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nesting sites for robins, bluejays, and woodthrushes. When the tree dies, its soft wood is the perfect place for downy woodpeckers and pileated woodpeckers. The living tree’s sap is relished by the yellowbellied sapsuckers.
The pine squirrel, gray squirrel, hawk, and owl all find some of their diet in and around the hemlock. In the northern states, deer will travel into hemlock groves to make their stand against winter.
The winds of winter and the snowdrifts are lessened by the soft branches and tender needles of the hemlock. The low hanging branches provide food, cover, and shelter.
Local hemlock stands are home for up to 25 varieties of birds, numerous small animals, plus deer and bear.
Areas within the forest of Virginia are rich with hemlock, but the chainsaw is changing that quickly, and it will take hundreds of years to return to its present condition.
Clearcutting in the National Forests is said to be “a management tool, a way to offset the costs of making the National Forest Lands available to the public.”
Sorry, I don’t agree with the logic or the fantasies. Oh, I agree that clearcutting is the logical way to cut timber, I just don’t agree that clearcutting is the best way to cut timber when an area is cut strictly by boundary markers. Without regard to strategic stands of hemlock or other vital cover trees or plants, management is simple, simple displacement of all game within the boundaries of the cut.
How can timber be sold to private industry at a negative profit and provide any offsetting costs of making the lands of the National Forest available?
In a recent timber sale in a western state, National Forest timber was sold at 90 cents a unit. The cost to the taxpayer was $1.06 per unit, a negative profit of 16 cents per unit. When you talk of millions of these units of timber sold each year, you realize that there simply is no way that we, the landowners of the National Forests, can benefit from timber sales.
We have all seen the enormous changes in the George Washington National Forest in the past 15 years. As thousands of acres of the forest have been cleared, it has become harder and harder to plan ahead of the next season.
Additionally, I have seen a decline in quality of the deerherd in the George Washington National Forest. I’m no wildlife biologist, but I can read scales. During the 1960s and early 1970s, a typical buck deer
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