forestry, is predicting what's going to grow there, and succession is that marching forward of how those different plant communities show up. And if you can start with a blank slate hundred acres of field, you know, for example, and start think that come back into a plant community that's no longer young grasses and it started getting shrubs and small trees. And Tim was talking about earlier with young forests you can support more deer than if it's wide open grass, or if it's a forest that's so old that it's canopied out and you have shade on the on the ground. So what you want to do from a timber perspective in terms of managing for financial gains and on the side of trying to make that forest workforce for you financially, can be tweaked a little bit on the deer manager's brain by trying to make it more diverse and offer more UH young cover through forest management practices. UM. So that's kind of the big picture, and we do that through a couple of broad rush techniques that foresters use of either trying to manage a UH landscape in a lot of young trees um or kind of a mix of young and old and those We can get into some of that terminology if you'd like, But that's the thought process. So if I was to be hired or you know, prior to working for t DUM, if somebody had called the consultant company I used to work for and said, hey, I'm really interested in deer hunting, um, how can I manage this for deer? The way you would manage that could would be different than if that person had said, hey, I'm really interested in and growing big trees, so I can, um, you know, get a rebbin off this from my kids or my grandkids. You can do both, but you definitely have to change what you're doing, um, and the prescriptions and how it's done, how the property is is treated would be different from the deer manager's point of view. Okay, So so talk us through then that scenario. Let's say I'm a landowner. I have a chunk of property that has some timber on it. Maybe I've got some diversity and what I've got, Um, can you walk me through Let's say let's say you were still working as a force and then Tim, I'd love you to hop in here too, in your role that you're in right now. UM. You know, let's say the two of you, we're gonna show up my hunting property and I said, hey, I want to understand what I need to do here to improve the habitat um influence some kind of force management. Can you kind of talk me through what your initial questions would be, what that initial process would look like, UM, what would what would I be in for during that first kind of meeting and and kind of subsequently, well, Kim, does that on almost on a daily basis, but it meets with landowners all the time, UM to the program we have here that you mentioned earlier. So Tim, why don't you take take a stab at it? I don't want to steal your thunder because you that is part of your job description. Sure like, Uh, I mean with any any form of FORCET management, you know you have that discussion with the landowner. UM that the initial discussion. A really good thing to find out is about the history of the property, how long they've had it, if it's been logged in the recent past, that they know the land has been treated to a certain way that might allow us to make inferences about what we'll find when we get out there. Probably the most important discussion to have is is about the objective uh and what things you know. It might be one objectives. Sometimes you meet with a person who really just wants that to be hunting property, or they have a multitude of objectives that might rank differently, and so you start with that objective. You do uh, you do an assessment of the property to basically uh get some information about what's what the forest looks like now, what the conditions are like currently, and then you work within your your knowledge and skill set to try and come up with a series of treatments which will sort of uh, as Matt alluded, to drive or steer that forest ecosystem in a direction that better meets those objectives, which can consist of a lot of different things, oftentimes cutting trees and oftentimes using herbicides to role plants which are not desirable. Uh. And of course hand in hand with that is heard management to make sure that you don't have deer that are are causing damage to your your potential crop for what you're trying to grow. So I mean that's that's basically the essence of it. Um. Okay, would you and and you you also want to know like what limitations are there? I mean certainly have to walk the property with the person. It's interesting those conversations are come sometimes the landowner or the person that's calling you know or even emailing us. We get these questions all the time. Uh. We just put a blog up about you know, that kind of interaction on our website, not that long ago, um. Where the landowner has has interest, but sometimes it's hard for them to even define it themselves. So it's those conversations that back and forth of Okay, you know, what do you use the property for? UM, you know, what would you like to not happen? What would scare you where? Whoever that manager is this meeting them almost has to massage the discussion to the point where, you know, just trying to get out of them what they're looking for, and then UM offer them a draft plan and a list of objectives to see if that actually is what they're looking for. I'll say one thing too as well, is it's really an interesting opportunity too. As I mentioned, these things are happening UM and they influence dear movement. But one of the things I thought was super powerful and one of those kind of like aha moments for me, was how we have the ability to change that. UM. You know, looking at a forest, many deer hunters will go out, you know, it doesn't matter private of public lands, and they start scouting for deer sign Right, You're going to look where you can find rob lines and beds. UM find sheds on the ground this time of year. In the next couple of weeks, UM plant food plots. You know, obviously to try to steer that a little bit, but you can think big picture and start really thinking, Okay, if you have access and the ability to do this on private land, it start uh influencing that in a big way by saying, Okay, if I know, Dear like these certain conditions, and I know the wind direction is a certain you know, predominant wind directions coming across this property a certain way, and I know my access is only uh these you know, from the from the main road. If it's a place where you don't have a house or cabin, I have to walk in from this direction. You can start planning that out in advance and saying I want to steer where dear go um. And you know it's not a bulletproof thing like anything, but you can really heavily influence dear movement across the landscape by making some of these decisions at the thirty ft scale. Now, so for the people that are listening that don't own property and don't have those decisions, that's where you fall into what Kim mentioned earlier is on lands you don't control, but you have access to, either through permission or if it's public land, you can start making those decisions and figure out where to scout and where the hunt from the air. Even though you don't have the control over it. You can look at things like that, UM, even on properties that you don't have access to. If there's land near you that's privately owned that you don't have permission to get on, all you need to do is get on an areal, go back a couple of years. There's all different ways that you can kind of rewind time on those areals and see what it looks like five years or man even fifty years ago. You can go into some of the soil and water conservation districts and get old areals and see what was done to that property that that is right next door that you've never stepped foot on, and kind of make a decision of Okay, I think I know why de are doing that. It really lends itself to the to the deer hunter that's trying to strategize making those decisions through forestry and how that's been treated. Yeah, it's interesting. At a very similar example, pop up my own life on our on our Northern Michigan deer camp up there about two years ago, maybe three years ago, two or three years ago. UM showed up there one year, I think, late summer and saw that the neighbor had just done a really aggressive cut, not quite a clear cut, but a but a very aggressive selective cut, I guess you'd call it. Um, And it just dramatically changed like a twenty acre section right next to our property. And right away I was like, Okay, well this is gonna change a lot of things, because what used to be just a big, thick, mature timber stand now is all of a sudden it's probably gonna be really good betting it's probably gonna be a whole lot of good food here for a while to um. So the past few years we've started placing cameras along the edge of our property and start paying attention to it more. Um, because you could just tell, like, when you see that kind of habitat, change is going to probably be positive for deer activity. Um. Even as you said, math, if it's not on your own property, you can still take advantage of it to a degree. And um. Interestingly, our shared friend further almost killed a nice buck coming into that section. He was right near kind of on our side, close to that clear cut area, and that the buck was heading that way probably check out for doze, and he almost got a shot. So it's that's cool. He didn't tell me. That's enough to find out why why I didn't hear all about it. Yeah, just just didn't quite have enough time to get on him before he turned heart started heading directly away from him. But yeah, yeah, I'll say One of other things too, is like you know, on the hunting side of it is we all have that thing in the back of our brain, you know, where you're walking into an area and all of a sudden it feels like theory, right, you know, you're like, oh, I feel like I could jump a deer right now. Um that you control that too. You can make those decisions from the air and say I would like that feeling to be over here on this part of the property. And that's land management and it doesn't necessarily always have to be forestry. Um. You can make those decisions by just letting the field go and let it go back. But that is what we're talking about here. Um. One thing you mentioned earlier is, uh, you said a selective cut, and I talked a little bit about those broad brush treatments generally for terminology. If you talk into a forester or if you know the property you have access to, forster has been on it and they're starting to work with that UM through some of the terminology and tim mentioned earlier. UM kind of one way to regenerate a force. There's two big I guess camps of forestry. Way we ways we manage is even age management and uneven Asian management. And even Asian management is where you want to create one whole new age class of trees coming up, and that would be like a clear cut as you were just talking about on that property up in Michigan. There's other ways to do even age management. UM. What you may have been looking at was a sea tree cut or shelter would cut. They're basically big massive changes where you remove almost the entire overstory, if not the whole thing sea tree and shelter would cut, or where you're leaving a little bit left for a residual stand. But the eventual plan is to get a new crop of trees coming up, and you do that in a block fashion where you're saying, Okay, this block is what I want to regenerate. And if we create a environment where there's a lot of sun and no overstory, very few overstory trees, you'll get a lot of some loving trees to come in there. Things like aspen, light seated species like white pine. Well, I'm listening stuff in the northeast, but it doesn't matter where you are. The things that will pioneer site is what shows up. Alternatively, if you want to do uh, the type of management that's uneven Asian management where you're removing some most people call it select cut or selective cut, where you're removing some of the trees believing a portion of them. You can regenerate some new trees in there. But the trees that generally will go back in that environment like shade or a little bit of sun, not a lot of sun. And that's through that predictability that I mentioned earlier. If you want to influence what trees grow back, you do that through those two major camps. In the forester's mind, they say, Okay, I need this to happen. The landowner or the landowner or deer hunter that's talking and he wants deer to bed over there. Here are things that we need to do. Now. The timeline on both of those of what deer will use are different. The reason I'm mentioning that is you're talking about that Michigan neighbor UH, the northern Michigan neighbor that's probably gonna be in the in the long term, kind of short lived. Although they did that cut that you know what you felt like was an aggressive or you know you described as an aggressive thing. They removed a lot of trees. Dear, deer use in there. You can expect to be very high for a handful of years, right, but at some point that stuff will get above the deer's reach. Shade will stroll back up, but use around the seven or eight eight year mark, and then deer youth starts to decline because they don't have access to those trees that are within reach or have lots of berries and fruits. The buds are no longer reach. And that's where you can start making those predictions. Um again, big term, big picture, long term from the sky of how dear will dear useful change. So I will bet you whatever year that was done on your neighbor's property, you got about seven or eight years of really high activity and then all of a sudden you're gonna start seeing at the client. UM use that to your advantage. You could plan around it. You know, those are things that are deer hunter even if you don't own the land next to you. You want to know that stuff. Yeah, So, so how do you determine what the right option is between an even age class management or UM or uneven I'm blinking on the terminology you just said two seconds ago. Um, But how do you determine what the right route is to go between those two different camps of managing a piece of timber? Um? I manage? It probably depends partly on your goals. But can you elaborate a little bit mat Tim, I'll say it had definitely the buds on the goals. A lot of it is baseball. So on what Tim mentioned before is walking the property and getting a you know, a current status what's out there? You know what what trees are there now? Um, because that will play a large role in it. UM commercially, if there's trees that you can't take out of there that will pay for it, then you're you're looking like it's a cost operation and most people don't have the ability to pay to have something like that done. You want the forest operation to pay for itself, um, if you possibly can. So you know the current conditions part of it. Also, the ground really really you know what what the soils are like? Moisture level. UM, all of that stuff will play a part too, because sometimes logistically, if it's really wet, you can't go in there any time year, or you gotta wait till it's frozen if you're in the north. Um. And all of the things that are kind of fall under the logistics tab you know of like what what you can do and what you can get away with. So there's a lot of nuances and that's why the answers typically it depends. It really depends on walking the property, getting a sense of what it feels like. And you know, I'll say nod for any anybody listening. You know, this is why forresters are important. There's a lot of these folks out there that use forresters. UM. They aren't just a middle middleman or woman that's there to you know, help alone with the process, but also get their quote unquote cut um. A lot of times you need somebody that's trained in those decision making. There's a lot of great laggers out there. I still have a lot of great friends and their loggers. UM. Folks that go directly with loggers can get a similar result, but you want somebody that's trained in silver culture. The science and art of managing forests to make some of those decisions. And that's part of the thought process too, is working with somebody that's trained. They have they went to school for it, um and it's certainly important, uh, Tim, you know, feel free to chime in, know about like going onto a property, how do you decide, um, whether you're gonna do full on even Asian management, uneven Asian management or what mark you originally had asked us to be on the call of uh is timber stand improvement. And that's a whole camp in itself. And of this intermediate stage where the trees are not quite commercial. Uh, they're not ready to be cut, but you can still do some things. I'll let Tim kind of take the ball from there. Yeah, if you can define some of that to be helpful to Tim absolutely well. You know, when we have an uneven state and uneven aged stand that's being managed typically using that selection method that Matt had mentioned, we're trying to leave, you know, at the stand level in that individual stand a similar area with trees of different ages in each age class trees and different ages that are all mixed up in the same stand. Because of our history at least in New York and a lot of the Northeast, so much of our forest has reverted from a band and agricultural land. That the vast majority of the forests that we're managing our even age um, and so it sort of becomes easier to continue to to follow that system. Uh, it takes a tremendously long time, whether you're starting from the ground or starting from an older even aged forest, to convert to an uneven aged forest where you have trees of lots of lots of different age classes. There are a few ways to do it, where you might come in with a mosaic of very small gaps that you're creating over time, or starting with a gap that you're expanding over time. But that's a very long process to go from, you know, an even age stand to an uneven aged stand. Whereas in any of these cases, if we go in and we do a very heavy cut like a shelter would or a seed tree or a clear cut, you know, it isn't as difficult to regenerate the stand and now have an even age stand that can basically that conversion can take place in a single treatment um. As far as you know, managing those as as they go forward, I mean, they're they're a little bit different, UM and this can this can influence which one is preferable, because with the even age stand, you're you're regenerating that stand, getting a new age class and new cohort cohort of trees coming up UM as they approach rotation age. Typically you have intermediate treatments like timber stand improvement to reduce the crowding and and leave behind the best individuals UM and then ultimately you're regenerating the stand, whereas in that uneven aged stand, each entry you're sort of doing both of fenning and a regeneration treatment because you're trying to keep trees of all different ages throughout that entire stand. So you've got seedlings and saplings and pole timber and small saltember and large saal timber size trees UM. And this can pose a different obstacle UM, particularly when you get into areas like much of New York has, where where deer can be overpopulated to the point that they're they're browsing down UM all of the region you want. In an even age scenario, you basically have a window of time where you need to get trees regenerated and then up over the heads of the deer where they can each those trees and not have to worry about it for another eighty years, whereas in an uneven aged setting you need to have regeneration constantly and having you know, even a period of time in time for a few years where the deer brows is so heavy that you can't get that regeneration established. That can pose a problem that is going to continue to be a problem because there's a gap in that age structure that will continue on through time. UH. The other thing we think about a lot as far as trying to you know, when we have them manage uneven aged stands UH in New York and many other places that have each bark disease. As Matt mentioned that that uneven aged management UM often favors shade tolerant species because they're growing under several other tiers of vegetation of different heights. It could be more difficult for those UM those shade intolerant or sun loving species to come in and UH in New York and many other places, we have this issue with with each that can come to dominate in those cases because each is so tolerant of shade, So it definitely poses some different obstacles managing under one versus the other. Is there any is there any kind of blanket statement you could apply to either even or uneven management as far as a benefit or or or negative to either one as far as managing from a deer hunting perspective, because I'm imagining if I were to just like guess off the top of my head, I see, okay, a clear cut that to kind of practice and even management practice right there. That seems like a downside to that would be that it would be at least immediately after that clear cuts made, you've lost a lot of cover in the short term, and you might have changed dear behavior in the short term, possibly negatively, depending on when that cuts made, how close it might be the hunting seasons. So that's something like, well, that's a catastrophic change. That's one downside, but then the upside might be that a year or two or three years from now, then you've got this this great, big, large area of of beneficial habitat um. That's my novice guests on one possible upside downside of something a clear cut. Could you speak to or point out any other possible benefits or downsized to either one of those. Um that someone might want to think about one considering one or the other. Yeah, I'll jump in. I think they both have their place, and if the land lends itself, the space lends itself. I like both techniques for deer hunting. UM. You know, in an ideal situation, you know, percuts don't have to be although they're nice to have, you know, larger five ten acres or even ten to twenty acres or larger recommended. You know, these blocks of two to five acres can be created to get especially if you get the light slope where the sun's coming down. It's the you know, a south facing slope to get a lot of sun in those places. UM. I like to see both. Then end on even as management for deer hunting, and it goes back to that sculpting of deer movement where you can you can influence how deer will bed you get the forest to respond the way you want as well, but you can influence how deer will better move. If you can picture again a block of landmark where you have, UM, let's say, just as an extreme right, the wind is out of the west. I'm gonna give you an extreme example. And on the west side of that hundred acres you put a linear five acre clear cut that takes up the whole west boundary. Right. Um, you can expect within a couple of years dear to be betting on that west cover. And then what if right in the center of that block, UM you did UM going from a you know, east west pattern, you get a whole bunch of uneven aged management UM coming from that that clear cut towards a food source which is all the way over on the east side of the property, but on the north and on the south off the end of your block, you didn't do much. There's just open canopy in there, or you know, a close canopy, not much on the ground growing. You would predict that deer would probably come out of that clear cut they'd be betting in there would follow that uneven aged management kind of swath where there's some cover growing in the in the understory to your food source. UM. That's an extreme example. But what I'm saying there is that's an example of having both and kind of um for lack of a better term, I mean, others have used it out their deer scaping the property where you can influence where deer betting. Sure, in about eight years or nine years, that clear cuts no longer going to be useful for deer um. Not necessarily useful, but it's not going to have the betting cover holding capacity that it did in the first couple of years. Um, you wanted some kind of time limits on that. I can tell you. You You know, doing those heavy even age management techniques, you're going to see a hundredfold being greets and brows coming in immediately in the first one to five years, you'll see an excess of over a thousand pounds of food. Breaker You're gonna get a flush of soft mass because a lot of those things like raspberries, um and other soft mass bearing shrubs and small trees will show up. That's where they grow. UM. But again you're gonna it's short lived, it's gonna kind of disappear. Whereas in the environment where you're doing the uneven aged management, you can expect, especially if we're going in and penetrating that area and just doing a little bit every seven to ten years, you're always gonna have cover coming up and always having covering coming up. So from a deer hunter's perspective, they're both good if you have the space for it. Um. You know, in that extreme example, I just told you after about ten years that western boundaries not going to be holding gear the way it was, um, you know, until you can go in there and do something else with it. So now you've got to plan accordingly. And that's really what a forced and UH wildlife management plan combined can do for you. If you integrate those two goals, your deer hunting or your wildlife specific goals with a timber management or forestry, you can start in flowing some of those things that having decisions where you might not do UH as large as a clear cut or even age management. In year one, you might do just that northwest boundary and then in ten years go down and do the north you know, southwest boundary and then move it into a different quadrant where you're moving that around where deer going. That's an ideal thing where you're always going through a rotation. I use that word of doing something there every couple of years to keep deer cover and food low and deer use on your property high. Um. It requires space to do that. For private landowners that have small landholdings. One of the best ways you can do that. And I didn't even plan I'm talking about this, but it just makes sense. It's through a cooperative, and I know they're huge in Michigan and they're big in New York too. Is I've seen foresters firsthand example where you might not own that much land if you are a private landowner, um, but you can plan a forest operation with multiple landowners involved through a cooperative where that forrester and the logging crew will love it because it's economy of scale where they might come in and they might have to create a couple of different landings to access the wood, but at least it's working cohesively as one big plan where you might have you know, five or ten landowners together. That actually makes it worth the operation and then you can start influencing the same stuff we're talking about through forestry. So cooperatives, although they have a lot of benefits in a lot of different ways, a lot of folks don't think through with the forestry side of it. But I've seen that firsthand example. I chure tim as well, where one foresters high by basically every landowner and they bring a crew and they just treat as much acres as they possibly can. In the fact, my own cooperative. Uh, there's a guy moving on this weekend. Uh, a logger's moving and he's gonna be treating several different properties on the place, slide hunt on. That's a really interesting way of of of continue to take that group approach and and expand that beyond just harvest decisions, but also to management of habitat. That's a pretty cool way to do it. You were talking about kind of rotating different quadrants and creating different even necessarily mentioned this war, but you kind of alluded to you're creating different edges. Like you talked about how you've had that one example scenario where you had the clear cut betting here on the west side, and then you had this edge created by uneven management through the middle then directed traffic towards that food source to the east. And as you were talking about that, I was thinking about, Yeah, a lot of what we're doing here when we're managing timber is taking what might be a wide been monoculture, even age standard timber that has no diversity to habitat, no edge within it, and now you're creating this edge, which as is a lot of deer hunters. No, edge is something that attracts deer that deer really relate to as far as movement, as far as the types of habitat they desire to be around for food and escape, cover and whatnot. Um and Tim, I read an article you wrote a while back about this about the importance of edge and how it might be something to think about. Is you could achieve I think your your line wasn't there that you could achieve creating edge on a habitat one bite at a time. UM, if you know what I'm talking about? Could you could you elaborate on on what your concept was there that you that you spoke about in that piece? Sure? Uh, And in that that piece, I was looking at something very much like what Matt was talking about just earlier, as far as continuing to to cut on the property so that you know there's always something that's been freshly cut and always something that's been growing in. I think one of the examples I gave in that article, Uh, it would be to expand a gap, particularly if somebody has a limited amount of space or time and resources that they can create a patch cut and then continue to work off of that. Um. You know, uh, sometimes you know it would seem almost that uh, that habitat management as as far as deer go and timber management can seem at odds because when we think about the things that dear need, you know, we're often talking about the things that come with that, those earliest stages of succession, whether it's actual early succession with forbes coming in at the ground level, or whether we're talking about young forest whereas we think timber and we're thinking of an older forest that's yielding larger saw logs. That seemed to be opposite objectives. Uh. And one of the best ways to to manage for that, when possible, is to create something of a rotation of a mosaic what forests sometimes term regulation, where over time, as you continue to cut similar areas, you eventually have this mosaic with plenty of edge um, but where you also have a consistent amount of habitat of different age classes. It's always changing, it's always moving, but you've got a stable, stable capacity there because you've always got this similar amount of of recently regenerated forest that maybe has some early successional plants coming in and stands that are just a few years old that offer that cover and then mature stands which you can which you can you know, tend in between. And that's also very good from a timber standpoint, because now you're over time getting consistent flows of timber from that UM. And there are are the things that you could do in those those intermediate treatments that you might tweak things a little bit differently than you would do for timber management to make the conditions better for deer and for deer hunting. UM. Speaking of that, another thing you mentioned, I think it was in that piece or maybe another, when it came to these different cuts that you're making and how it might be able to benefit both wildlife and your timber management plan. One of the things to improve UM the capacity for wil life use that you mentioned was the shape of the cuts and what the benefit might be of having an irregularly shaped cut versus just a circle or square. And this is something I never thought about. I thought about a lot when it comes to food plots, the benefit of strategically planning the shape of your food plot, but when it came to, you know, improving timber habitat or bedding cover, I'd always kind of I just kind of make a block and you cut it all, or you do whatever kind of practices that you want to implement. Um. But can you speak to why you might want to be a little bit more thoughtful with the shapes? Sure? Well, for one, uh, you know, different shapes of the same area are going to have different perimeters, that is to say, different amounts of edge. Um. And beyond that, I think another thing I mentioned in that article is getting near the edges of those patch cuts are clear cuts you're planning and actually feathering, so that rather than having a heavily cleared area met a wall of timber, you've you've gradually thin in that surrounding area um, which uh you know can give you basically the interspersion of those older and younger trees and uh as far as a deer and hunting goes. It can also give you a good place to to hang a stand. Uh you know, have have trees that you can hang a stand on and be among some of that stuff that that's coming up. Um. Some of the more important points of choosing the shape of a cut um have to do with how much sunlight is reaching the ground when you're planning a clear cut or a patch cut. There are a number of different things that are influencing how many hours of direct sunlight you're getting. You know, you want to think about the aspect. Are you on a north face or a south face? Um. And not that there's anything you can do to influence that or to influence this, but um, your latitude is going to affect how much sunlight you're going to get in a cut of a given shape and slow position and all that. Um. And of course you know a shape, the shape of the cuts gonna influence that because you know, if you have a cut of a given area, you know the shape is going to influence how wide and opening you're creating. So if you're doing a linear cut, you might not get as much sunlight as you would in a cut of the same area that is closer to a circle or a square in shape. Uh and uh. You know, typically as a rule of thumb, UM, if you're trying to create a gap that's large enough to regenerate shade tolerance trees, you want to create a gap that's at least one times the width of the surrounding tree heights. If you want to regenerate shade intermediate trees. Uh. You know you look to create a gap that's one and a half times that total tree height of the surrounding trees. And if you want to create a gap that has enough direct sunlight for enough hours reaching the ground that you're gonna get shade intolerant trees, which are really sun loving species, you want that gap to be, you know, at least twice as high as a twice as wide as as the surrounding trees are high. And that's just the rule of thumb, of course, because as I mentioned, there are a lot of a lot of factors, um such a slow position and latitude that are going to affect how many hours of direct sunlight your your cut is going to receive. You know something I didn't that we didn't really touch on, maybe quite enough, but that I'm thinking of as we go through all this, Through all this, I'm thinking to myself, there's a lot here, right, There's there's a lot of nuance, there's a lot of detail, um And and if I ever thought to myself of going out into my woods, if I had a block and trying to figure all this stuff out on my own, I would be very intimidated by it. And so this leads me to the question of and you you kind of alluded to this a little bit. Mag touched on us a bit, But it seems like bringing a forster is a is a good option if you feel that way. Um, but how do you go about finding a forster? How do you go about getting someone like the right kind of forster? You did an article about this, Matt, Um, can you can you just give us a little bit more detail if we're listening to this and we're like, oh, holy smokes, I'm overwhelmed. How do I actually find the right person to help me with us and not just you know, pick the first force I see in the Google results. Sure, yeah, that's funny. It's an article that we just put on our website a couple of weeks ago that I had written. It was inspired because I had a member reach out to me through social media and said, uh, hey, yeah, I get a question for you, And it just sparked the thought because it was my dou dat to write something, and it was like, this is something I get asked all the time. Um. And honestly, I was just talking to another colleague this morning about the exact same question. Um. One of our co op guys in Missouri had a similar thing happened to him. UM. My advice is generally pretty simple, as you want to find a forceter that gets deer hunting and hopefully they're a deer hunter. UM. Even better if you can find somebody that's ACUITIA MAY member or have worked with Q and MAY members if they're not one. And one way you can do that is we are obviously a UM conservation organization. We have members and we have local branches all across the country. There's a map on our website. You can click on your home state or province and see if there's a branch near you. Contact them. They have a contact information. Uh, maybe even get involved with that branch and uh, you know there's likely somebody there that's probably used a forrester. Personal recommendation is always a great way to find somebody, and particularly if you're talking to a fellow deer hunter that's into deer management, UM, you're probably gonna get a good referral. So that that's one way to do it I talked about in that article. Another is ke you may actually has a program to certify lands. It's called our Land Certification program, where we have inspectors listed. Many of them have forestry uh backgrounds, a lot of more foresters. UM, you can mind that list for folks that are listed on our website. UM. Not all of them are force or some of them have strictly wildlife background whether that's another opportunity. And you can also enroll and in that program and get your property certified. That's what they're there for. UM. You know, so there are there are different ways, but generally you want to if you find somebody that's as passionate about deer hunting as you are. UM, they're and they're trained in silver culture or forced management, they're likely going to get what we're talking about. And um, you know, along the lines of sculpting or you're talking about directional planning. In terms of your habitat, it's okay to not treat every you know, square foot of your property. In fact, if you want to, and I know, Mark you wrote something like this for years ago for our magazine about having those dear deserts right, you can not treat some of your property, um, with the hope that it influences deer to not be there. I mean, that's that's certainly important, UM to think about any time that you can manage the property, get good food cover on the ground. UM. I wouldn't say go to on the extreme and manage only small parts. I would actually go to the other direction of that continuum and try to manage most of your property most maximum food and cover on the food would be maximum benefits. So if you want to see deer hit their their highest potential for antler size and body weights per age class, you need lots of food and cover on the ground. So to do that, you need a lot of airs treated. So I wouldn't push the dear desert extreme to where you leave very little your property managed. UM. I would manage most of it, but maybe leave little blocks here there it might help in terms of dear movement. UM. So the person that's feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the discussion, the first thing would be to reach out to somebody, um uh, to talk to a forest or somebody that's trained in it. But you know, in all honesty, Mark, even with some of that UM and I'm a big proponent on working with license or certified foresters, trying to find somebody that's a professional. UM, there's still a lot you can do, whether if you're able to on land that you either own or have access to, and they'll let you treat some things. Um, you can do a lot of work. You know this, you know with the chainsaw, score bottle and influence. What's there the general idea of trying to influence growth at the ground levels. You've got to get some light to come in. I mean, that's the simplest rule. And by removing some of the canopy, if you can reduce that at least to that like sixty mark where of the sky is open, of the sky's open, that's when you start influencing growth. It's that predictability that Tim and I have been talking about what's going to grow back? There is where you really need the professional advice to come in. UM. And then also you don't want to miss opportunities. UM. You don't want to kill or cut down a tree that might be valuable because then you just you and yourself in the front in terms of if the tree had value in it and you cut it down, UM, you know you're you're taking that away from yourself. You basically you are throwing money out the window, which we don't like to see. You should make that money your property grew it or your grandfathers or grandparents or parents property grew it. That's standing money there. You might as well utilize it. So that's another thing. And then obviously in the respect of having an operator in there where a forester comes in, most forestry operations don't have hired contractors. They work with subcontractors and uh those people could folks that are logging, they come in, they have insurance, they're trained. You can treat way more acreage. You know, there's a lot of good that comes into paying somebody to come in and mark the timber, sell the timber for you. You make more money. I mean, I can go on and on about all that. UM just based on if you think of it this way, if you were to try to do it yourself and you wanted an outlet to sell out, would and you were just going around and trying to sell it, you know, in whatever means way you could. Uh, when you work with a forrester that has a lot of UM, a client base that's broad and is working with lots of landowners, the pure supply that they provide UM, you know, mills and things like that is much much much greater than you would be able to do by yourself and they can demand higher prices for it, you know, because they're supplying them with so much more wood, So you actually can make more money by by doing that. It's one of my soapbox things that I like to talk about. So I'd say, if you feel overwhelmed, you're not going to be paying to use somebody to get professional lice. There's a lot of free resources out there through your state wildlife, state agencies, through your state forestry agency. UM. In some parts of the world. UM. You know, you can even to get advice through your cooperative extension service. Where I mentioneding that I went to school in New Hampshire. There are county based forresters that that is certainly a case. In some state wildlife agencies, they have private lands forresters, private lands conservationists and biologists. There are free resources out there for you. Tim is one he's he's in New York. Other other conservation organizations like ourselves have have those resources. But if you ended up going with a consultant to come in and basically work for you, uh, they are going to work for you, and that means make you the most money if it's possible. So it certainly is a good way to do it. Um. And you know what they can your mark project that you can do for yourself. Um, and say, hey, listen, I marked every tree you need to get rid of either girl and spray or cut it down. And then you go out there and do the silla equity. Um. You know there there's there's certainly nuances of how you can do these things. You don't have to just hand everything over to somebody else. Yeah, and and and that was one the questions I had was about the the d I Y option. If you wanted to kind of try to do a lot of this yourself, it sounds like there's still benefits to bringing in a consultant of some kind. Um. So I want to first better understand the free options if I want to try to get some free help. Does it sound like the first step is just contacting your state game agency and say, hey, do we have some kind of program within Michigan to help with this kind of thing? And then there'll be someone who can direct me around. Is that kind of how to start the looking for free help process? How would always go with whatever the government agency is that's in charge of forestry and or Wilby it's because if they know, if you contacted your wildlife department, you know, they're all under the same roof in most places. But um, and saying I'm interested in having some forestry advice, UM, they're probably gonna send you over to the forestry side of things, UM advice first. You know. A lot of times though, getting back to that comment about you know, I'm really interested in deer hunting, I think that's where that's born from. I'm not saying not to call free management advice. Certainly is there. Our taxpayer money pays for it. But a lot of time those folks are not maybe on the same um sheet of music, I guess because they might not be deer unders they went to forestry school, or it would be a little bit of a long shot to try to find somebody that's really really interested in deer hunting. Um where it's gonna you're it's gonna take some due diligence on the person that they're asking. You gotta ask a lot of questions, um, you know, and find the person that fits well with you. But there are certainly lots of free options. And not only is that, I mean, I know in your case in Michigan, there's there's some really good options just based on some friends I know through our organization UM that get deer onting that our q d m A members. I mean, it's it certainly exists. Just might do take a little bit more flipping through the playbook to find somebody. Yeah, now, what if we want to bring in uh a force your consultant that that would be a paid situation. Obviously payments would be different depending on who and where and but can you give me any kind of ballpark or how costs is applied or anything? Just if I'm thinking about this, what am I thinking about to bring in something like this? Is this like a two bucks for a day or is this like x percentage of the project we plan on doing? How does that work? There's all different ways that it can happen, uh And I hate to say it depends, but it depends on what you're asking for. So if you're looking for a management plan, like to have them come in and write a plan for you with no operations in the woods, but basically give you a document. UM that typically is the cost, but there are definitely cost share options and we can get part of that paid off. They're definitely free options again, management plans written through different federal and state programs. Um, if they're coming in to cut timber, and there's commercial timber, typically an initial visits not going to cost you anything. That they're they're getting to know you. You're going to get to know that that that is certainly uh, the most common thing is, hey, they want to find out what you need, what you're looking for, and then you know vice versa that you're trying to figure out if there's the right fit for you. Um. Sometimes it's a combination of not only writing a plan, but doing an inventory to figure what's out there, eventually doing a commercial harvest. Sometimes that can all be wrapped up under one contract where uh, they are going to eventually cut some wood there and it can be paid for from the from the sale. UM. You know, to have a management plan. There's also tax incentives to get tax breaks on your property, and there's certainly a lot of ways to get plans there too, and tim feel free to jump in. But I mean, I'm trying to make it not as confusing, but it's hard to answer that question based on Unfortunately it is confusing, especially you know here in New York there are so many different programs that involve different agencies tax breaks, you know, getting funny, so you know, New York State offers a program where in New York land owners who get a four stry plan written and agree to follow it, they get a tax break. Then there's the NRCS and they've got equipped and you can get funding to have a plan written by a consultant who you hire, and then they'll offer you funding for that and then also funding for other things like getting t S I marked, getting t S I caught, that sort of thing, and you know, that's a different program, and they typically expect that consultant to be a technical service provider. I know that in the New York City, in the New York City Watershed, the Watershed Agricultural Council, they offer funding for plans where they'll they'll pay to have a consultant come out and UH write a forest management plan. So it actually can be tough to navigate. UM I know d EC they'll come out and they're they're state foresters will will sometimes come out for the day and write a for stewardship plan. So there's a number of different routes you can go. UH as far as how forresters charge when it comes to a management plan. Some of them do it on a per acre basis UM. Most of them have in an hourly rate that they'll sometimes base calculations off of UM. A lot of them do charge a percentage when it comes to administering a timber sale, But as far as some of the management ending goes, a lot of them are just sort of trying to cover their time and sustain themselves and not earn too much money really off of the management plans. But you know, cover you know, cover their calls, make a little bit of money off of the management planning in hopes that they'll have a relationship with that landowner so that they can be the person to make some money when it comes to administering the timber sale for them. Uh. That's that's really where a lot of a lot of consultants do better because landowners know that they're they're you know overall, even even paying a consultant going to do better by having that timber sale administered with somebody in their corner, particularly when it is a sizeable timber sale. So yeah, unfortunately, can't be uh simple answer, but there there are a lot of opportunities out there to explore. So would it be safe to say that if I'm a landowner and I want to if I'm just looking at this from a from a hunting perspective, and I'm thinking, Hey, I know I've got all this timber. It's not doing me a whole lot of good because mature it's it's a mono culture. It's big, wide open block of the same thing. I know. I want to do something to improve for wildlife habitat. Would it be safe to say that, whether it be through timber sale of marketable timber on that chunk, and or through tax breaks, and or through government programs that help fund certain desired types of habitat practices, that I can get a management action taken on my hunting property that will improve my hunting and improve wildlife habitat. I can do that, and there are ways to help cover that and or completely cover the costs, or at least help with the costs of making that change if I were to take advantage of these previously listed um uh benefits. That's that's right, right. We shouldn't just go in there and think we gotta cut everything down ourselves. It's gonna cost ten dollars to do it. We can actually look at this as a way of hey, we might be able to get free habitat improvement or cost assistance. We just kind of habitat improvement. But we have to take advantage of these different programs. I yeah, that is accurate. And I would say, um, having a plan from the forefront helps in a lot of different ways. And there's ways to either they either low costs are free based on what's out there. Um, you know. So I would say, if you don't have a manage a plan for your property, if you're interested in doing this, you want kind of a plan of action, right, Like Like if I were to leave my house right now without and I was trying to drive to where you are, Mark, and I had no idea where in Michigan you were, but I knew you were in Michigan and I just left, it would take me a lot longer than if I actually you send me your address and I put it into my GPS and I got straight there. Right. So a plan will get you someplace faster. So having a plan is important. Will spent one source the plan plan writers are free, there's ways to get them. Number two, I would want that plan to be integrated with both if there's enough value in the timber. With my wildlife centric goals, particularly dear qum A, we really stay a deer management plan template. It's free, it's a PDF you can sell out. It gives really good guidance. It's actually part of our dear Steward program, but it's a free document. You don't have to take dear Steward to get it. Get's posted on our website. Um I would say sit down with somebody if you're using a Forrester that does not get deer hunting, have them kind of go through well, either have them take dear Steward, which would be awesome for both you, the Forrester and for us UM at least have them sit down with that management plan template and talk through some of those concepts of hey, this is a concept of what I want to think of. So that your deer hunting goals and the land management timber specific goals are talking to each other. You know, obviously we talked about how all of this influence happened. So you don't want them going to be counter productive or you know, working against each other. You want them to be going in the same direction. So number one to have to get a plan written. Number two, make sure your deer hunting goals uh are married to your other land management goals. And then number three, the property is capable of having something done to it in terms of tree removal and manipulation of that for us, don't be scared of it. There's a lot of people. That's one thing we didn't talk about yet. Are you know clear cut has been a bad word. Uh. The mass that's left of cutting trees down. You know, people get very they don't like change, but it definitely influences deer and and in a good way. And I've gone over the years of being um probably less conservative to being I mean more conservative, being less conservative in terms of, okay, we want to influence dear nutrition at the highest scale. You gotta cut some timber, you gotta get you gotta get something down there. You gotta get deer eating stuff that grows in the ground. Because I mean, let's be honest, Mark, you know, most people that are doing things like putting feed out plots or you know, supplemental stuff, you're only treating a percent to a couple percent of your property, right, I mean, and even in agg dominated landscapes. That agriculture is there during the summer, but it's not once this stuff is harvested. So you're talking about the limiting resource for deer, particularly during the breeding season and when they're at their lowest point nutritionally in the winter, when there's nothing green and growing is relegated to forests. So why not give them the best benefit by cutting that stuff in a way that gives them food and cover where they want to be. Um, you know, all those folks out there that are interested in growing deer or managing deer for health and having them weeks of potential per age class you do that through forest You you can get some marginal gains by doing all the other things mentioned. They certainly help, but that doesn't care. Do what carries you with Where do you look? Deer live and a lot of that is in forests. And and it's is it fair to say that that forest management it really benefits so many other species to not just white tails. Right, if you're if you're trying to think about the holistic I felt, the whole ecology of your property and all the animals that are out there. Forestry management is a really important way to do that right, absolutely, it's the foundation. Tom Tim tell them about, you know, Young Forest initiative, how many species are influenced by that? Well sure, uh, of course you know. Q D m A is on board with the Young Forest Initiative because of the benefits that it offers to to deer. But white tails are not the number one species that are targeted by the overall initiative. There are other species like New England cotton tale, which it's it's range has seriously decreased because of a lot of forests growing older and not having that young forest on the on the landscape of the same as true with the American woodcock is another focal species for the Young Forest initiative. Golden winged warbler is another focal species, and they need young forest cover near the ground, uh you know, forbes and shrubs and sapling springing up where they've got some scattered over story trees as perch trees to do their singing display. Of course, rough grouse. There used to be a lot more rough grouse in New York than there are today. Um so yeah, I mean there's a very long list of of of songbirds and game birds and uh, you know, of course rabbits that uh that UM can can benefit greatly from having some of those earlier stages of forest development. You know something I was talking to someone recently about doing some forest management, and they were talking about how in the head of forest or come in they would they like to have all the tree tops cleared out and taken with them. And I was thinking to myself, why why would you want that? Like, wouldn't you want the tree tops left in some instances because because of just like those types of things like having cover valve for rabbits and other species, and you know, some some betting that deer might like to Is there anything to be said about that too? People, you really like to get rid of the tree tops? Do you leave them? Is that something that you would ever think about when making plans like this? When when the tree tops come out as part of the logging operation, it's often a whole tree shipping operation where that's just more efficient and it's all usable. So so there, that's what they're doing. Uh. In many of the cuts that we see here, and of course a lot of our forests are northern hardwoods, those tops are left behind initially as some of the larger saw logs and larger firewood is pulled out, those are left behind. Um. And sometimes that's put in the timber sail contract that the landowner retains those for the simple reason that it creates less erosion and less scarring of residual trees compared to dragging those those crowns out. Um. But what you're describing where people want to see the tops gone or commonly also included in contracts, the tops are lopped down. Sometimes the contract will say that the logger needs to go with the chainsaw and lopped the tops down so that they're below you know, six ft below four feet. Sometimes contracts will call for them to be down to eighteen inch. Is that's really a matter of aesthetics, so that the landowner when they walk through their their forest, when you're done, i mean logging forestry, when done right, it doesn't look pretty immediately after it happens. And so that's one way that people live have uh, you know, basically made it look like a prettier timber sale afterwards. But uh, you know, absolutely leaving some of those tops both in place and leaving them up you know, maybe not where they're they're way up in the sky, but that they're you know, six eight, even ten feet high, that's gonna offer side cover, that's gonna offer cover to small mammals like you alluded to, and uh, in many cases can be significant in protecting some of the regeneration coming in in cases that we want dear to be able to benefit from some of that, but also want to be able to protect some of it so that it becomes part of that next stage class We're you gonna add anything then? Now what he said? Uh, so, speaking of um, just the the that X a little bit of it and how it is in some of these cases if you're doing a more of an even stand management practice where you're coming in and doing something pretty dramatic. Um, is there anything that we should know about the timing of something like this? So that might be different maybe than your general forster might come and say, Hey, we're just gonna do this as soon as we can get to it. But if I'm a deer hunter and I'm trying to manage this for the best possible hunting habitat that coming season, would it be best to do this kind of thing like in the winter right now, or when's the best time to maximize the reproduction of new growth and all these other things. But that would depend on on a lot for for reasons other than just hunting. I mean, for one, as far as hunting goes. You know, it occurs to me how many times I've gone on a recently completed or even active logging job and seeing how many deer have come just to just to chew some of the buds off of the tree tops that are laying there. So there can be that impact. Uh, certain species that we're working with have a tendency to sprout from the stumps or the roots system, and oftentimes we get a better sprouting or compassing response when we cut during the winter, and that might be desirable. Um. And then on the opposite side, if we're dealing with some species where we expect them to sprout and we don't want them to sprout, and that can be a problem, it might be more beneficial to cut them during the summertime, and more beneficial still to cut them during the summertime so that we can apply herbicide to them. Apart from that, you know, you think at the time of year, depending on some sites that might be weather, you might require that the trails are frozen or dry during the heat of summer. UM. And then there are other things, like you think about the time of year that uh, you know, trees have seeds on them, you know, are you cutting them just before they're gonna put seeds out for the season, or are they hanging onto viable seeds that haven't fallen yet. And now when you drop the tree, the seeds fall right where that crown is, so that's where your seedlings are coming up and being protected. So yeah, Unfortunately, again it kind of comes to a depends answer because it has to do with which tree species you're trying to regenerate or not regenerate, what the site conditions are. UM. In New York, some people are faced with time of year cutting restrictions because of an effort to protect endangered bats that roost in those trees during the summertime and then go into caves during the wintertime. So there are certainly a whole lot of factors that that can play into the timing of a regeneration cut. Yeah, And one thing to add to that, I mean, I would say from the deer hunter's perspective, although that's that's all true, I would I would less care about the timing and make sure that it's the right time. Um for all the environmental reasons. You know, a lot of it is whether dependent and you know, accessibility. Sometimes it's scheduling based on one that crew can get there if the forest here you're working with is you know, using specific crews to douce uh. You know, there's all kinds of different blocking operations out there, from small opera raiders to to you know, machinery that's very big that takes up a lot of space and it's fully mechanized. So whatever scale the property is and whatever operator would be the most efficient for you to you know, get it done with quickly. Um. They all lend itself to two different things, but a lot of it is gonna end up probably especially on one of those larger operations. Mark the market, you know, in terms of when that wood is valuable. Sometimes it's very specific to a time of year based on the bed where I've seen like cruise move in and it's not necessarily a short notice, but just say, hey, prices are really good on oak now, for example, we want to cut that now because it might not be in six months. So, um, if the ground can hold it, and and and handle it. Environmentally wise, there's a lot of good best management practices out there or state agent, state forestry agency, and environment protection agencies will make sure that they're not happening at that time of the year that there's you know, erosion is at the at the east to minimize as much as possible, um, and you're not really you know, ruts are not happening. A lot of that those d MPs are followed. UM. You know, financial driven decisions are usually what comes into play. And I would say for the deer hunter, let those things make those decisions, because as we all know, seasons come and go and deer react to it. Although it might not be ideal for three months or six month perry for your deer hunting, Um, it will make it better in the big picture. And if that's when that cruise available, I would I would let it, let it happen, even though it might be it would be a little bit of a punch, and of good it's something's happening right when you're about to hunt. The hunting will get better. And I do listen to your podcast, Mark, and I know that Dan uh your co host, had talked about that not that long ago, but I've also heard him recently say that things are are pretty good right now. And if the DAN from a couple of years ago could talk to the Dan today, I would imagine he'd be like, yeah, right, things are things are pretty hot because that's where the gear are. Yeah. I think that's a perfect example. He was really stressed out about it that one year, but now it's been a few years and things are looking really good. So that's that is a perfect illustration of that concept. His stressed level sounds like it came down quite a bit. It might be rising for other reasons, but but at least for that one thing, it's down. So one back back a little bit too um some of the d I Y options. I feel like when we start to get into, at least when deer hunters start talking about managing timber and cover, one of the first things people usually jumped to is hinge cutting, because it seems like the easiest thing that you as an individual can do without knowing a whole lot, without like feeling comfortable falling great big trees, without hiring someone. That just seems to be like the most accessible way to manage some degree of timber because you go out through the chainsaw and cut downs or hinge cut some small trees and you can you can manage to a degree. So a lot of people seem to do it. It's very popular. People are always talking about all these different tegic ways to hinge cut. And you hear some people talk about the properties. You go look at some properties and these things are hinge cut all over the place, like tons and tons and tons of hinge cutting. From your guys perspective, from a forestry perspective, um, do you see any downside to the popularity of hinge cutting or do you see anything that's being done or or promoted or recommended to folks as far as hinge cutting that actually from a Forrester's perspective perspective that hey, we're actually missing the boat on some of this stuff. Any like mistakes that pop out to you, guys, that's a great question. I figured we get into hinge cutting a little bit and I'll I'll try to cover as many bases as possible. Um. So Kim has mentioned the kind of intermediate you know, when the forest is not quite mature enough to get something out of it in terms of value for the wood, When trees are are smaller size, you know, midsize UM. There's a lot of things you can do to influence that, and there's a lot of different TI. That's the timber stand improvement t s I. What people say t s I is basically removing trees that are I don't use the word runs, but the trees that are not either the species is not what you want there, or they're competing with trees that you do want there. But it's the removal or killing of trees that you don't want and leaving of the ones that you do want. That can be done a number of different ways. You can do that through cutting the tree down completely and removing it UM if you can get fireword out of it, if there's a product there, cutting it down and leaving it on the fourth floor. You can girdle it, you can hack and square. Yes, you can hinge cut it. With the goal there is to influence competition, so leaving your favorite species and and UH taking away the ones that are undesirable and influencing structure UM and sunlight so basically getting more in the sunlight in there. So hinge cutting is one of those techniques UM that can be used. UM. I think a lot of under the untrained I. UM, what a lot of folks are doing is they're just removing trees that they don't want there or just want to cover aspect without thinking about the food side of it. And Tim mentioned earlier, UM, you know, if you kill a tree, if you spray it with some chemical and the tree is dead from the root down, you're not going to get the sprouting effect. And if it's a tree that deer want to eat the sprouts of UM, it might be counterintuitive. So you can hinge a tree that is an undesirable food and if that tree sprouts, all you're doing is providing, yes, and cover, but a lot of food at the ground level of something dear don't really want to eat. So there's that side of it. UM. A couple of years ago, one of our colleague colleagues wrote and really good articles on our website about UM kind of clues that you might be hinge cutting too much. And UH he had talked about species and that that's kind of one of those examples of not knowing the species of the trees you're cutting and what's going to happen there. And there's a handful of other ones, UH listed I would wreck men. You go look for that. If you're interested in hinge cutting, find that article on their safety is certainly another one. Um Safely cutting a tree down, UM, it comes with risk. The larger the diameter of the tree. UM, you're certainly uh better off at felling that tree down through a technique that will drop the tree directional felling where the tree goes in a very predictable way. We kind of have a general rule of thumb that q D M A. I mean, it's not like a policy or anything, but we recommend to folks that if you can influence the direction of that tree with the power of your hand or one of those tools to basically push it um. You know, so about the size of your thigh or smaller um, you could hinge it. But if it's getting larger than that, where no matter how hard you push with you in your hand on that tree, once it's been hinged or caught, that tree is going wherever it wants to, you know, the risk goes up exponentially. So safety is certainly another thing I think of on the cutting kind of wagon that a lot of people are jumping on. And then from a forestry perspective, one thing I'll finish with and then jip tim feel free to jump in is um. You know. One of the things that it does is yes, it creates a lot of that side cover, similar to leaving tops in the woods. Right, you get all of this structure out there, um where you're going to bed underneath, and people try to influence exactly where dear bed by doing hinge cuts and uh. It certainly has a value to it. But from a forestry perspective, you're creating if you do a lot of that an example of where um example, but you're creating a situation where it's going to be really hard to come back in in seven to ten years and remove some other trees. So if it's part of a forestry operation, uh, where you hope to continually come in and do un even age management for example, UM, you're pretty much creating a very difficult situation where a logger can't get around there anymore. Um, they can't move the machinery without clearing some of it, you know, out of the way, and it's just going to take a lot of time and it's gonna cost more for you to do it. And if you do things like prescribed fire or other land management techniques. It's becoming more and more difficult now. I know a lot of folks that do a lot of hinge cutting have smaller properties and they say, listen, I can never get a forester in here or a logging crew because I only own ten or twenty acres. And there's truth to that. UM. But if you're part of a co op and you're working with your landowners we talked about earlier, you can thwart some of that and actually get the economy of scale to a point where you can have somebody come in. UM. I prefer to treat remove trees completely, UM, either removing them using that product or doing some safe techniques where directional selling, hinging of not hinging, uh birling and spraying in the interior of forests. So any place that is in where I want to manage a forest through civil culture with you know, the operation and that we talked earlier, even or on even age management, I am not hinge cutting. I think it has its best place. And that article talks about this to a degree on our website on the edges of habitat and Kim talked about edge feathering. UM. You know, so where you're basically working on the edges of what is open in that wall of forest where you're trying to get as soft as edge as opposed to a hard edge. Hinge cutting has certainly a place there. A lot of times the timber on the edge of a field is not going to be your highest quality because those trees will be more limit um there. They will have more limbs on the bowl of the tree in the mid stem, in the mid story because they are trying to reach out into the field, so they have a limb there, and because of that, their timber value is not that great. And what a great way to influence dear betting than you know, fifty to a hundred yards or maybe not quite a hundred yards, but just off the field ed you want dear betting there. So that's why hinge cutting is Unfore why not place it on your field edges where there's some open space and you're trying to do some of the edge feathering. If I was a move to the interior of the forest for all of those other reasons, I would want to do straight up silver culture manage at a scale with where I can actually influence nutrition at a maximum way get dear bedding under you know, even age management, dear dear travel patterns through uneven aged management, and just be able to go in there and continually treat it with a crew, you know, have them come in and do large scale stuff. That's where it makes the most sense to me. I'd like to kind of jump off what Matt said. They're about doing it near the edge and and say, I've seen a few places where hinge cuts have essentially died rather rapidly. You know, when you go out into the interior of the forest and you're doing these hinge cuts, particularly where maybe no real thingning is taking place in the trees that you're hinge cutting. Are you know, maybe in the lower can a bee because they're the smaller trees that you want to hinge cut, and uh, you know, you get that initial sprouting response which is kind of a distress response, but there's now not enough sunlight for that tree now that it's on the floor to actually continue to grow and grow new sprouts. Um, So you definitely want to consider that and maybe you know, have a reasonable expectation when you're in the dark forest compared to in an area or on the edge of an area that's being clear cut or the edge of an existing field where the tree can sprout and now those sprouts grow leads and get sunlight and continue to grow despite being horizontal. Uh. And I would also point out, you know, with the hinge cutting um, there are a number of different ways that hinge cutting itself has been used to you know, create betting areas, just to provide some some brows when when deer needed, or to actually create a a bottle bottleneck to influence deer movement across the landscape. So, just like some of these other practices, certainly consider before you go around and start cutting trees, hinge cutting them or cutting them down, what is your ultimate goal in doing this work. And in the case of hinge cutting, you know, do consider if I'm gonna hinge cut, is this going to be any different or how would this be different compared to if I just severed the tree, you know, from the stump and allow those sprouts to come in. It's like any other tool on a toolbox. It has it has certainly a very high value and purpose just needs to be applied in the right place. You know, you're you're you gotta grab a hammer to hammer nail, not not a crescent wrench, you know, so you gotta just figure out where it has the best place. Now, there's a lot of folks out there with small properties that don't work with their neighbors, and they've hinge cut, you know, their entire ten acres in some way, shape or form. And I can guarantee a mark that they are going to be met at betting in there. I mean, I certainly would say that is going to have that influence that they're hoping for. Um. But I mean, I wouldn't put it under the word sad, but it certainly it's caught on and a lot of people have been doing it, and I just say, think about where the best play to use it so that you get the maximum benefit and uh and you're also not risking your life, you know. And sometimes some places, um, it can be very risky to hinge some of those bigger trees, and folks are hinging them, and it makes me grim us a little bit that their safeties um at risk, you know, And I don't I don't like seeing that. I'd rather than be safely at home and have somebody in there with a feller buncher that's going in and caught those trees down. You're gonna get to some light in there, and the trees are gonna respond and they're gonna betting that that happens too. Yeah. Well, you just kind of blew my mind there, Matt, because all these years I've been using crescent wrenches trying to get my nails and then never worked too well. And so now no, no I'm not so handy. In all seriousness, You're welcome seriousness, UM. This is this has been really interesting, really helpful for people. I think, I think for anyone out there who hunts deer, cares about deer and wildlife, and while habitat, there's there's some pretty interesting things in this conversation. I think understanding habitat, understanding habitat UM improvement and management and force try being one of those ways of doing that. It just helps with a holistic understanding of this creature and how we interact with it. So so thank you guys for sharing such in depth, UM insight and know all of this. But I gotta believe there's a whole lot of stuff we have not covered. Still there there's a lot more to it, um. If people want to learn more about this or if they want to learn more about the Young Forced Initiative or anything that we've kind of discussed. Becauld, you guys point out a few places that folks can go to dive into this these topics further. Matt, maybe you want to kick it off. Sure, well, if you if you're not a member of k m A and you've never been on our website either way, just our websites q m A dot com. So I would say there's a lot of stuff there. There's a little search window that you can type in habitat Management. There's a whole um menu option of habitat Management. You can look to all of our articles there. Um certainly if you want, remember, we'd love to have you. You belong with us if you're if you're a deer hunters, would join. It's good to be part of a conservation organization that fights for you know what, one of your passions. If you're a deer hunter, we'd love to have you as part of our family. And uh, it's not that expensive, and you get a great magazine, some great authors out there that are written like Mark Um. And then one final thing I'll say, um is that we have a series of different classes and training. Some of them are online, some of them you can attend in person. We dive pretty deeply into the habitat management realm in all of those and certainly we I mean we've been talking a while now, um today this is all forestry. There's all other kinds of habitat management you can do as well, you know, including food plots. A lot of people go to managing you know, putting in food plots, um. But one of the big things is just managing early successions. So not even forestry or young for us, but basically that first flush of forbes and and young growth if you disturb an area and walk away idea really really need that and that's been kind of uh an eye opening things for a lot of folks. So we cover all of that in those classes that's under the conserve menu class we do called Dear Steward. We actually have a couple of in person classes this year. One in South Carolina in June, um one in Ohio in uh September. So you know, check that stuff out unlisted on that Let's say, if you're interested in attending some of the stuff, you can reach out to me perfect anything you would add, Tim sure for anybody interested in learning more about the Young Forest Initiative check out young forest dot org, which is run by Wildlife Management Institute. And as far as getting general forestry information, I would say reach out to your state agency or cooperative extension locally, because forestry is something of a regional practice where you know, if you transplanted me a thousand miles away, I probably would not be able to offer sound advice the way your local foresters could. All right, good, good advice, And thank you for mentioned those additional places we can check out, and um, you both have left me with a lot to think about. We're trying to implement some of this stuff on our Northern Michigan deer camp. We've actually been I've been looking into trying to find a forrester myself and hopefully can step some meetings here in the next couple of weeks and look at some things that we can do related to all these topics, um to to improve the wildlife habitat for our little neck of the woods. And this certainly helped me kind of steer the direction I need to go. So thank you Matt, thank you Tim, and uh this has been great. Thanks for having a smart for having it's always it's always a pleasure to have to have you on the show, Matt and Tim. Hopefully you can come again, all right, and that's gonna do it for us today. So thank you for tuning in. Hopefully you found this one interesting. I certainly learned a lot from this because it's a topic that you know, it's relatively new for me, so I definitely came out of this conversation with some important lessons to learn. Now, I want to leave you with a couple remind enders. One, if you haven't yet left a rating or review on iTunes for this podcast. You know, I've been you know, preaching this for years now, but I'm still gonna keep mentioning because it really does help and I really do appreciate it. So thank you in advance if you're able to go in there and share some feedback. Also, I'm putting a lot of my content now in two places. The Mediator dot com is where all my new articles are. That's where the articles that include the new podcasts are as well, so make sure you're following what's going on over at the meat Eater dot com. And then secondly, the wire Hunt Instagram account has more than it ever has before. I'm doing almost daily stories documenting all sorts of things going on in my white tail life UM, as well as different recommended books, UM, different breakdowns of properties. You can find that all at Wired to Hunt on Instagram and other than that, I just want to uh wish you all luck in the woods, if you're shed hunting, if you're out there scouting or hanging stands or working on some habitat, I hope you're having fun with that too, And as always, thank you for listening, and until next time, stay wired, don't h

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