The Training of a Forester

by Gifford Pinchot

The Forest Assistant secures his position with the Service by passing an examination devised to test his technical knowledge and his ability. After he has served two years as Forest Assistant the quality and quantity of his work will have determined his fitness to continue in the employ of the Government. If he is unfit he may be dropped, for there are many young and ambitious men ready to step into his place. If he makes good he is promoted to the grade of Forest Examiner and is put definitely in charge of certain lines of professional work; always, of course, under the direction of the Supervisor, of whom he becomes the adviser on all problems involving technical forestry.

The most important tasks of the trained Forester on a National Forest are the preparation of working plans for the use of the forest by methods which will protect and perpetuate it as well, and the carrying out of the plans when made. This is forestry in the technical sense of the word. It involves a thorough study of the kinds of timber, their amount and location, their rate of growth, their value, the ease or difficulty of their reproduction, and the methods by which the timber can be cut at a profit and at the same time the reproduction of the forest can be safely secured. A working plan usually includes a considerable number of maps, which often have to be drawn in the first place from actual surveys on the ground by the Forest Examiner. These maps contain the information secured by working-plan studies, and are of the first necessity for the wise and skilful handling of the forest. They often constitute, also, most important documents in the history of its condition and use.

On many of the National Forests the need for immediate use of the timber is so urgent and so just that there is no time to prepare elaborate working plans. Timber sales must be made, and made at once; but they must be made, nevertheless, in a way that will fully protect the future welfare of the forest. Whether working plans can be prepared or not, a most important duty of the technical Forester is to work out the conditions under which a given body of timber can be cut with safety to the forest, especially with safety to its reproduction and future growth. The principal study for a timber sale will usually include an examination of the general features and condition of the forest, and the determination of the diameter down to which it is advisable to cut the standing trees, a diameter which must be fixed at such a size as will protect the forest and make the lumbering pay. It will include also an investigation, more or less thorough and complete, as the conditions warrant, of the silvical habits of one or more of the species of trees in that forest. The areas which form natural units for the logging and transportation of the timber must be worked out and laid off, and careful estimates, or measurements, of the amount of standing timber and of its value on the stump must be made, as well as of the cost of moving it to the mill or to the railroad.

The Forest Examiner must also consider, in many cases, the building of logging roads or railroads, timber slides, etc., and must make a careful study of the material into which the trees to be cut can best be worked up, and of the value of such material in the market. Most of all, however, he must study, think over, and decide what he will recommend as to the conditions which are to govern the logging conditions by which the protection of the forest is to be insured. These conditions, fixed by his superiors upon the report of the Forest Examiner, determine whether an individual timber sale is forestry or forest destruction. This is the central question in the administration of the National Forests from the national point of view.

The principal objects of the conditions laid down for a timber sale are always the reproduction of the forest and its safety against fire. Natural reproduction from self-sown seed is almost invariably the result desired; and so the question of the seed trees to be left, and how they are to be located or spaced, is fundamental, unless there is ample young growth already on the ground. In the latter case this young growth must not be smashed or bent by throwing the older trees on top of it, or against it, and the young saplings bent down by the felled tops must be promptly released.

In order to avoid danger to the young growth already present or to be secured, as well as to protect the older trees from fires, the slash produced in lumbering, the tops lopped from the trees up to and beyond the highest point to which the lumbermen are required to take the logs, must be satisfactorily disposed of—either by scattering it thinly over the ground, by piling and burning, or often by piling alone.

These and many other conditions of sale must be studied out in a form adapted to each particular case, and must be discussed with the men who propose to buy, who often have wise and practical suggestions to make.

Similar questions on a less important scale present themselves and must be answered in the matter of small timber sales, and of timber given without charge under free-use permits to settlers and others.

When the terms of a contract of sale have been worked out and accepted and the timber has been sold, then the Forest Assistant has charge of the extremely interesting task of marking the trees that are to be cut, in accordance with these terms. Usually this is done by marking all the trees which are to be felled, but sometimes by marking only the trees which are to remain.

The marking is usually done by blazing each tree and stamping the letters "U. S." upon the blaze with a Government marking axe or hatchet. It must be done in such a way that the loggers will have no excuse either for cutting an unmarked tree or leaving a marked tree uncut, or vice versa, as the case may be. The marking may be carried out by the Rangers and Forest Guards under supervision of the Forest Assistant, or in difficult situations he may mark or direct the marking of each tree himself. Marking is fascinating work.