280 FEATURES OF FRENCH NATIONAL FOREST ADMINISTRATION 



French consider that the best preventive for mice is the encouragement 

 and protection of owls, buzzards, vultures, foxes, and cats. 



Damage from Grazing. The French policy is to exclude goats 

 and sheep from all forests without exception and only to allow other 

 classes of stock, such as cattle and horses, when unavoidable, but never 

 in broadleaf stands, where even logging teams must be muzzled when 

 not at work. As explained in Chapter V (p. 69), hogs are sometimes 

 driven through beech forests to wound the soil and assist regeneration, 

 but this is rare, and hogs are never allowed to graze freely. In the 

 United States the grazing of stock, so generally allowed on National 

 Forests in the West, was an inheritance from the public lands adminis- 

 tration. Admittedly much damage results, but at the present stage of 

 our economic development in the West it is a necessary evil in the 

 extensive conifer stands, but grazing of all kinds should certainly be 

 rigidly excluded from our broadleaf stands if serious damage to young 

 growth is to be avoided. Grazing is tolerated in the United States to 

 a far greater extent than in France, and the damage will become more 

 and more serious as the silvics of our species are studied and systematized. 



Fungous Damage. The actual loss from fungus in well-managed 

 forests is small. In the fir stands there is some damage from the so- 

 called canker, and one of the most important objects of frequent thinnings 

 is to remove trees infected with this disease in order to gradually stamp 

 it out and prevent it from spreading to neighboring stands. The good 

 results of this simple operation are evidenced by the small amount of 

 rot in the final fellings. In a trip of more than a month's duration in 

 the Jura the writer saw only two cases where timber cut was badly 

 damaged by rot, and in one place the amount left in the woods did not 

 amount to more than 10 per cent of the entire tree. In the remote 

 inaccessible stands of the Pyrenees and Alps there is considerable defect 

 because periodic thinnings cannot be made. In the Landes there is 

 some damage from fungus in the maritime pine stands. This has 

 been controlled by isolating with a ditch the groups of trees attacked so 

 that the mycelium of the fungus cannot spread to the roots of other 

 trees. This method, while still used, is not satisfactory; it is best to 

 prevent the damage by " de"pressage " or thinnings in seedlings or sap- 

 ling clumps, since the damage is usually due to overcrowding. 



Windfall Damage. The material loss from windfall is not great, 

 since usually as soon as discovered and before it becomes worthless the 

 down timber can be sold at approximately five-sixths of the full stumpage 

 price. 22 The damage is mostly in the mountains, but occasionally occurs 



** A windfall in the Jura sold in May, 1919, at about five times the normal stumpage 

 price of 1913. This was due to the abnormal shortage of softwood lumber and in- 

 ability to import. 



