Chainsaw-in-Hand

By Cate Nelson

The most challenging part of felling a tree is not bringing it to the ground but choosing which tree to take down. Felling trees is a long-standing part of conservation work, and a near-daily task for the Aldo Leopold Foundation’s stewardship crew. In A Sand County Almanac’s famous “Axe-in-Hand” essay, which is perhaps the closest the stewardship team has to a guidebook, Aldo Leopold shares the many factors that influence his decisions when felling trees. A multitude of factors, including the ecosystem services a tree offers, how many seasons it will offer leaf cover, and the impact it will have on another tree’s growth, were on Leopold’s mind—and his heart. Today, on the Leopold-Pines Conservation Area (LPCA), wielding chainsaws rather than axes, the stewardship team continues to weigh as many factors when felling trees as Aldo Leopold did when he managed this land.  

In “Axe-in-Hand,” Aldo Leopold was forced to choose between felling a pine or a birch. A sense of paternal bias prompted him to favor the pine. While he’d intentionally planted the coniferous seedling, the birch had “crawled in under the fence.” However, on the LPCA, when the stewardship team comes across a self-sown white or bur oak, standing among red pine planted for timber harvest, we celebrate. The rounded leaves are a reminder that the dreamy vision of an open savanna was in fact once reality. People may forget that a floodplain was not always choked with forest, but these oaks indicate that the land remembers. Therefore, unlike the case of Leopold and his planted pine, our land management priority is sometimes towards the self-made tree, grown from memories in soil’s seed bank.

But it’s not truthful to say that self-seeding trees are always favorites on the LPCA. For example, boxelder trees are weighed down every fall with thousands upon thousands of drooping winged seeds, which saturate the nearby soil. These winged seeds disperse aggressively into open areas, such as a newly restored prairie. Though they’re quick to sprout, boxelders are short-lived and don’t thrive when exposed to fire. On the LPCA, we typically maintain an open landscape maintained by prescribed burns. Therefore, trees that readily seed in the landscape but can’t handle the heat, including boxelder, often feel the bite of the saw.

Leopold, when selecting between his two trees, also wondered if finances drove his preferences, noting that a birch could earn him “two dollars to a thousand,” while a pine is worth ten. However, this fact, Leopold concludes, does not carry much weight in his decision. Money was not his priority. Today, the LPCA is no stranger to the logging industry’s timber harvests, which can help us transform large tracts of woodland into open biomes while also putting a precious renewable resource to good use. A contractor with industrial equipment can accomplish in a single week what would take months of work for our crew. But, like Leopold, who favors the pine regardless of the income it promises, our stewardship team does not prioritize profit when planning a harvest. Often, the biggest, oldest, and most profitable trees are the ones we save as keep trees, whose canopy will remain standing in the newly harvested unit. As a result, many of the trees that are taken by loggers are unfit for anything other than firewood and pulp. These small-diameter trees, grown without investment-oriented maintenance, come in all kinds of wild, twisting, twin-stemmed shapes and sizes. The trees we log are not the straight-boled, hardwood darlings of the wood industry, because our conservation ethic does not favor the bank. Instead, we are investing in the future of the landscape.  

After considering all possible angles, Leopold ultimately decides to fell the birch, allowing personal bias the final say in his land management decision. Leopold professes that, while he loves all trees, he is “in love with pines.” The stewardship crew, too, has biases on the landscape. Land Stewardship Fellow Sophie Van Zee has a soft spot for eastern red cedars, a native species that’s overly plentiful on the LPCA because they were planted as ornamental trees on homesteads. Cedars are generally among the first trees we’ll remove when opening up a wooded area. But Sophie likes their delicate cones and warm scent, which reminds her of the incense cedars she worked with on the West Coast. Sometimes the stewardship team comes across a ropy old cedar with beautiful whorls and thick, twisting branches: a wolf tree. Such a tree is left often untouched, save for a pruning to protect it from fire. One could hardly help but love a tree so fierce and beautiful.

I admit that I have a bias towards mulberry trees. The stewardship team typically removes white mulberries because they’re nonnative trees, long ago imported from China for Wisconsin’s silkworm industry. Now naturalized, their short Midwest lifespan of 60 years and their lack of fire tolerance makes them a poor fit on much of our property. However, I can still find reasons to appreciate the species. I enjoy their distinctive, deeply lobed leaves, which can be wildly different in shape even between branches. The scalloped edges of the ornate leaves remind me of dense floral wallpaper patterns. And while mulberry wood’s softness makes it undesirable for furniture, its beautiful colors and striking contrast between growth rings has me entranced. The heartwood often boasts stunningly beautiful purples and pinks, surrounded by greenish gold sapwood. I also have an easy familiarity with mulberry wood, the kind of closeness that comes from spending an evening together at a lathe, witnessing the slow, spinning transformation of a tree into a simple and stunning bowl. In the field, I fell mulberry trees on a regular basis without much regret, thinking more of the forest than the trees. Unfortunately for them, mulberries on the LPCA are usually in the wrong place at the wrong time. But when I see one, I smile, because I see a friend.

Sophie and I are not the only stewardship members who have favorites, who may choose to leave a tree when others would chop it down. Every member of our crew has a different bias—in fact, Leopold wrote that “the wielder of an axe has as many biases as there are species of trees on his farm.” These biases do not prevent good conservation. It is appropriate to love trees and to develop connections with them. To treat the land as community is to live a land ethic; soft spots for a friend-like species are a natural part of this process. It is also good that each of us creates slightly different patterns of disturbance on the landscape. Conservation work that always makes the same decisions cultivates a monoculture. The stewardship team hopes that our combined biases, united under our shared vision for the LPCA, will create a system with a greater wholeness than the sum of our preference-influenced parts.

Whether with axe or chainsaw, felling a tree is a simple task on the surface, yet it requires complex consideration.  Using chainsaws instead of handsaws doesn’t make the decision-making process any easier. But we’re shaped by a land ethic: our connection to the land as community. When felling trees, we consider the health of the forest as a whole as well as our relationships to individual species. Like Leopold, as we wander through the woods, making hard decisions about which tree to fell, our hearts influence our choices.