Ep. 899: Adopting a Land Steward Mindset with Ethan Tapper

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
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

(00:40):
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

(01:00):
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,

(01:21):
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

(01:44):
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

(02:06):
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

(02:27):
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

(02:49):
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.

(03:11):
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

(03:31):
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

(03:56):
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

(04:18):
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.

(04:46):
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.

(05:09):
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

(05:29):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
Thanks so much.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
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,

(05:58):
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,

(06:21):
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?

Speaker 4 (06:44):
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

(07:06):
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

(07:27):
and we're doing things like controlling non native invasive plants
and cutting trees, doing what we call logging, right, and.

Speaker 3 (07:34):
Also so much more.

Speaker 4 (07:35):
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

(07:58):
there creating habitat, cutting trees, that's just one component of
this of this bigger thing that's really what we want
to do.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
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

(08:26):
to do this. What did that look like for you personally?

Speaker 3 (08:29):
I really got into it, you know.

Speaker 4 (08:31):
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

(08:53):
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

(09:14):
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

(09:35):
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

(09:58):
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.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
The relationship didn't work out.

Speaker 4 (10:09):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:25):
And.

Speaker 4 (10:27):
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

(10:49):
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,

(11:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (11:22):
And so that's sort of how I got into forestry
in the first place.

Speaker 4 (11:25):
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

(11:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
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

(12:22):
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

(12:43):
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

(13:03):
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?

Speaker 4 (13:17):
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.

(13:39):
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

(14:04):
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

(14:27):
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

(14:50):
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,

(15:12):
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

(15:32):
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

(15:54):
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

(16:15):
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.

(16:37):
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

(16:59):
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

(17:21):
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

(17:42):
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

(18:03):
which are also part of the forest.

Speaker 2 (18:07):
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

(18:27):
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

(18:49):
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?

Speaker 4 (19:00):
I think, you know a lot of times I'll say
something right like everything's connected, which sounds like this like
woo wooee.

Speaker 3 (19:08):
Thing, and that's sort of how I used to think
about it.

Speaker 4 (19:11):
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

(19:33):
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

(19:56):
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

(20:17):
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

(20:40):
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

(21:01):
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.

Speaker 3 (21:20):
That we might do to care for the species.

Speaker 4 (21:23):
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

(21:44):
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.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
It becomes a little bit more complex when we look
at it a little bit more closely.

Speaker 4 (22:00):
You start to see how you kind of have to
make these compromises to do all the stuff we want
to do at once.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
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

(22:26):
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.

(22:50):
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?

Speaker 4 (22:58):
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

(23:20):
and ages of trees, lots of different structural conditions of trees.

Speaker 3 (23:23):
So we might have.

Speaker 4 (23:23):
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

(23:48):
that does is basically allow us to provide the most
habitat that we possibly.

Speaker 3 (23:54):
Can in a given area. So, like an example that.

Speaker 4 (23:56):
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

(24:18):
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,

(24:43):
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.

(25:04):
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.

Speaker 3 (25:18):
We let the forest regenerate.

Speaker 4 (25:20):
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

(25:41):
increase the volume.

Speaker 3 (25:42):
Of habitat that's there.

Speaker 4 (25:44):
You still have all the habitat associated with, you know,
for all those those species that like that upper closed
canopy forest and those.

Speaker 3 (25:53):
Tall trees, but you also just like have so much more.

Speaker 4 (25:56):
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

(26:17):
and there's really nothing in the understore.

Speaker 3 (26:19):
You can just look right through and you can see
a long ways.

Speaker 4 (26:21):
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

(26:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
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,

(27:34):
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.

Speaker 3 (27:52):
I was gonna say, yeah, it does.

Speaker 4 (27:53):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:09):
As a shade.

Speaker 2 (28:11):
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,

(28:34):
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,

(28:58):
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,

(29:18):
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

(29:39):
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

(30:00):
all issue that I'm laying out.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
Yeah, I mean, I think so. One of the things that.

Speaker 4 (30:07):
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.

Speaker 3 (30:16):
You know, accept.

Speaker 4 (30:17):
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

(30:38):
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,

(30:59):
and it's important for variet of different reasons. It's important,
I believe for cultural reasons, and it's you know.

Speaker 3 (31:05):
It's cool to have these areas. And certainly I would
say if we.

Speaker 4 (31:08):
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.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
There's just not enough of it left. It's precious. However,
you know a lot of the stuff.

Speaker 4 (31:22):
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

(31:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
So guilty of it.

Speaker 4 (32:02):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:14):
The way that we care about.

Speaker 4 (32:15):
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

(32:36):
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

(32:58):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
You know.

Speaker 4 (33:07):
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

(33:29):
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.

Speaker 3 (33:52):
Right now.

Speaker 4 (33:52):
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

(34:13):
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,

(34:34):
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.

(34:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (35:08):
All they want to do is just answer that question. Yeah,
but it's complex.

Speaker 2 (35:13):
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

(35:35):
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.

Speaker 4 (35:54):
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,

(36:16):
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

(36:37):
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

(36:59):
along this path way and.

Speaker 3 (37:00):
Eventually become an old growth forest.

Speaker 4 (37:03):
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,

(37:24):
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.

(37:47):
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

(38:11):
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

(38:31):
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

(38:53):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:10):
So that could be another thing to look for.

Speaker 4 (39:12):
But you know, you can have all the big trees
you want if you've got Japanese barber in the understory.

Speaker 3 (39:17):
It's not going to amount to anything in the long term.

Speaker 2 (39:20):
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

(39:45):
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

(40:05):
that natural old growth diversity.

Speaker 4 (40:08):
Right, yes, yeah, and I think you know there's a
there's a bunch of stuff there.

Speaker 3 (40:16):
I think that.

Speaker 1 (40:17):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (40:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (40:32):
So you know, when we look.

Speaker 4 (40:35):
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

(40:58):
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

(41:20):
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,

(41:41):
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

(42:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
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

(42:36):
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

(42:59):
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

(43:21):
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

(43:41):
overpopulation of deer due to a forest and what's the
ripple effects of that on the ecosystem.

Speaker 4 (43:49):
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,

(44:12):
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

(44:33):
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

(44:53):
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

(45:15):
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,

(45:35):
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.

Speaker 3 (45:57):
So that'll be species like beach.

Speaker 4 (45:59):
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

(46:22):
providing to all the other things that live there and
to us as well, right as we also get things
from the forest.

Speaker 3 (46:29):
So they're making it.

Speaker 4 (46:30):
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.

(46:54):
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

(47:15):
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.

Speaker 3 (47:34):
Again, you can see right through it. But where are
the future.

Speaker 4 (47:38):
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

(47:59):
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

(48:19):
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,

(48:40):
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

(49:01):
per square mile, you know this thing, it's not just
like it's going to magically correct itself.

Speaker 3 (49:06):
I don't know when it would.

Speaker 4 (49:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (49:40):
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

(50:00):
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,

(50:23):
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,

(50:47):
and too many deeri is not a good thing.

Speaker 4 (50:48):
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

(51:12):
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

(51:35):
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

(51:58):
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.

Speaker 2 (52:14):
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?

Speaker 4 (52:23):
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

(52:44):
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,

(53:05):
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

(53:27):
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

(53:48):
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

(54:10):
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

(54:31):
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

(54:52):
we can harvest while solving all these problems, and that
we made it legal for it to be sold in
supermarkets and restaurants.

Speaker 3 (54:59):
That's a lot of food.

Speaker 4 (55:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:11):
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

(55:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (55:41):
I think what we need.

Speaker 4 (55:42):
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

(56:05):
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.

Speaker 3 (56:13):
And I know that.

Speaker 4 (56:13):
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,

(56:35):
no matter who they are or how they're coming at it.

Speaker 2 (56:38):
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

(57:02):
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

(57:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (57:43):
You know, And it's for me.

Speaker 4 (57:46):
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.

Speaker 3 (58:03):
And it was my.

Speaker 4 (58:04):
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.

Speaker 3 (58:23):
I don't think it's just gonna happen.

Speaker 4 (58:25):
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

(58:46):
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.

Speaker 3 (58:56):
Kill and kill some deer.

Speaker 2 (58:58):
No better.

Speaker 4 (58:59):
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

(59:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (59:34):
And I'm like, well, what are you going to do
about it?

Speaker 1 (59:37):
You know?

Speaker 2 (59:38):
Great, it goes the other way too.

Speaker 4 (59:40):
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

(01:00:01):
you've got your binoculars on it, it's like you got
your shot.

Speaker 3 (01:00:04):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
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.

(01:00:26):
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

(01:00:49):
opening and really neat to just start seeing these different
layers out there on the right.

Speaker 4 (01:00:55):
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

(01:01:15):
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

(01:01:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:01:44):
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

(01:02:04):
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.

(01:02:27):
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?

Speaker 4 (01:02:45):
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

(01:03:06):
was a cut there, and I'm like.

Speaker 3 (01:03:07):
What does this mean? You know where birds are?

Speaker 4 (01:03:11):
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

(01:03:32):
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

(01:03:53):
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,

(01:04:14):
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

(01:04:36):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:04:42):
Crop tree, and you cut them.

Speaker 4 (01:04:44):
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,

(01:05:06):
whether we're just working with a chainsaw or pulling out
our firewood for the year or whatever, the most impactful.

Speaker 3 (01:05:11):
And that's how you do it.

Speaker 4 (01:05:13):
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

(01:05:33):
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

(01:05:55):
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

(01:06:17):
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,

(01:06:38):
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

(01:07:00):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:07:17):
So with that it's a little bit trickier.

Speaker 4 (01:07:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:07:30):
See if you could have of the forests that are there.

Speaker 4 (01:07:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:07:50):
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,

(01:08:14):
and the willingness to uh to sweat a little bit,
you can make a big difference out there.

Speaker 4 (01:08:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:08:34):
You got other stuff to do.

Speaker 4 (01:08:36):
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

(01:08:57):
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

(01:09:17):
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,

(01:09:39):
that provide really amazing habitats and conditions for wildlife and
that really make forest healthier.

Speaker 2 (01:09:45):
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

(01:10:06):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:10:25):
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

(01:10:48):
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

(01:11:10):
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

(01:11:31):
your portrait.

Speaker 3 (01:11:32):
A hundred of them would do it in a hundred
different ways. And so what you should do.

Speaker 4 (01:11:36):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:11:48):
Best way possible.

Speaker 2 (01:11:50):
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

(01:12:10):
us real quick?

Speaker 3 (01:12:11):
Sure?

Speaker 4 (01:12:11):
So I'm on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok.

Speaker 3 (01:12:18):
At how to Love a Forest, just like the title
of the book.

Speaker 4 (01:12:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:12:41):
Book come out.

Speaker 4 (01:12:42):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:13:02):
Cool idea of end of life.

Speaker 4 (01:13:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:13:16):
To do to help make forests healthier.

Speaker 2 (01:13:18):
That's perfect.

Speaker 4 (01:13:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:13:32):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:13:50):
Thanks so much, Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:13:54):
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

(01:14:16):
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

(01:14:39):
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.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 899: Adopting a Land Steward Mindset with Ethan Tapper