Field Trip 101

The Forest Society held a workshop in conjunction with UNH Cooperative Extension staff last month entitled “Field Trip 101: You Can Lead a Guided Walk!” This workshop was the result of a brainstorming session between our two organizations surrounding how to connect New Hampshire residents with the conservation lands in their local communities. Many people don’t realize that there are conservation properties open to the public within a short drive of their own home. Giving volunteers the tools and confidence to advertise, plan and implement guided “nature walks” on these lands is a great way to raise local awareness about conservation lands open for recreation and nature study. As people realize how these lands benefit them directly, they will be more likely to support and help fund conservation projects in the future. The 25 participants in the Field Trip 101 workshop agreed to lead their own guided walks within 6 months in exchange for receiving the training. The workshop was a great success as participants left highly energized and in possession of many new tools and techniques. Look for similar workshops from the Forest Society and UNH Cooperative Extension in the future if you’d like to get involved!

Banner Sign Year!

We have been holding land steward workdays to refurbish wooden property and trail signs for the past three summers, and find that it is a really efficient way to ensure that we get a good number of these signs made or restored each year. Picking away at it over the course of the year sounds like a good idea, but in practice other things always seem to be higher on the priority list! As Jason is fond of telling us, it's a fourteen step process to transform a piece of rough-cut pine into a beautifully routed and gleaming property sign. Planing, Sanding, Stenciling, Rasping, Routing, Sanding (again), Staining (twice, or 3 times), Varnishing (twice) and Painting Letters (twice, or 3 times)... whew! This is why it helps to have a big group tackle the signs and do as many as we can at once... and with so many steps, there's a task to fit everyone's talents and interests.

Mike Elmes and Bart Hunter sand the rough-cut pine

Al Cort and John Tear staining

This year's sign workdays were extremely productive. The group ended up completing 41 new or refurbished signs (it takes just as many steps to refurbish a sign as to create one from scratch, believe it or not)...which is nearly double previous years' efforts. Some gorgeous new large property signs were made, but also many smaller signs that will provide direction to hikers on Forest Society reservations across the state. A big congratulations and thank you to all who assisted with the sign workdays this year.

Crew on Day 1 with routed Welch Farm sign. From L to R: Tyler Pelland, Wes Niebling, Seth Benowitz, Hiel Lindquist, Bob Fuller, Jason Teaster, Alan Cort, John Tear

Seth Benowitz inspects some smaller signs

Seth Benowitz, Scott Lavoice, and Jason Morris work on stenciling

Monadnock Trails Week 2011

Alan Cort and Tyler Pelland work on a rock waterbar

Tools. Rock. Timber. Sweat. Another great Monadnock Trails Week has come and gone! This was the 6th annual trails week (my 4th) and I have to say that I think we're getting more and more productive every year. The Dublin Trail, a straight 2.4 mile shot up the north side of Mt. Monadncock, was the recipeint of our efforts for the first three days this year. The drainages from about 1/2 mile to 1.5 miles up all needed cleaning, restoration, and rebuilding. Since suitable large rocks were difficult to find immediately surrounding the trail, we decided to use a significant nubmer of cut and peeled spruce logs for waterbars and check steps. Cutting, peeling, and especially moving these large logs into place required some significant teamwork and was a highlight of the week as a result. We used long slings to swing the logs slowly into position in some cases (check out the video below) and brute manpower to heft and carry the logs in others.

Moving a spruce log (photo: P. Russell)

Chris Garby uses an axe to peel a spruce log

More log transport (photo: R. Ward)

Trish (L) and Jackie (R) Russell show off their work, Dublin Trail

Part of the crew on Day 1, Dublin Trail

There was plenty of rock work as well, for those who like the mental and physical challenge of fitting and setting odd shaped rocks together into steps and drainages. Towards the end of trails week we shifted to the White Arrow Trail, which is accessed from the Old Toll Road parking area. On White Arrow rocks are in great abundance, so we were able to use them to create new stone steps and waterbars. Other tasks for the week included painting and hanging trail markers on sections of the Dublin and White Dot trails, restoring a mountain view at the old Halfway House site, and cleaning 30+ drains on the White Dot Trail. All told, it was just under 500 hours of work put in on the mountain over 5 days, by 36 participants. A very solid effort! Thanks to all who participated and made this year's Trails Week a huge success!

Mike Zlogar, Hiel Lindquist and Mike Williams adjusting a stone step, White Arrow Trail

Tool cache

video by Trish Russell

High Blue Workday

Restored view! (Photo by H. Lindquist)

On June 15th a group of land stewards and Forest Society staff assembled at High Blue Reservation in Walpole for a workday. The tasks at hand were to build a new footbridge and restore a view cut that had grown in over the past 6 years or so. Bud Ross, the land steward for High Blue, has been a steward for over 17 years... since the very first class in 1994. One of his "classmates", Karl Putnam (Brewster Forest steward) was also at the workday, so it was a reunion of sorts... and they were joined by several other stewards including Bart Hunter, Hiel Lindquist, Ruth Ward, Walter Weeks, Alan Cort, and Len Martin. It was a beautiful day to be in the woods, and the work went quickly with so many hands.

Lunch break at the view cut (photo: H. Lindquist)

Bart Hunter and Alan Cort secure bridge stringers

Finished footbridge

Hemlock Woolly Adelgid

Land Steward Bart Hunter, SPNHF Forester Wendy Weisiger, TNC Stewardship Ecologist Joanne Glode and I recently spent the day at the Heald Tract in Wilton with NH DRED Forest Health Specialist Jen Weimer to look at an infestation of Hemlock Woolly Adelgid (HWA) that has recently been identified there. HWA looks like small cottony white balls on the underside of hemlock branches. It's not a fungus, as you might suspect from the look of it, but is actually an insect pest. The woolly balls are the egg sacs of a very small, fluid-feeding insect that sucks sap out of hemlock needles, causing them (and eventually the whole tree) to die. Birds, mammals, and even wind spread the small insects from hemlock to hemlock, increasing the extent of an infestation.

HWA on the underside of hemlock needles

An invasive exotic pest, HWA was first discovered in Pennsylvania in the 1960s. Since then it has been slowly spreading northward , just reaching the NH border in the past few years. In New Hampshire it has been discovered primarily in towns along the southern border with Massachusetts, and forest health experts expect it will continue to spread. It may be that New Hampshire's cold winters will keep the insect in check to some degree, preventing or delaying spread to more northerly areas of the state, but that is only speculation at this point. What we do know is that it's here, and complete eradication of the pest is not a realistic option now. Individual trees (generally specimen street or yard trees) can be "cured" via injection with a systemic pesticide, but it's not feasible to treat all the hemlocks in a forest this way. NH Division Forests & Lands is also experimenting with releasing two types of bio-control beetles which feed on the adelgid-- this is also not expected to eradicate the pest but simply keep it in check enough to hopefully prevent the trees from dying.

Jen Weimer, NH Forest Health Specialist, looks for HWA at Heald Tract

At the Forest Society's Heald Tract in Wilton, the known infestation is limited to one location at the moment. Prognosis is not great, however, as more extensive infestations have also been found on abutting and nearby properties, including the Nature Conservancy's Sheldrick Forest which shares a trail system with Heald. At this time, the Heald infestation is not large enough to justify releasing bio-control beetles, so our plan is to simply monitor the situation. Stewards and volunteers at Heald will be checking for the fluffy white balls on the underside of hemlock branches as they conduct their other land stewardship activities and hopefully, in the meantime, a more effective method of treating the adelgid will be developed.

HWA is fairly easy to identify once you know what you're looking for. If you have hemlocks on the property you monitor for SPNHF, try flipping over the accessible branches to see if you can find any small white cottony masses. Be aware that spittlebugs (a native and non-destructive insect) can create white blobs under hemlock needles too, but these are constructed of hundreds of miniscule bubbles, not "wool". Knowing the extent of the HWA infestation in New Hampshire is critical to Forest & Lands ability to make management decisions and track the spread of this invasive pest. If you do find something that looks like HWA, take a photograph if you have a camera, and be sure to note your location well so that you'll be able to describe it to me or the state Forest Health Specialists. Land Stewards for the Forest Society are in a unique position to assist in monitoring this and other forest pest invasions as we are outside on forested properties across the entire state. Please take a look the next time you pass a hemlock on the trail!

Don't be fooled! This is spittle bug (bubbles), not HWA (wooly)

Monadnock Trails Week!

Please consider joining us for Monadnock Trails Week this year! We had a great turn out from the steward community last year and were able to complete many trail projects including several large bridges. This year we're planning some work on the Dublin and White Arrow Trails, among other projects. Monadnock Trails Week is a great place to learn how to some more technical trail work using rock - waterbar construction, stone steps, etc. It's also a lot of dirty fun! If you're interested in participating for one or more days from Saturday July 9 through Wednesday July 13, just email me at cdeegan@forestsociety.org or call 603-224-9945.

View Clearing and Community Building at Buxton-Simons Forest

The crew, minus Terry Iwin (photo: T.Irwin)

Terry Irwin, land steward for the Buxton-Simons Forest in Weare, has been working to build a community of volunteers around his reservation. He started with a trail restoration and dedication ceremony last summer, to which the donors and many of the neighbors were invited. Since that time, abutting landowners and community members have been in contact, excited about the newly refurbished trail, and wanting to know how they can get involved. A group of them hit the trail for a workday over Memorial Day weekend, with the primary purpose of opening up the panoramic mountain view that exists at the trails' end near the summit of Mount Wallingford. The group included land stewards Terry Irwin and Len Martin (Bockes-Ingersoll Forest) as well as abutting landowners Charlie Bowen, Scott Olson, Ashley Olson, and Alex Olson. Terry led the group in the view clearing project and sent in some photos afterwards... and they are already talking about another workday this fall!

Charlie Bowen cuts a pine (photo: T.Irwin)

Left to Right: Alex, Scott, and Ashley Olson hard at work (photo: T.Irwin)

The view was nice even before the clearing project (photo: C.Deegan)

Terry at the trail dedication last fall (photo: P.Doscher)