FORESTRY ON THE COUNTRY ESTATE 



By WARREN H. MILLER, M. F. 

 Editor Field and Stream 



IV. TREE TROUBLES 



IN THE woodlands of a country 

 estate owner, forestry partakes of 

 many of the characteristics of park 

 culture, as opposed to lumbering, in 

 that the individual tree will have more 

 care bestowed upon it and more money 

 spent to save it if it is ailing than the 

 lumberman could ever afford to spend. 

 To him a tree attacked by borers or 

 caterpillars is just non-merchantable 

 stock, to be left standing or else used 

 for skidways or construction work. To 

 the estate owner, however, his chest- 

 nuts, hickories, pines, hemlocks, oaks 

 and maples are the glories of his forest, 

 and he will go to considerable expense 

 to save a fine specimen, knowing well 

 that if it dies he will not live to see it 

 replaced by another like it. 



These lines are therefore written more 

 for the man who proposes to keep every 

 fine tree in his forest thriving and health- 

 ful, than for the commercial forester 

 who is mainly concerned with exploiting 

 the timber. The usual forest remedy for 

 most insect and fungus epidemics is 

 to cut down and sell at once all the 

 infected trees, also cutting down and 

 leaving trap trees, which are forthwith 

 burnt at the proper time to destroy the 

 insect life they contain. Such a course 

 would at once deprive the man owning a 

 small tract of woodland of a large num- 

 ber of the trees which form a noticeable 

 part of his forest, and which could ill 

 be spared without rendering the place 

 unsightly and leaving many dangerous 

 gaps in the forest cover. For him, then, 

 the spray and tree-surgery methods, in 

 order to save and keep standing the 

 fine growth that he already has. 



In general, 'the best way to reduce 

 tree troubles is to put your forest in a 

 condition of maximum health, with the 

 full complement of bird, animal and 

 insect life which nature had ordained 

 and maintained for thousands of cen- 

 turies before tree^ troubles were ever 



thought of. With the approach of 

 civilization, the settlement of country, 

 the growth of railroads, the killing off 

 of our song birds, and the introduction 

 of foreign insect life for which our own 

 forest regime had no specific remedy, 

 the tree troubles in our forests multi- 

 plied fast, and millions of dollars have 

 been spent in artificial methods of 

 restoring Nature's balance and trying 

 to save our native trees from utter 

 destruction. With the passing of the 

 birds went our great feathered army of 

 tree cleaners; with the introduction of 

 the railroad and the factory came vast 

 clouds of black soot, tainting the air 

 and clogging up the respiration of our 

 tree leaves, so that it is almost impossible 

 to travel along the right of way of any 

 big commuting railroad and see any- 

 thing but dead and dying trees, killed 

 by the train soot. And then, in the 

 irony of fate, while it has proven impos- 

 sible to make imported silk worm moths 

 and other valuable insects thrive here, the 

 harmful sorts, such as the gypsy and 

 browntailed moths, increase and mul- 

 tiply here wholesale! To restore the 

 original plan on which Mother Nature 

 got along comfortably enough, the 

 owner will see to it that a big, thriving 

 bird colony is attracted to his forest, 

 by bird houses, feeding, and rigid pro- 

 tection; that the forest is cleaned and 

 thinned so as to promote vigorous 

 growth in his trees; that spraying appa- 

 ratus is used on infected trees too valuable 

 to be cut down, and that parasites are 

 imported, under directions of the U. S. 

 Bureau of Agriculture, to fight insect 

 epidemics. He will need all these 

 resources to insure a fine forest growth, 

 for, while Nature had a vast amount 

 of decayed wood to contend with, man 

 today has constant invasions from with- 

 out his premises of every sort of fungus 

 and insect wave which sweeps over the 

 country, which more than balance the 

 advantage gained by having a clean 



