In 2014 the Old Newgate Coon Club, near Norfolk in northwestern Connecticut, launched a project to help New England cottontails by clearing 21 forested acres so that dense small trees – a habitat type also known as young forest – would grow back and create the thick cover that New England’s native rabbit needs. The project also involved building three brush piles per acre, hiding sites that cottontails quickly dart into when threatened by foxes or coyotes.
When the East Quabbin Land Trust bought the 90-acre Frohloff Farm, near Ware, the farm hadn't been managed as farmland in many years. Invasive species like glossy buckthorn, multiflora rose, bittersweet and honeysuckle were taking over.
"We're mostly managing forest edges and fields here in the St. Lawrence Valley," says Andrew Hinickle, a biologist for Audubon New York, the state program of the National Audubon Society. Those management efforts create more breeding and feeding habitat for golden-winged warblers, along with dozens of other kinds of wildlife that use the same type of cover as those beleaguered songbirds. "We’re not generally going into the woods and making clearings," Hinickle continues. "It’s more about maintaining and improving on what's already here."
The Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry, in the state's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, manages 2.2 million acres of woodland, 13 percent of all forested lands in the Keystone State. The Bureau brings in around $25 million each year from harvesting timber on approximately 14,000 acres. That income helps fund the Bureau’s operating costs, with 10 percent of those dollars channeled into forest-regeneration projects.
We’ve owned our forest in Starksboro, Vermont, since 2005, and have added to it over the years by purchasing adjacent properties; the entire parcel now totals 290 contiguous acres. We spent the first few years of ownership investing in the property: researching boundary lines and property history, surveying, reclaiming old trails, creating connector trails, and managing water on all trails.
New Addition to State Forest System Features Young Forest
A significant young forest restoration project continues to expand on the 25,000-acre Clermont Tract in northern Pennsylvania’s McKean County. With guidance from the Wildlife Management Institute and funding from the Wildlife For Everyone Endowment Foundation, conservationists planted 12,400 seedlings in 2015, the project's sixth year. The planting is part of an ongoing effort to improve wildlife habitat and to monitor wildlife populations, including the American woodcock and other young forest species.
Foresters and wildlife biologists with Lyme Adirondack Forest Company (an affiliate of The Lyme Timber Company) and the Wildlife Management Institute have sited a young forest habitat demonstration project on part of Lyme’s 239,000-acre ownership in the Adirondacks of upstate New York.
