Low Impact Forestry- Profiles - Mike and Mark Spence

Mike and Mark Spence

Baie Verte
1000 acres
Ecoregion - Eastern Lowlands
Ecodistrict - Petitcodiac

Mike Spence, along with his brother Mark, manage nearly 1000 acres of woodland to provide a wide variety of forest services. Their management objectives range from maintaining special areas that will never be harvested to harvesting logs for their own mill and for sale to mills in the region. Their land holdings include the property that was owned by their grandfather Vincent Goodwin. They cite him as their greatest inspiration and influence in establishing an ethic for woodlot management and a deep respect for forest ecosystems.

The woodlots are located at Uniacke Hill near Baie Verte in the extreme southeast corner of New Brunswick in the Petitcodiac Ecodistrict of the eastern Lowlands. The Petitcodiac Ecodistrict features a low gently rolling ride and valley topography.

Red spruce dominates the forests here, mixed with black spruce, balsam fir, red maple, white birch and poplar. Tamarack, eastern hemlock and white pine are also found here. However the influence of hundreds of years of settlement has created large expanses of forest comprised of poplar, red maple and white birch. Black spruce is common on poorly drained soils, while jack pine is commonly found in the sandy soils along the rivers.

The Spence woodlots, similar to other woodlots in the region, have a long harvest history that has changed the appearance of the forest. The forest today contain a red maple, poplar, white birch and balsam fir component, and a smaller amount of spruces, sugar maple, and yellow birch. Some species that were common to the region have been virtually eliminated from the landscape. Mark Spence , through his study of the ecology of the forest has determined through pollen that red oak and hemlock were common to the region a couple of hundred years ago. Harvesting has eliminated theses species.

Mike and Mark began developing their passion for the woods when they were children in the 1960's, and their Grandfather Goodwin armed the two with hatchet and paint pail and supervised them to clean and mark the boundary lines on his property. Grandfather Goodwin had logged his own property and managed camps for winter harvest in the region.

Horse Logging, Horse Boarding and Horse Sense

Mike started work in the woods at a serious level when he bought his first yarding horse when he was 13 years old. This was also the first horse that he shod himself. He continued to work in the woods on weekends and holidays until junior high school, when he took a sabbatical from school to pursue trail cutting, full time.

"I was fortunate that the snow got deep and the pay checks disappeared and I realized that school wasn't so bad and that an education would be a useful asset to carry into life."

He completed high school, and following his passion for horses, went on to Nova Scotia Agricultural College to complete an extensive blacksmith course that included advanced farrier techniques. Spence now spends an average of 4 days a week on the road in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia shoeing horses as part of his farrier business, and the remaining 3 days he spends at home, working in the woodlots and milling and finishing lumber.

Mark Spence was also infected with a similar fascination with the forest but pursued an involved academic study of the forest. On completion of high school, he attended Mount Allison University, receiving a degree in Biology, with a special interest in Botany and forest ecology. He advanced his studies and now shares his time between the woodlot work and contracting botanical surveys and environmental impact assessment work to a wide variety of clients in the Maritimes. Outside of his botanical work, Mark remains yard boss on harvest operations and number one piler in the mill operation.

Mike Spence continues to use a yarding horse for logging operations and figures it is the best logging system for their woodlot operation.

Horse and Mill Complex

He built a log house on his first woodlot in the 1970's. He explains that he had his horse and together they yarded black spruce logs about one kilometre to the building site. After the logs were all on site he used the horse to parbuckle the logs onto the wall where he scribed and notched each log. The homestead also includes a black smith shop, a riding arena and a barn which is home for a number of owned and boarded horses, not to mention a number of large dogs.

Not far from the house and horse complex is the mill complex. It consists of a log yard that holds about 50,000 feet of logs, a tractor shed, a building that houses a Mighty Might band sawmill, a dry kiln and an assortment of planers and other wood working machines and lumber storage. There is also lumber stored in the yard.

Looking around the building housing the mill and kiln, Mike explains, "We have to make some changes here. The building was fine when we started sawing, we had lots of room to work. But then we added the kiln, jointer, planer, trim saws and we also store dried lumber. We have to re-model. We need a building for dry lumber storage and a more efficient building to house the kiln."

Management Philosophy

Although Mike had a management plan prepared for one section of his woodlot, he relies more on a philosophy of management rather than a rigid plan. An average year will see the brothers harvest up to 150 cords of pulpwood and about 40 thousand board feet each, of softwood logs and hardwood logs. Mike is also developing a reputation for dropping into the neighbours to buy some logs from their fuelwood piles.

Harvesting is done in the winter and yarded by horse. Logs are browed up and then loaded on wagons and transported to the mill. The main woodlot roads are the trails that were used by past generations for winter sledding roads. The terrain is remarkably level, so winter yarding and subsequent hauling with a farm wagon is very efficient. The tractor, 65 hp John Deere, with front end loader also gets a lot of use for handling logs and lumber around the mill and for work around the horses.

Brother Mark Vanishes

Mike likes to keep yarding distance under 600 feet, but once he yarded up to 1000 feet. "That was not a very successful experiment. I was in the woods cutting and hitching on the logs. Mark was out in the yard, unhooking and turning the horse and starting him back the trail to me. We started out pretty good, it took quite a while to make a turn. It was in the spring and it was nice and warm, then the horse didn't show up when I thought he should. I went back to work because I wasn't sure how long it had been. I worked a while and thought he surely should be back. Then I thought maybe the wiffletree got caught on something, and I started down the path. Well I went and went, then I figured there was something wrong because he wasn't on the trail. When I got to the yard there was the horse beside the log pile, still hooked on to the log. Then I kind of panicked thinking something had happened to Mark. But then I spotted him laying in a pile of brush facing the sun sound asleep. Now I keep the twitches short so my help won't go to sleep." Mark responds that a woodlot owner must be able to enjoy all aspects of woodlots, including the relaxing qualities that they provide.

Yarding with a Horse

Mike's horse is a crossbred gelding that enjoys a diverse heritage, part draft, part Morgan and part Quarter Horse. He is rather short legged with a powerful front end and deep chest. Not comparable with big Draft show teams, but Mike brags unabashedly for his performance as a yarding horse and pet. Mike raised the gelding and proceeded to break and train him for yarding.

"When I'm working in the woods I will cut for two or three days and the bring in the horse to yard it all up. In the morning I start with short twitches. That way I am handy, right there with him to get him used to the work and voice commands again, because he hasn't yarded for a few days. I always put some treats in my coat pocket then hang the coat on a peavey, right where I want him to stop. After the first twitch he's standing right beside the coat, I give him a treat. I do the same for the first few twitches. He catches on then and stops every time with his nose on my coat. As the twitches get a little longer or if I have to cut or move something and I'm late getting to the yard, he is right there in the right spot waiting for a treat. I also like to use a jump log and he catches on to that. A jump log is a small log on the ground at the yard. As the horse drags his twitch over the jump log his load hits it and jumps up and over. As soon as he feels the log jump he knows it's time to stop, and if he's lucky I left my coat there too."

"I also carry a short peavey at the stump and I carry it right to the yard if I'm working alone. You carry a short peavey because you are carrying it and after a day it gets heavy but not as heavy as a long peavey.
If a log gets caught behind a stump you can just give it a little roll and away he can go."

Where and What Gets Cut?

Where and what gets cut is decide by two considerations. One where stand conditions dictate and how good the woods are frozen up. The original sled roads tended to follow wet runs through the woods because they ran down hill and everything was hauled to the front of the farms, toward the shore. "If we can't get it froze up, we can't work, and will have to find a place that is frozen" says Mike.

Stand conditions are less straight forward. "We work in areas that have over mature trees that will start falling down in the not too distant future. We tend to work through taking the dominants and some of the co-dominants and not scarring any of the smaller trees that we are leaving in the stand. We don't have to worry to much about regeneration because with the horse we are not disturbing much. In fact we find that the skid trail, which is only a foot or two wide will sprout full of spruce seedlings in a year or two because the moss and litter have been disturbed a bit."

Some cut-over areas contain obviously old, flat-topped spruce trees, which on many woodlots would be considered risky to leave because of advanced age, shallow rooting, the possibility of harboring butt rot, possessing questionable genetic qualities, along with other considerations. After considering a sensitively crafted question to explore these issues, the Spence's are more than willing to share their reasoning.

"The trees are not dead, they are putting on volume. Maybe not as much as some younger and more vibrant of their species. If they are growing in volume they are growing in value."

Co-dominant tops are often not as symmetrical as dominant tops, but those less attractive tops can make good volume on the stems."

"What is the best lumber for building fishing boats? Slow growing, tight grained spruce. They come into the mill, look at a pile of lumber and point to the pieces of this old slow spruce and say that one, that one, not that one and so on. So those old spruce are a special value. Also if we have some and we want to saw a bunch for boat lumber, we know exactly where to go to get them and we can cut what we need and leave the rest until next time."

"If there is some butt rot, that's OK, we sell pulpwood and we burn firewood and it doesn't hurt to leave some big old rotten butts in the woods, there are all kinds of small animals and birds that use them and then there are the microbioles that reduce it to organic matter and that whole process is important to the forest ecosystem."

"We are working here and we watch the trees if a few go down, we can come by and clean them up."

"We also like to grow our regen in the shade. It is slow but we have aggressive trees that are struggling to reach light. They grow straight, stretching for the light and they self prune their lower limbs as they starve for light."

Restoration Planting

Despite a harvesting regime that provides for abundant natural regeneration, the Spence brothers also do some planting. Their interest is in establishing small patches of uncommon species such as Oak, Hemlock. Mark explained that when he was studying forest ecology in the region, he analyzed the pollen in the soil and found that species like oak, hemlock, white pine, ash and beech had occurred in the forest. Harvesting and stand manipulation, through the years, has resulted in the elimination of these species from the forest.

"We are under-planting these species on the sites where we figure they will grow well. We get the stock from stands in the region that we know about or from nurseries. I like to put the stock in a nursery bed at home and grow them to about five feet in height before we plant them out. We plant in small islands close enough, so that when the trees mature they will be able to cross breed. There doesn't seem to be much damage from animal browse, probably because they are mixed in with lots of other young trees. They are inconspicuous on the landscape and don't attract any unusual browse attention."

Mark also points to global warming speculating that the future will see a greater proliferation of hardwood species in the region. He says that the greater diversity of species there are on the woodlot the better are the prospects for maintaining a healthy forest.

Mike adds that he like to see more hardwoods on the woodlot because they are so much fun to saw. "I guess we tend to favour hardwoods when we are thinning as well. If I have to saw a lot of softwood, its hard work. Now when I'm sawing hardwood that is exciting. I can come home at ten o'clock at night and saw until two or three in the morning as long as I have a bunch of nice hardwood logs. Every cut with the saw is a mystery, you never know exactly what will turn up. Hardwoods give you character woods, pretty grain, lots of different and exciting features. And you can make more money on hardwood lumber. Anyone that buys a band sawmill to saw softwood lumber and then compete in the market with large capacity mills and lumber yards, are out of their mind. You simply can not compete with big mills on construction 2x6. Now hardwoods are an entirely different story. It is like every log is a birthday present and the sawyer has to unwrap it and see what is inside. You must go slower and more thoughtfully. You develop intuition for different species, different logs. You also develop customers that want specialty woods, so that when you see it you know where it will sell. I am a pest in the neighbourhood. When I see someone gets a load of eight foot wood for fuelwood, I'm stopping in and nosing around the woodpile. When I spot something I like I start pulling out cash to buy a few blocks. I told one guy that I wanted to buy a couple of logs from his pile. I wanted to pay him what they were worth, but I didn't have that much money. So I offered him what I could and it was nearly what he paid for the load. I sawed those logs and made money on them. When I'm buying up retirees wood piles, why wouldn't I want to grow more nice hardwoods."

Mark saws and kiln dries all kinds of hardwoods and markets to cabinet makers, crafters, canoe makers, wood turners. One specialty that he is developing on the hardwood side is for splated wood. As hardwood begins to rot and decay it develops lines and stain patterns in the wood. To the uninformed visitor, a look at the spalted log pile looks like a big pile of rotting hardwood logs that never got sawed or cleaned up.

Mike explained, "These aren't rotten logs, they are spalted. It is just about time to turn them again. We keep them turned so that they spalt more evenly. You want spalt all through the lumber, it isn�t any good if only one end is spalted. Crafters and hobbyists go crazy for this stuff. They use it for furniture, trim and turning. I just sent a shipment to Fort MacMurray, they don't have anything to compare to this product so we make up an order and ship it out."

"We sometimes get bird's eye and curly maple and birch, there are customers that want that. Others are looking for colour, and shades. Spile holes in hard maple, I can sell that at a premium, that is real special character. Sometimes I make a mistake sawing and have to take a real thin cut to get the sawing back on track. I always thought that thin cut was a waste and threw it in the slab pile. Now I have to saw thin cuts to supply the orders that puzzle makers give me."

The Spence's have some conventional silviculture treatments on the woodlots. They have some stands that were pre-commercially thinned in the seventies and early eighties. Mike says that when it was fist thinned, he kept the stocking quite high to encourage height growth and self- pruning. He has subsequently thinned one of the stands a second time and is very happy with the growth and quality of the trees in the stand.
The Spence's have also identified special habitat areas on their land that they plan to set aside and never harvest at all. "We plan to create our own small protected areas that will be allowed to develop as nature alone dictates, simply because we feel that the areas are valuable and deserve to be protected."



		*Mike and Mark Spence* Baie Verte 1000 acres Ecoregion - Eastern Lowlands Ecodistrict - Petitcodiac
Mike Spence, along with his brother Mark, manage nearly 1000 acres of woodland to provide a wide variety of forest services. Their management objectives range from maintaining special areas that will never be harvested to harvesting logs for their own mill and for sale to mills in the region. Their land holdings include the property that was owned by their grandfather Vincent Goodwin. They cite him as their greatest inspiration and influence in establishing an ethic for woodlot management and a deep respect for forest ecosystems. The woodlots are located at Uniacke Hill near Baie Verte in the extreme southeast corner of New Brunswick in the Petitcodiac Ecodistrict of the eastern Lowlands. The Petitcodiac Ecodistrict features a low gently rolling ride and valley topography. Red spruce dominates the forests here, mixed with black spruce, balsam fir, red maple, white birch and poplar. Tamarack, eastern hemlock and white pine are also found here. However the influence of hundreds of years of settlement has created large expanses of forest comprised of poplar, red maple and white birch. Black spruce is common on poorly drained soils, while jack pine is commonly found in the sandy soils along the rivers. The Spence woodlots, similar to other woodlots in the region, have a long harvest history that has changed the appearance of the forest. The forest today contain a red maple, poplar, white birch and balsam fir component, and a smaller amount of spruces, sugar maple, and yellow birch. Some species that were common to the region have been virtually eliminated from the landscape. Mark Spence , through his study of the ecology of the forest has determined through pollen that red oak and hemlock were common to the region a couple of hundred years ago. Harvesting has eliminated theses species. Mike and Mark began developing their passion for the woods when they were children in the 1960's, and their Grandfather Goodwin armed the two with hatchet and paint pail and supervised them to clean and mark the boundary lines on his property. Grandfather Goodwin had logged his own property and managed camps for winter harvest in the region. Horse Logging, Horse Boarding and Horse Sense Mike started work in the woods at a serious level when he bought his first yarding horse when he was 13 years old. This was also the first horse that he shod himself. He continued to work in the woods on weekends and holidays until junior high school, when he took a sabbatical from school to pursue trail cutting, full time. "I was fortunate that the snow got deep and the pay checks disappeared and I realized that school wasn't so bad and that an education would be a useful asset to carry into life." He completed high school, and following his passion for horses, went on to Nova Scotia Agricultural College to complete an extensive blacksmith course that included advanced farrier techniques. Spence now spends an average of 4 days a week on the road in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia shoeing horses as part of his farrier business, and the remaining 3 days he spends at home, working in the woodlots and milling and finishing lumber. Mark Spence was also infected with a similar fascination with the forest but pursued an involved academic study of the forest. On completion of high school, he attended Mount Allison University, receiving a degree in Biology, with a special interest in Botany and forest ecology. He advanced his studies and now shares his time between the woodlot work and contracting botanical surveys and environmental impact assessment work to a wide variety of clients in the Maritimes. Outside of his botanical work, Mark remains yard boss on harvest operations and number one piler in the mill operation. Mike Spence continues to use a yarding horse for logging operations and figures it is the best logging system for their woodlot operation. Horse and Mill Complex He built a log house on his first woodlot in the 1970's. He explains that he had his horse and together they yarded black spruce logs about one kilometre to the building site. After the logs were all on site he used the horse to parbuckle the logs onto the wall where he scribed and notched each log. The homestead also includes a black smith shop, a riding arena and a barn which is home for a number of owned and boarded horses, not to mention a number of large dogs. Not far from the house and horse complex is the mill complex. It consists of a log yard that holds about 50,000 feet of logs, a tractor shed, a building that houses a Mighty Might band sawmill, a dry kiln and an assortment of planers and other wood working machines and lumber storage. There is also lumber stored in the yard. Looking around the building housing the mill and kiln, Mike explains, "We have to make some changes here. The building was fine when we started sawing, we had lots of room to work. But then we added the kiln, jointer, planer, trim saws and we also store dried lumber. We have to re-model. We need a building for dry lumber storage and a more efficient building to house the kiln." Management Philosophy Although Mike had a management plan prepared for one section of his woodlot, he relies more on a philosophy of management rather than a rigid plan. An average year will see the brothers harvest up to 150 cords of pulpwood and about 40 thousand board feet each, of softwood logs and hardwood logs. Mike is also developing a reputation for dropping into the neighbours to buy some logs from their fuelwood piles. Harvesting is done in the winter and yarded by horse. Logs are browed up and then loaded on wagons and transported to the mill. The main woodlot roads are the trails that were used by past generations for winter sledding roads. The terrain is remarkably level, so winter yarding and subsequent hauling with a farm wagon is very efficient. The tractor, 65 hp John Deere, with front end loader also gets a lot of use for handling logs and lumber around the mill and for work around the horses. Brother Mark Vanishes Mike likes to keep yarding distance under 600 feet, but once he yarded up to 1000 feet. "That was not a very successful experiment. I was in the woods cutting and hitching on the logs. Mark was out in the yard, unhooking and turning the horse and starting him back the trail to me. We started out pretty good, it took quite a while to make a turn. It was in the spring and it was nice and warm, then the horse didn't show up when I thought he should. I went back to work because I wasn't sure how long it had been. I worked a while and thought he surely should be back. Then I thought maybe the wiffletree got caught on something, and I started down the path. Well I went and went, then I figured there was something wrong because he wasn't on the trail. When I got to the yard there was the horse beside the log pile, still hooked on to the log. Then I kind of panicked thinking something had happened to Mark. But then I spotted him laying in a pile of brush facing the sun sound asleep. Now I keep the twitches short so my help won't go to sleep." Mark responds that a woodlot owner must be able to enjoy all aspects of woodlots, including the relaxing qualities that they provide. Yarding with a Horse Mike's horse is a crossbred gelding that enjoys a diverse heritage, part draft, part Morgan and part Quarter Horse. He is rather short legged with a powerful front end and deep chest. Not comparable with big Draft show teams, but Mike brags unabashedly for his performance as a yarding horse and pet. Mike raised the gelding and proceeded to break and train him for yarding. "When I'm working in the woods I will cut for two or three days and the bring in the horse to yard it all up. In the morning I start with short twitches. That way I am handy, right there with him to get him used to the work and voice commands again, because he hasn't yarded for a few days. I always put some treats in my coat pocket then hang the coat on a peavey, right where I want him to stop. After the first twitch he's standing right beside the coat, I give him a treat. I do the same for the first few twitches. He catches on then and stops every time with his nose on my coat. As the twitches get a little longer or if I have to cut or move something and I'm late getting to the yard, he is right there in the right spot waiting for a treat. I also like to use a jump log and he catches on to that. A jump log is a small log on the ground at the yard. As the horse drags his twitch over the jump log his load hits it and jumps up and over. As soon as he feels the log jump he knows it's time to stop, and if he's lucky I left my coat there too." "I also carry a short peavey at the stump and I carry it right to the yard if I'm working alone. You carry a short peavey because you are carrying it and after a day it gets heavy but not as heavy as a long peavey. If a log gets caught behind a stump you can just give it a little roll and away he can go." Where and What Gets Cut? Where and what gets cut is decide by two considerations. One where stand conditions dictate and how good the woods are frozen up. The original sled roads tended to follow wet runs through the woods because they ran down hill and everything was hauled to the front of the farms, toward the shore. "If we can't get it froze up, we can't work, and will have to find a place that is frozen" says Mike. Stand conditions are less straight forward. "We work in areas that have over mature trees that will start falling down in the not too distant future. We tend to work through taking the dominants and some of the co-dominants and not scarring any of the smaller trees that we are leaving in the stand. We don't have to worry to much about regeneration because with the horse we are not disturbing much. In fact we find that the skid trail, which is only a foot or two wide will sprout full of spruce seedlings in a year or two because the moss and litter have been disturbed a bit." Some cut-over areas contain obviously old, flat-topped spruce trees, which on many woodlots would be considered risky to leave because of advanced age, shallow rooting, the possibility of harboring butt rot, possessing questionable genetic qualities, along with other considerations. After considering a sensitively crafted question to explore these issues, the Spence's are more than willing to share their reasoning. "The trees are not dead, they are putting on volume. Maybe not as much as some younger and more vibrant of their species. If they are growing in volume they are growing in value." Co-dominant tops are often not as symmetrical as dominant tops, but those less attractive tops can make good volume on the stems." "What is the best lumber for building fishing boats? Slow growing, tight grained spruce. They come into the mill, look at a pile of lumber and point to the pieces of this old slow spruce and say that one, that one, not that one and so on. So those old spruce are a special value. Also if we have some and we want to saw a bunch for boat lumber, we know exactly where to go to get them and we can cut what we need and leave the rest until next time." "If there is some butt rot, that's OK, we sell pulpwood and we burn firewood and it doesn't hurt to leave some big old rotten butts in the woods, there are all kinds of small animals and birds that use them and then there are the microbioles that reduce it to organic matter and that whole process is important to the forest ecosystem." "We are working here and we watch the trees if a few go down, we can come by and clean them up." "We also like to grow our regen in the shade. It is slow but we have aggressive trees that are struggling to reach light. They grow straight, stretching for the light and they self prune their lower limbs as they starve for light." Restoration Planting Despite a harvesting regime that provides for abundant natural regeneration, the Spence brothers also do some planting. Their interest is in establishing small patches of uncommon species such as Oak, Hemlock. Mark explained that when he was studying forest ecology in the region, he analyzed the pollen in the soil and found that species like oak, hemlock, white pine, ash and beech had occurred in the forest. Harvesting and stand manipulation, through the years, has resulted in the elimination of these species from the forest. "We are under-planting these species on the sites where we figure they will grow well. We get the stock from stands in the region that we know about or from nurseries. I like to put the stock in a nursery bed at home and grow them to about five feet in height before we plant them out. We plant in small islands close enough, so that when the trees mature they will be able to cross breed. There doesn't seem to be much damage from animal browse, probably because they are mixed in with lots of other young trees. They are inconspicuous on the landscape and don't attract any unusual browse attention." Mark also points to global warming speculating that the future will see a greater proliferation of hardwood species in the region. He says that the greater diversity of species there are on the woodlot the better are the prospects for maintaining a healthy forest. Mike adds that he like to see more hardwoods on the woodlot because they are so much fun to saw. "I guess we tend to favour hardwoods when we are thinning as well. If I have to saw a lot of softwood, its hard work. Now when I'm sawing hardwood that is exciting. I can come home at ten o'clock at night and saw until two or three in the morning as long as I have a bunch of nice hardwood logs. Every cut with the saw is a mystery, you never know exactly what will turn up. Hardwoods give you character woods, pretty grain, lots of different and exciting features. And you can make more money on hardwood lumber. Anyone that buys a band sawmill to saw softwood lumber and then compete in the market with large capacity mills and lumber yards, are out of their mind. You simply can not compete with big mills on construction 2x6. Now hardwoods are an entirely different story. It is like every log is a birthday present and the sawyer has to unwrap it and see what is inside. You must go slower and more thoughtfully. You develop intuition for different species, different logs. You also develop customers that want specialty woods, so that when you see it you know where it will sell. I am a pest in the neighbourhood. When I see someone gets a load of eight foot wood for fuelwood, I'm stopping in and nosing around the woodpile. When I spot something I like I start pulling out cash to buy a few blocks. I told one guy that I wanted to buy a couple of logs from his pile. I wanted to pay him what they were worth, but I didn't have that much money. So I offered him what I could and it was nearly what he paid for the load. I sawed those logs and made money on them. When I'm buying up retirees wood piles, why wouldn't I want to grow more nice hardwoods." Mark saws and kiln dries all kinds of hardwoods and markets to cabinet makers, crafters, canoe makers, wood turners. One specialty that he is developing on the hardwood side is for splated wood. As hardwood begins to rot and decay it develops lines and stain patterns in the wood. To the uninformed visitor, a look at the spalted log pile looks like a big pile of rotting hardwood logs that never got sawed or cleaned up. Mike explained, "These aren't rotten logs, they are spalted. It is just about time to turn them again. We keep them turned so that they spalt more evenly. You want spalt all through the lumber, it isn�t any good if only one end is spalted. Crafters and hobbyists go crazy for this stuff. They use it for furniture, trim and turning. I just sent a shipment to Fort MacMurray, they don't have anything to compare to this product so we make up an order and ship it out." "We sometimes get bird's eye and curly maple and birch, there are customers that want that. Others are looking for colour, and shades. Spile holes in hard maple, I can sell that at a premium, that is real special character. Sometimes I make a mistake sawing and have to take a real thin cut to get the sawing back on track. I always thought that thin cut was a waste and threw it in the slab pile. Now I have to saw thin cuts to supply the orders that puzzle makers give me." The Spence's have some conventional silviculture treatments on the woodlots. They have some stands that were pre-commercially thinned in the seventies and early eighties. Mike says that when it was fist thinned, he kept the stocking quite high to encourage height growth and self- pruning. He has subsequently thinned one of the stands a second time and is very happy with the growth and quality of the trees in the stand. The Spence's have also identified special habitat areas on their land that they plan to set aside and never harvest at all. "We plan to create our own small protected areas that will be allowed to develop as nature alone dictates, simply because we feel that the areas are valuable and deserve to be protected."