Low Impact Forestry- Profiles

Dell Hiscock

Near Plaster Rock
Ecoregion - Continental Lowlands
Ecodistrict - Wapske/Bluebell

Dell Hiscock continues to manage his woodlot in much the same manner that his father did. The woodlot located at Northview, about 10 kilometers north of Plaster Rock is part of the family's Elite Potato Seed farm. The farm is situated on an isolated pocket of fertile soil well east of the intensively farmed Drummond and New Denmark areas. The isolation is an attractive location to develop seed stock because it is some distance from commercial growing districts that often experience disease and pest problems.

The fertile soil provides Mr. Hiscock with a very productive woodlot. At an elevation of 250 metres, the tree species are typical tolerant hardwoods such as sugar maple, yellow birch, and beech predominate, with a scattering of spruce, hemlock, balsam fir, cedar, white birch, red maple, white pine and ash.

This is typical for this ecodistrict. Sugar maple, yellow birch, and beech, with scattered red spruce and hemlock are the dominant species. However white ash, iron wood, and red oak are also found here. On the poorly drained flats, black spruce, white spruce, red pine and white pine dominate. Some wet sites with better fertility have considerable cedar in the mix. Large areas of forest are at an early successional stage characterized by forests of poplar, red maple and white birch with mixtures of spruce and fir in the understory.

Mr. Hiscock developed his appreciation for forest and woodlot management as a boy helping his father in the woods in the winter.

Mr. Hiscock recalls that when he was young we went to the woods in the winter to cut firewood for the house and to cut some sawlogs for sale or for their own construction needs. "We cut and yarded to a brow and then loaded them on bobsleds to haul out."

Harvesting History

The harvesting was by single tree selection, taking the oldest and the poorest quality trees. This harvest method has allowed the tolerant species to continue to re-establish and maintain a predominately tolerant hardwood condition across the woodlot. Exceptions to tolerant hardwood condition occurs in low wet areas where spruce, cedar, hemlock and balsam fir predominate.

A second exception is an area called the sheep pasture, which had been cleared for a sheep pasture, but was allowed to revert back to forest. According to Mr. Hiscock, the area regenerated with intolerant hardwoods; pin cherry, white birch, along with balsam fir. White pine seeded in from the lone white pine tree on the woodlot. The sheep pasture was thinned for Christmas trees in the late seventies, but they were not tended. "Now they are pulpwood".

A woodlot management plan was developed in the 1970's and a new one was done in 1998. Mr. Hiscock says that the woodlot now contains more hardwood and is in a more uneven-aged condition so he figured a new plan was a good investment. In the past, harvesting focused on harvesting the softwood and fuelwood. "Now we have a lot of hardwood that is producing veneer and hardwood logs. The plan helps me to focus on maintaining those high quality hardwood trees."

Maintaining a Hardwood Dominant Forest

Another intervention that helped to maintain the tolerant hardwood predominance of the woodlot was a harvest across the woodlot to remove the balsam fir that was dying as result of spruce budworm. The harvest was completed by a horse logging contractor. Directions for the harvest were simple; cut all the fir and leave the rest. Again this harvest did not create any large openings and the shade allowed mostly tolerant hardwood regeneration. Mr. Hiscock says that the harvest brought another management advantage to the woodlot.

"The horse loggers didn't want to yard more than about 300 feet. So there were a lot of areas they said they were not going to work. The result was that my father put in some more roads so the horse logging continued over the whole woodlot and we gained more roads. We improved those roads and now have a real good system serving all areas of the woodlot."

Road Network

In Mr. Hiscock's early memories the woodlot roads were simple trails for the bulldozer and bobsleds used only in the winter. "My father bought a small bulldozer as farming started to become mechanized in the forties and fifties. He used the bulldozer on the farm and in the woods in the winter for hauling wood. We always had a small dozer even after we had tractors, I still use a 350 John Deere in the woods. It seems I grew up using a dozer and I'm comfortable working with it."

In the late seventies around the time of the balsam fir/budworm harvest, the Hiscocks took advantage of a woodlot management program and had a crew cut a main woodlot access road and followed up with a hired bulldozer to build the road. This road with some small adjustments for wet areas is the basis of a highly developed road system.

"As we mechanized potato production, we had to mechanically pick rock so that we could dig with harvesters. We took the picked rocks and filled in wet areas on the woodlot roads. we continued this so that now we have year round roads. I can go on my roads anytime. I even keep most of the roads open in the winter, I have a big snowblower for around the farm, and lots of horsepower, so it takes only a short time to get around the woodlot, then I can get anywhere I want."

"I have a big 3 point hitch grader blade that I use to clean out ditches. I pull material up on top of the road surface. Sometimes I get a lot of rocks that I can't level out like I want. I just let it dry a while then come in with the rock picker, pick the rocks, drop them in a spot I want to build up then return with the scraper and level out the road surface.

In addition to field rock, there is also a shale pit on the woodlot that the Hiscocks have used for improvements on the farm and woodlot. The main road was initially constructed by the most up to date technology. A large bulldozer to push all the debris and topsoil into large piles along the road, and then shape the subsoil into a road surface.

"I was always annoyed to see all that valuable top soil piled in the push-offs along the road. Then the day came when I was building field terraces in the potato fields, and I had to get material to build them. I just went to the woodlot and hauled the push-offs to the fields. Two problems solved!"

Harvesting

Following the balsam fir harvest, Mr. Hiscock and his father continued to harvest fuelwood and logs, around the farming schedule. With the Fraser sawmill only ten miles away, Mr. Hiscock was able to use the farm's truck and tractors along with the bulldozer to produce wood.

"We yarded wood with the dozer and then used the front end loader of the big tractor to load on the trailing axle truck. Today, I like using the skidsteer loader that we use in potato handling, for sorting in the yard."

Mr. Hiscock considers beech a weed in the woodlot, because it suffers from beech bark disease and develops very poorly. He has developed some theories around beech culturing.

"After we started following our first management plan and trying to perpetuate the tolerant hardwoods, I was always concerned that we might cut too much - open the stand up too much and get too much light on the ground and then you end up with a lot of balsam fir and white birch. Now, when I look back with twenty years of experience, I see that I have a lot of beech, which is no good. I think that the very low light penetration encouraged beech regeneration. I look at other spots where it was opened up more I got lots of sugar maple. Now I tend to open up the stand a little more, a little more light encourages maple regeneration."

Another peculiarity on the woodlot is the apparent die-off of the ash. "We used to have a lot of good ash. I remember when I was very young, Indians used to come and cut ash for basket making. I remember being astonished that my father would give away those trees. Today there are very few ash trees and they are dying off."

Mr. Hiscock continues to use bulldozer to do single tree selection. A slotted bar is fitted to the back of the dozer and there are six chains in a box for hooking up the felled trees. The blade of the dozer is six feet wide, while the track width is just over 5 feet.

Mr. Hiscock is planning to sell the Elite Seed farm to a neighbour but keep the woodlot. He is looking at various low impact harvesting machines for his management work and at the same time evaluating the practicality of sticking with the bulldozer and equipping it with a winch.

When harvesting with the dozer, he usually backs in a trail to the felled tree and brings it out the same trail. Large trees are bucked into sections to minimize damage to trees along the trail. When work starts in an area, a trail is planned and located strategically with trees that will be harvested to be used as bumper trees, that the logs can scrape along as they are yarded to roadside. As the area is logged, the last trees to be harvested are the bumper trees along the trail.

Tree sections are yarded to the road and dropped in a yard which is simply a wide spot or intersection of roads. Mr. Hiscock will work an area filling several yards before processing the sections into veneer bolts, logs or fuelwood. Mr. Hiscock has developed a clientele for firewood as far away as Grand Falls. Firewood customers are an important part of an operation focusing on veneer production.

In the past few years Mr. Hiscock has added a new management tool in areas were he is thinning small diameter (< 6 inch diameter) trees, mostly beech, away from crop trees. The new machine is a 4 wheel drive ATV. A hitch for pulling logs was built on the back of the frame and a tractor counter weight was attached to the front of the ATV.

"I hire a neighbour, about six months a year to help with the woodlot work. He just loves twitching logs with the ATV and he is good at it. As soon as I get a tree down and limbed, he is back. It is a lot faster than using the bulldozer, uses a narrower trail. We haul a bunch out, then use the Dozer or tractor to pile up the logs."

Fish and Maple Syrup with a Side Order of Ginseng!

Hiscock provides multiple benefits and enjoyment for friends and family. Mr. Hiscock and his wife thought it would be nice to have a couple of fish ponds, so they set out to build the ponds. The first construction seemed to go quite well until the dam washed out. After the pond was rebuilt, it washed out again. This structure won the title Pondless. Meanwhile, a second pond was constructed and remained in place no problem. Today the two structures are referred to as "Pond" and "Pondless".

Another non-timber activity on the woodlot is a sugar bush operated by Mr. Hiscock's uncle and his friend. "They show up in April with their snowshoes and get tapped in. I keep the roads open all winter, so they can come and go to the camp with ease. They have around .. buckets. I help them get wood in the spring. And they just have a lot of fun. People come and visit and talk and tell stories and they even make some syrup."

Mr. Hiscock has also planted some Ginseng on his woodlot, to see if it might be a good agroforestry crop.
"I am disappointed, it doesn't seem to have grown. I should have done a germination trial before I planted so at least I would know how good the seed was. I never planted anything on my farm without germination data."

The woodlot is home to a wide variety of wildlife, including pileated woodpeckers and squirrels. There is not any management to create habitat, just lots of healthy and some over mature habitat. Due to the high elevation, white-tailed deer do not winter on the woodlot, but as the snow disappears in the spring, deer move into the woodlot for the summer and fall.



		*Dell Hiscock* Near Plaster Rock Ecoregion - Continental Lowlands Ecodistrict - Wapske/Bluebell
Dell Hiscock continues to manage his woodlot in much the same manner that his father did. The woodlot located at Northview, about 10 kilometers north of Plaster Rock is part of the family's Elite Potato Seed farm. The farm is situated on an isolated pocket of fertile soil well east of the intensively farmed Drummond and New Denmark areas. The isolation is an attractive location to develop seed stock because it is some distance from commercial growing districts that often experience disease and pest problems. The fertile soil provides Mr. Hiscock with a very productive woodlot. At an elevation of 250 metres, the tree species are typical tolerant hardwoods such as sugar maple, yellow birch, and beech predominate, with a scattering of spruce, hemlock, balsam fir, cedar, white birch, red maple, white pine and ash. This is typical for this ecodistrict. Sugar maple, yellow birch, and beech, with scattered red spruce and hemlock are the dominant species. However white ash, iron wood, and red oak are also found here. On the poorly drained flats, black spruce, white spruce, red pine and white pine dominate. Some wet sites with better fertility have considerable cedar in the mix. Large areas of forest are at an early successional stage characterized by forests of poplar, red maple and white birch with mixtures of spruce and fir in the understory. Mr. Hiscock developed his appreciation for forest and woodlot management as a boy helping his father in the woods in the winter. Mr. Hiscock recalls that when he was young we went to the woods in the winter to cut firewood for the house and to cut some sawlogs for sale or for their own construction needs. "We cut and yarded to a brow and then loaded them on bobsleds to haul out." Harvesting History The harvesting was by single tree selection, taking the oldest and the poorest quality trees. This harvest method has allowed the tolerant species to continue to re-establish and maintain a predominately tolerant hardwood condition across the woodlot. Exceptions to tolerant hardwood condition occurs in low wet areas where spruce, cedar, hemlock and balsam fir predominate. A second exception is an area called the sheep pasture, which had been cleared for a sheep pasture, but was allowed to revert back to forest. According to Mr. Hiscock, the area regenerated with intolerant hardwoods; pin cherry, white birch, along with balsam fir. White pine seeded in from the lone white pine tree on the woodlot. The sheep pasture was thinned for Christmas trees in the late seventies, but they were not tended. "Now they are pulpwood". A woodlot management plan was developed in the 1970's and a new one was done in 1998. Mr. Hiscock says that the woodlot now contains more hardwood and is in a more uneven-aged condition so he figured a new plan was a good investment. In the past, harvesting focused on harvesting the softwood and fuelwood. "Now we have a lot of hardwood that is producing veneer and hardwood logs. The plan helps me to focus on maintaining those high quality hardwood trees." Maintaining a Hardwood Dominant Forest Another intervention that helped to maintain the tolerant hardwood predominance of the woodlot was a harvest across the woodlot to remove the balsam fir that was dying as result of spruce budworm. The harvest was completed by a horse logging contractor. Directions for the harvest were simple; cut all the fir and leave the rest. Again this harvest did not create any large openings and the shade allowed mostly tolerant hardwood regeneration. Mr. Hiscock says that the harvest brought another management advantage to the woodlot. "The horse loggers didn't want to yard more than about 300 feet. So there were a lot of areas they said they were not going to work. The result was that my father put in some more roads so the horse logging continued over the whole woodlot and we gained more roads. We improved those roads and now have a real good system serving all areas of the woodlot." Road Network In Mr. Hiscock's early memories the woodlot roads were simple trails for the bulldozer and bobsleds used only in the winter. "My father bought a small bulldozer as farming started to become mechanized in the forties and fifties. He used the bulldozer on the farm and in the woods in the winter for hauling wood. We always had a small dozer even after we had tractors, I still use a 350 John Deere in the woods. It seems I grew up using a dozer and I'm comfortable working with it." In the late seventies around the time of the balsam fir/budworm harvest, the Hiscocks took advantage of a woodlot management program and had a crew cut a main woodlot access road and followed up with a hired bulldozer to build the road. This road with some small adjustments for wet areas is the basis of a highly developed road system. "As we mechanized potato production, we had to mechanically pick rock so that we could dig with harvesters. We took the picked rocks and filled in wet areas on the woodlot roads. we continued this so that now we have year round roads. I can go on my roads anytime. I even keep most of the roads open in the winter, I have a big snowblower for around the farm, and lots of horsepower, so it takes only a short time to get around the woodlot, then I can get anywhere I want." "I have a big 3 point hitch grader blade that I use to clean out ditches. I pull material up on top of the road surface. Sometimes I get a lot of rocks that I can't level out like I want. I just let it dry a while then come in with the rock picker, pick the rocks, drop them in a spot I want to build up then return with the scraper and level out the road surface. In addition to field rock, there is also a shale pit on the woodlot that the Hiscocks have used for improvements on the farm and woodlot. The main road was initially constructed by the most up to date technology. A large bulldozer to push all the debris and topsoil into large piles along the road, and then shape the subsoil into a road surface. "I was always annoyed to see all that valuable top soil piled in the push-offs along the road. Then the day came when I was building field terraces in the potato fields, and I had to get material to build them. I just went to the woodlot and hauled the push-offs to the fields. Two problems solved!" Harvesting Following the balsam fir harvest, Mr. Hiscock and his father continued to harvest fuelwood and logs, around the farming schedule. With the Fraser sawmill only ten miles away, Mr. Hiscock was able to use the farm's truck and tractors along with the bulldozer to produce wood. "We yarded wood with the dozer and then used the front end loader of the big tractor to load on the trailing axle truck. Today, I like using the skidsteer loader that we use in potato handling, for sorting in the yard." Mr. Hiscock considers beech a weed in the woodlot, because it suffers from beech bark disease and develops very poorly. He has developed some theories around beech culturing. "After we started following our first management plan and trying to perpetuate the tolerant hardwoods, I was always concerned that we might cut too much - open the stand up too much and get too much light on the ground and then you end up with a lot of balsam fir and white birch. Now, when I look back with twenty years of experience, I see that I have a lot of beech, which is no good. I think that the very low light penetration encouraged beech regeneration. I look at other spots where it was opened up more I got lots of sugar maple. Now I tend to open up the stand a little more, a little more light encourages maple regeneration." Another peculiarity on the woodlot is the apparent die-off of the ash. "We used to have a lot of good ash. I remember when I was very young, Indians used to come and cut ash for basket making. I remember being astonished that my father would give away those trees. Today there are very few ash trees and they are dying off." Mr. Hiscock continues to use bulldozer to do single tree selection. A slotted bar is fitted to the back of the dozer and there are six chains in a box for hooking up the felled trees. The blade of the dozer is six feet wide, while the track width is just over 5 feet. Mr. Hiscock is planning to sell the Elite Seed farm to a neighbour but keep the woodlot. He is looking at various low impact harvesting machines for his management work and at the same time evaluating the practicality of sticking with the bulldozer and equipping it with a winch. When harvesting with the dozer, he usually backs in a trail to the felled tree and brings it out the same trail. Large trees are bucked into sections to minimize damage to trees along the trail. When work starts in an area, a trail is planned and located strategically with trees that will be harvested to be used as bumper trees, that the logs can scrape along as they are yarded to roadside. As the area is logged, the last trees to be harvested are the bumper trees along the trail. Tree sections are yarded to the road and dropped in a yard which is simply a wide spot or intersection of roads. Mr. Hiscock will work an area filling several yards before processing the sections into veneer bolts, logs or fuelwood. Mr. Hiscock has developed a clientele for firewood as far away as Grand Falls. Firewood customers are an important part of an operation focusing on veneer production. In the past few years Mr. Hiscock has added a new management tool in areas were he is thinning small diameter (< 6 inch diameter) trees, mostly beech, away from crop trees. The new machine is a 4 wheel drive ATV. A hitch for pulling logs was built on the back of the frame and a tractor counter weight was attached to the front of the ATV. "I hire a neighbour, about six months a year to help with the woodlot work. He just loves twitching logs with the ATV and he is good at it. As soon as I get a tree down and limbed, he is back. It is a lot faster than using the bulldozer, uses a narrower trail. We haul a bunch out, then use the Dozer or tractor to pile up the logs." Fish and Maple Syrup with a Side Order of Ginseng! Hiscock provides multiple benefits and enjoyment for friends and family. Mr. Hiscock and his wife thought it would be nice to have a couple of fish ponds, so they set out to build the ponds. The first construction seemed to go quite well until the dam washed out. After the pond was rebuilt, it washed out again. This structure won the title Pondless. Meanwhile, a second pond was constructed and remained in place no problem. Today the two structures are referred to as "Pond" and "Pondless". Another non-timber activity on the woodlot is a sugar bush operated by Mr. Hiscock's uncle and his friend. "They show up in April with their snowshoes and get tapped in. I keep the roads open all winter, so they can come and go to the camp with ease. They have around .. buckets. I help them get wood in the spring. And they just have a lot of fun. People come and visit and talk and tell stories and they even make some syrup." Mr. Hiscock has also planted some Ginseng on his woodlot, to see if it might be a good agroforestry crop. "I am disappointed, it doesn't seem to have grown. I should have done a germination trial before I planted so at least I would know how good the seed was. I never planted anything on my farm without germination data." The woodlot is home to a wide variety of wildlife, including pileated woodpeckers and squirrels. There is not any management to create habitat, just lots of healthy and some over mature habitat. Due to the high elevation, white-tailed deer do not winter on the woodlot, but as the snow disappears in the spring, deer move into the woodlot for the summer and fall.