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