Much of the field work on National Forests must be done during the 

 summer, because most of these forests, being at high altitudes, are 

 usually snow-covered in winter. Accordingly, several thousand 

 temporar}^ emplo^^ees are hired each summer for fire protection; tree- 

 disease and insect control; brush disposal; road, trail, and other 

 improvements; construction; maintenance; and similar forest work. 



3. "How Important Are the Nonprofessional Workers to the Forest 

 Service?" 



Very important, indeed. Nonprofessionals help the professional 

 do the job he has to do. An engineer's road design for a National 

 Forest is useless unless he has a corps of unskilled, skilled, and super- 

 visory workers to build the road. In this respect, the Forest Service 

 is like any other large organization with its dift'erent levels of skills 

 and functions which have to operate harmoniously. 



Let's look a bit closer at the categories listed under the second 

 question : 



A. TECHNICIAN.— More and more professions are finding that 



certain tasks that were once performed by the professional 

 can be delegated to the technician. In the Forest Service, 

 this approach has met with great success. Technicians have 

 taken over from the professional foresters such responsible 

 and diflficult jobs as supervising on-the-ground operations 

 in timber sales, recreation-area use, or research activities 

 that require the use of practical skills and experience; col- 

 lecting, consolidating, sometimes analyzing, reporting, and 

 summarizing data within guides set up b}^ professionals; 

 contacting the public, contractors, and other forest users for 

 information or policy enforcement; or supervising a road 

 survey crew on a road-building project that will make 

 timber accessible for harvesting. 



B. AID. — No organization can exist without people who know 



how to get the basic or preliminary work done. The Forest 

 Service is no exception. It has always been fortunate in 

 having hard-working aids who not only get the job done, 

 but enjoy doing it. 



Aids, even more than technicians, work at a variety of 

 productive tasks that help both the technician and the pro- 

 fessional. Some of these tasks are: Scaling logs; marking 

 specific trees and collecting and recording such data as tree 

 heights, tree diameters, and tree mortality; installing, main- 

 taining, and collecting records from rain gages, streamflow 

 recorders, and soil moisture measuring instruments on simple 

 watershed improvement projects; serving on a road survey 



