FORESTRY COMMISSIONER. 43 



place they become very dangerous and prolific in extending fires. 

 The policy should be to remove all jack pine as soon as its place 

 may be taken by more valuable species. It does not produce 

 much saw timber, but the thinnings may be converted into fire- 

 wood and find ready sale when transportation facilities are pro- 

 vided to get it into market. 



The jack pine, however, has some good qualities. It germi- 

 nates readily in any soil, grows fast, produces seed early and 

 freely, and rapidly covers the ground after fires. It is ener- 

 getically invading the swamps and roughly disputing their pos- 

 session with the spruce and tamarack which had long looked 

 upon the wet ground as their exclusive privilege, and has been so 

 successful in the fight that we are warranted in applying the 

 term "Jack pine swamp" to some of these areas. 



These jack pine swamps have a bottom covered with boulders 

 and little or no soil among the stones. Here the water lies and 

 keeps alive the mosses that creep over the rocks, forming with 

 the interlacing roots a heavy mat in which the jack pine and 

 other seeds find lodgment and germination. 



Growing up after the fires, and in mixture with jack pine, 

 aspens, birches, maples, and a few other trees form groves in 

 which the aspen is the most common. But as these trees will in 

 time succumb to the pines we have treated them as a feature only 

 of the jack pine forest. The poplars are short-lived and do not 

 appear to have ever attained much size in this region. Some 

 birch in the Old Forest reaches 12 inches in diameter and might 

 become a valuable timber if encouraged on favorable soil, but I 

 think that it should be entertained here only as an undergrowth 

 of the pine. 



Scattered through the forest, in depressions and along the 

 shores of lakes and streams where the waters do not have free 

 flow, the timber trees are spruce, tamarack and arborvitae 

 (cedar), of which the black spruce is in the lead. These areas are 

 usually small in extent and irregular in outline. They too, like 

 the poplar groves, are, with the exception of a few muskegs, 

 features of the jack pine forest. As we have before mentioned, 

 the jack pine, and also the white pine and other trees are pushing 

 into the swamps, so that with the exception of the very wet 

 ground, the larger portion of the swamp area will become in a 

 few years pine land. The attainment of this result may be 



