Did the ice storm ruin my timber?

[Hill Farm]

What long term effects will our recent ice storm in Arkansas have on timber? We have mostly red and white oak with some hickory and ceder in the mix. Many of the trees lost large limbs or the tops in the ice. Will they die, recover, or recover but be more likely to die a few years down the road? I'm not really sure what to do with them. I would go through and select cut the damaged stuff now, but timber prices were down before the storm and will probably be worse with several folks doing the same. Some of it I would like to thin anyway, but hate to give it away. For that matter, it may not need to be thinned since the storm. Right now I am leaning towards wait and see, but would appreciate a professional opinion.

 

[hammerlogging]

A couple of things you could consider when evaluating overall conditions include 1. are the trees heavily sprung (whiole stems bent over)? 2. Are trees partially uprooted and leaning? 3.Do trees have much greater than 30%canopy loss, looking at individual trees? and 4. Are these rips and tears from brioken branches on the main bole (trunk) of the tree, where decay will eventaully effect sawlog quality, or are the rips and tears out in secondary branches which is not nearly as big a deal?

Watch out for hangers when walking around out there!

 

[hutch3912]

Hammerlogging's number 4 is an important one. Anything that could cause rot or decay should go now while it still has value. I've heard numbers from out ice storm in 1998 where people cut 20-40% of there stock cause of damage. Up here though all your birches, aspen and red maple just absolutely rocked, oak, pine survived a little better.

 

[True Blue Sam]

If your timber was needing a thinning, you may have plenty of undamaged or lightly damaged crop trees to work with. Check your spacing on the good trees that have acceptable damage, and thin out the damaged trees around them, rather than focusing on the damaged ones only. A 33' x 33' spacing will give you 40 crop trees per acre to work with, if you cut three trees around each crop tree you will be plenty busy. You can get bogged down trying to cut every bad tree.

Damaged red oaks may cause an outbreak of oak wilt. Don't cut any trees in the red oak group until late summer to lessen chances of spreading that disease. I try not to cut red oaks in my woods from late March through June in Illinois. They used to recommend treating pine stumps with borax to prevent the spread of fungal diseases; don't know if that works with oaks, but given your cleanup situation, it wouldn't hurt, and it might prevent a bad outbreak.

 

[hermit]

I also have severe ice damage in north central Ark. The sawmills have about shutdown so I will wait awhile, I don't think a few months will hurt. I logged mine about 6 years ago, but only cut the big trees and I had some red oak borer trouble. Mine will be smaller logs but better to cut than let it ruin. I have about 380 acres of hard wood and rocks on pretty steep hills. I wanted to log it myself when I retired, I have a band saw and a team of big perch cross mules but before I retired I had an accident riding one of my mules and broke my back and crushed right shoulder and busted right lung, so I have retired but I had to slow down drasticaly. I cut my own firewood.

 

[Hill Farm]

Never, ever, trust a mule.

 

[hazard]

Here is a story

On my grandpas apple orchard the back of the farm is on a ridge and has maybe a 30' deep fence line. Good wind break. Lots of nice white and red oaks. In southern WI in 1977 we had a bad ice storm. I was 7 and I remember the 8" birch tree bent all the way over laying on the driveway. Alot of the big oaks had the tops broken out of them.

Now fast forward to 1995 when I started getting into milling my own wood. We decided to cut some of the dead oaks out. All were hollow and everyone of them had the tops broken out of them. Potentially some very nice 24"-36" oaks wasted because of the ice storm.

I would do some cutting now before the wood rots

Chris

 

[True Blue Sam]

You can go to this page for information geared toward Arkansas: http://www.forestry.state.ar.us/icestorminfo.html

There are lots of links on that page, so look it over for information that may help you.

Go to: http://www.arkansasforestry.org/ and click on Manage Your Forest to find info on your state forestry programs.

 

[Zodiac45]

Besides the obvious that HammerL mentioned. It's gonna be a few years before you really know how the trees fared. Ice can take a while too show the damage. Not as much with hardwwod trees as conifers though.

 

[Hill Farm]

I just got back from the farm. Spent the day clearing trees and limbs off of fences. I am way pissed at the county boys. They piled stuff that was in the road on top of my brand new fence. They could have put it on the other side of the road and not hurt a thing.

It was kind of strange up there. Some areas look just awful, and others not so bad. I could not find a consistant North side, South side of the hill or type of tree factor to explain it. My best guess is that some areas where just a little colder than others.

We have several trees that lost a large portion of the top, and many of these split when they broke. Guess I will go in the firewood business. Most lost a smaller portion of the top, or large limbs. I am hoping that those will be OK in the long run. On the plus side, it is opened up quite a bit. Some sunshine and green stuff will be good for the wildlife. I'm not sure how to go about ever getting all the brush in the woods cleaned up, probably will just have to let it rot and hope a fire does not come through. There is so much fuel on the ground I really worry about the fire danger for the next few years. I'm afraid it would get hot enough to hurt the timber if it burned.

Sorry, no pics. I ran off and forgot my camera this morning.