The Town of Ulster is considering a special use permit for a timber harvesting project on around 115 acres of a 161.4-acre property at 65 Blacks Road. The request, which came from Eddyville Corporation, was the subject of a public hearing at an Ulster town board meeting earlier this month.
In the application submitted by forester Mike Gans, his Stone Ridge-based Ulster Foresting Products, Inc. would clear 585 mature trees and 975 low-quality trees, the latter a focused cull to reduce overcrowding, promote the growth of desirable trees and improve the prognosis for natural regeneration. The plan would reduce the basal area from 100-square-feet to 70-square-feet per acre, aligning with federal and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation best practices.
“When they say best, what they’re really referring to are just like some of the basic forestry tenets for tree density,” said Lou Turrito, a forester working with Gans on the project. “It’s not a rule or a law, it’s just a smart way of doing it. At some point, thinning below a certain density is not practical, and it actually starts to take away from the benefit you’re trying to do…What they recommend is basically decades of science that has really determined how many trees per acre should be, how they should be distributed, and all that sort of stuff.”
The timber to be harvested includes red, white, and rock oak; sugar maple, red maple, white pine and eastern hemlock.
Turrito said people often hear about logging and images of clear cutting entire swathes of trees in the Pacific northwest pop into their heads. But because of the uneven age forests in the northeast, with trees in various sizes, diameters, and species, that rarely happens in this area.
“The idea behind select cutting is that you are fast tracking the release of the more promising trees, helping them grow bigger, faster, and relieving spacing competition for site resources like sunlight, nutrients, and water,” he said. “And almost all the woodlands in New York and in the northeast in general are managed this way…Here, we’re lucky because we have a bunch of different species. For example, red oak likes a lot of sunlight, white oak can deal with a little bit more shade. You’re always basically going in very similar to a garden where you’re tending the trees that are there, trying to release the most promising ones with the goal of always having it be treed. That’s really what silvicultural systems in the northeast really do.”
The last time the property underwent a similar timber harvest as the one proposed was around 40 years ago, which Turrito said was “quite a long time” between culls.
“Depending on how the last harvest was done, whether it was done indiscriminately or it was done with some sort of foresight or planning, 15-to-20 years is a typical interval between selective harvests,” he said. “In a perfect system where the landowner cooperates, the local rules and regs allow for it. Fifteen to 20 years is more ideal, but this particular lot was sort of overdoing. And mortality begins to take over whether you harvest or not at some point.”
Turrito stressed that the end goal is to ensure the land is healthy as a result of the timber harvest.
“A lot of the things you try to do are preemptive,” he said. “And that’s why the bottom line is if you keep a vigorous, healthy, fast-growing forest, that’s the best thing you can do to stabilize any of those types of things.”
The property was formerly used for mining, and is adjacent to a smaller 43.9-acre parcel within the Town of Rosendale. To essentially perform the same sort of operation on that land, the foresters are seeking a special use permit from Rosendale.
Turrito said the timber harvest would be done between November 1 of this year and March 31, 2025 to minimize the impact on the endangered northern long-eared bat, which often roosts in local forested areas near caves. But there are other benefits to a winter harvest.
“Oak trees tend to hold their leaves a long time, and if you could cut them after they fall off, it immediately looks better just because of that,” he said. “So that’s why it’s important that even though there’s constraints about the endangered species, it’s actually smart to do it in the winter, dry or frozen ground conditions.”
Turrito added that winter isn’t what it used to be.
“Nowadays, as you all know, we don’t all get a winter like we used to,” he said. “Sometimes you have three weeks, four weeks where the ground’s frozen.”
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