PROLONGING THE SUPPLY. 19 



CONSERVATIVE METHODS IN THE WOODS. 



Redwood lumbering has done much to keep the annual supply of 

 tanbark steady and to make remote stands accessible. It is the 

 practice of the redwood lumber companies to send tanbark crews 

 through the woods in advance of the redwood logging crews, since the 

 firing of the district, which always follows felling, to facilitate the get- 

 ting out of the redwood logs by wire cable and donkey engine, badly 

 injures all standing trees, and even if it does not actually destroy the 

 tanbark oak it makes peeling .difficult or impossible. 



GUARDING AGAINST FIRE. 



Up to the present time no attention has been paid to the future 

 condition of the forestf in which peeling has been carried on. Yet the 

 introduction of conservative methods would prevent a very large 

 waste. Fire, which always accompanies redwood logging, makes it 

 an economical policy to take all the bark possible, whether the .tree 

 has reached maturity or not. Under conservative methods " jay- 

 Hawked" trees, which yield only from 10 to 60 pounds of bark with 

 a low tannin content, would in 10 or 20 years form profitable elements 

 in the new stand for both bark and wood. Despite the custom of 

 taking all the bark that can be peeled without regard to whether it 

 is mature or not, the maximum yield is never obtained under present 

 methods. Some trees which will not for one reason or another peel 

 readily in one season, although they would a year or two later, are 

 sacrificed in order to chip a little bark off their trunks or to secure one 

 or more coils because the trees are considered as doomed to fire any- 

 way. Often from 70 to 90 per cent of the bark in such cases can not 

 be taken from the tree. Moreover, the fires kill very young trees, kill 

 sprouts down to the stumps, and seriously interfere with reproduction. 

 Under conservative management the older trees would be saved for 

 peeling in a favorable year and the younger ones permitted to develop 

 a new stand. As tanbark oak always grows in mixed stands, the 

 holding of redwood and Douglas fir lands for a second crop would 

 give the tanbark oak the necessary fire protection and would furnish 

 a profitable element in the later harvests. 



During the rainless season in California, from May to October, even 

 in the foggy coast region, fires caused by logging crews, hunters, 

 campers, and in the far north coast ranges by thunderstorms, lead to 

 several million dollars damage every year. These fires rarely kill tan- 

 bark oak trees, but make long vertical wounds from 4 to 10 feet up 

 the sides of the trunks. On young trees these injuries are often com- 

 pletely covered by the meeting of new bark growth, but with trees 

 more than 100 years old the sides of the' wound usually spread. The 

 exposed wood rots, andsucli trees, called " goose pens," are difficult 



