They produce gun stocks, flooring, cedar shingles, log homes, wooden playsets. They make cigar tips, wooden pack baskets, doors and staircases. Cutting boards and chairs, cabinets and baseball bats, grilling planks canoe paddles. Colorful wooden eggs made by Wells Wood Turning in Buckfield have been featured at the White House Easter Egg roll since 2006,…
There are a lot of threats to Maine forests — fragmentation, poor forestry practices, development, imported and native pests and diseases . . . and invasive plants. Plants like “burning bush,” famous for its red color. Or the distinctive “Crimson King” Norway maple. Or the common privet. Plants that have graced Maine lawns and gardens…
This was the year the West burned. The numbers are mind-boggling: By the end of November alone more than 56,000 wildfires had burned 9.1 million acres in the west. Thousands of homes and other buildings destroyed. Scores killed. Losses in the billions. And the flames roared into December. Huge fires ripped across California, including several…
Tom Shafer’s business is mining trees. It’s not really harvesting; maybe re-harvesting. “Recovering a forgotten forest” is his company motto. He likes to think of it as mining. And Shafer’s not just selling lumber to panel offices, restaurants and your home den or man cave. He’s selling history. He’s selling green. Shafer, a former stock…
Wild sarsaparilla is not a flashy forest dweller. It doesn’t soar overhead, or have showy blossoms. Or produce copious amounts of fruit or nuts that benefit wildlife. Or even envelop large areas of the forest floor. In fact, it is quite a nondescript little plant, though one with a disconcerting, but superficial, resemblance toWild Sarsaparilla poison…
Alan Hutchinson was always thinking. Thinking about ways to approach things differently, to bring people together, to untangle complicated problems. All with an overriding goal: to protect Maine’s North Woods for future generations. Karin Tilberg, his deputy director at the Forest Society of Maine, remembers how they would often work together on a particularly knotty…
The Maine forest industry’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative has helped out on a lot of community projects over the past decade or so. They’ve provided materials to build Habitat for Humanity homes, provided materials for buildings at Pine Tree Camp for people with disabilities, built fish-friendly ice shacks to raise money to improve fish passage on…
Photo courtesy of North Maine WoodsThere is the north Maine woods: the vast expanse of trees and mountains and ponds that makes up a significant portion of the Pine Tree State. Then there is North Maine Woods, the organization that manages recreation on 3.5 million acres of the state owned by a variety of landowners,…
By Joe Rankin A forest, like all living things, is constantly changing. Sometimes the changes are big and abrupt and obvious and sometimes small and gradual and unnoticeable. A few years ago I started an experiment in forest succession. Primary succession, to be precise, on about an acre and a half across the road. For…
The forest — any forest, really — doesn’t just stretch out across the land like a blanket (or a washcloth if it’s a small patch of woodland). It goes up and down as well. But this vertical dimension is something we overlook, even those of us who find forests endlessly fascinating. For instance, we often…
