No. 4.] REPORT OF STATE FORESTER. 291 



held a hardwood stand of sprout chestnut, white birch, oak and 

 maple. It was advised in our report that the pine stand should 

 be thinned, that is, the crowded, slow-growing trees should be 

 cut out, and that the chestnut and white birch among the hard- 

 woods should be removed. It was thought advisable to cut the 

 chestnut on account of the danger of infection by the chestnut 

 bark disease, and the white birch, because it was mature and 

 seemed to be deteriorating in quality. 



The recommendations of our report in regard to the thinning 

 were accepted by the trustees of the estate, and six of our men, 

 with one of our most experienced foremen, were set to work in 

 the woods. The Steven's estate paid the entire cost of the work, 

 including the expenses of the forester from this office who marked 

 the trees and supervised the work. Arrangements were made 

 with Mr. Williams, a local lumberman, to take the logs on the 

 ground for $8 per M feet. Considering the conditions this was 

 a very fair price. The slash and dead wood were piled but not 

 burned, as it seemed impossible to do this without scorching and 

 killing many of the standing trees. 



The financial results of this operation should interest those 

 M^ho have wood lots in which thinning is a possibility. The 

 amount of lumber sawed from the logs came to 235,000 board 

 feet, and at the selling price of $8 per 1,000 the gross returns were 

 $1,880. The labor cost of chopping and slash piling was $600; 

 tools, $30; supervision, i.e., expenses of the forester, $25; mis- 

 cellaneous, $15; total, $670, or $2.90 per 1,000 feet. This leaves 

 a net return of $5.10 per 1,000 feet, — a very good margin of 

 profit for an operation carried out primarily for improvement to 

 a wood lot situated more than 10 miles from the railroad. 



Experimental Thinning. 



A work which should prove to be of considerable interest 

 when the final results are obtained has been begun in the town of 

 Cheshire. The object of this undertaking is to learn the cost of 

 thinning out the valueless species among the thick second-growth 

 hardwood which comes up on the slopes of the Berkshires after 

 the older trees have been cut off. 



These slopes are covered largely with this sort of growth, which 

 in the course of fifty years or so, by a process of natural thinning, 



