Forest Management and Wildlife

The most general goal of good forest management is to create a healthy, vigorous forest which will sustainably produce quality forest products over time. A landowner may also as a primary or secondary goal have in mind the creation or maintenance of quality habitat for various wildlife species. Often, these goals go hand in hand. Good forest management and healthy forests provide habitat for a wide variety of wildlife. However, where landowner goals include habitat for species which require more specific forest stand conditions, steps can also be taken during management to help meet those goals.

The Big Picture: Well-Managed Forests Create Habitat

Part of our philosophy at Southern Maine Forestry is that rather than implementing harvests by rote prescription, treating an entire stand as the same, we mark each harvest tree-by-tree and adjust harvesting strategy at a micro level based on conditions within a stand. This generally results in an increase in structural diversity across a woodlot. Whereas practices such as diameter-limit cutting limit the number of ages classes present, we allow healthy mature trees to continue growing to their full potential. Single-tree selection thinning is alternated with group selection based on specific conditions in an area of a stand. These practices generally result in a mosaic of age classes across a stand, which provides habitat for a wider array of wildlife species.

The Specifics: Wildlife Species and Forestry

Deer. White-tailed deer are often first in people’s minds when they think of wildlife in Maine. They are abundant, beautiful to watch, and the biggest wild game resource in the state, with over 32,000 deer harvested by hunters in 2018. While deer can present challenges to forest managers by browsing the saplings of desirable species such as oak, most landowners (and us foresters too!) generally value having a healthy deer herd on the landscape.

Deer are an “edge” species, which means that they generally favor forests with plenty of the aforementioned structural and age class diversity. Irregularly shaped openings created by group selection lead over time to forests with a mixture of freshly opened areas where forbs and seedlings provide food, taller released regeneration provides cover, and mature mast-bearing species such as oak provide a further food source while growing quality timber. Check out this page from the Quality Deer Management Association for further info on creating deer habitat through forest management: https://www.qdma.com/give-yourself-the-edge/

A woodcock on her nest in the spring

Grouse and Woodcock. Both iconic game bird species, ruffed grouse and american woodcock require a diverse landscape in which openings and early-successional forest are mixed with more mature forest. Populations suffer where unmanaged forests grow into homogeneous mature stands. Group selection and patch cuts, where appropriate, can promote the presence of these species on a woodlot. This publication from the NRCS describes in greater depth the habitat needs of woodcock: https://timberdoodle.org/sites/default/files/northern_forest_woodcock_bmp_nrcs_wildlife_insight.pdf

Other Birds. Maine’s forestland is home to an especially high variety of bird species, including many that rely on it as breeding habitat. Populations of many species are on the decline due to a variety of factors including habitat fragmentation and degradation, pollution, and development. Specific habitat needs vary from species to species, but the general trend is that a forested landscape with plenty of structural, age class, and tree species diversity helps support birds. Maine Audubon has produced a publication oriented towards both forester and landowners that outlines the habitat needs of key species and management strategies that can help them: https://www.maineaudubon.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/FFMB-2017.pdf