Logging Longleaf Pine. 387 



ing from two 16- foot logs up to five or six logs on the same area. 

 The trees are distributed very unevenly, growing sometimes in 

 dense clumps, then scattered or singly with wide blanks. 



It is evident that under natural conditions, even in the presence 

 of repeated fires, the longleaf pine forest renews itself, young trees 

 coming in on areas left blank by the death of old timber. Seed 

 is constantly supplied from the surrounding trees and seedlings 

 finally survive the fires and form groups of saplings and poles. 



But along with this restocking are at work the processes of 

 decay and destruction. Red rot, which attacks trees that have 

 dead stubs of branches to give the spores a chance to enter the 

 wood, is constantly weakening old trees and will attack smaller 

 timber, especially the stunted weakened trees. In time such 

 timber dies or blows over. Fire, if it once succeeds in burning 

 through the bark at the base, will continue to eat into a tree in 

 successive years until it brings it down. These two factors re- 

 duce the number of trees to the acre and others, in competition 

 with stronger trees close by, cease to grow and finally die. 



All trees in a stand do not grow equally fast, nor continue to 

 grow at the same rate. In longleaf pine this is especially no- 

 ticeable. Only the largest trees, with the biggest crowns, con- 

 tinue to grow at a rapid rate after a stand has reached merchant- 

 able size. The older a tree becomes, the slower it grows, as a 

 rule. 



The falling off of growth in old or crowded stands is one of 

 the main reasons for advocating a selection of trees in the first 

 cut, rather than a diameter limit. After a longleaf pine stand 

 reaches the age of about 120 years the loss from rot, fire and 

 suppressed growth increases so fast that the net gain in growth 

 on the stand would not pay the taxes. The following figures are 

 taken with some care and may be accepted as representing the 

 yield on average longleaf soils for old stands. 



These are actual yields from average stands, with the area 

 occupied by timber below 14 inches excluded. It was found 

 that the number of trees to the acre diminished constantly as the 

 stands grew older, till at 300 years ten trees per acre was a full 

 stand, while at 100 years sixty trees per acre was the average. 

 This slow destruction of timber which, as the table shows, offsets 

 growth, is due chiefly to the inability of the soil to support so 

 many trees of large size. Rot and fire are merely the agencies 



