Episode 39: Dead Wood (in English)

 From the Oregon State University's Extension Service, you are listening to In the Woods with the Forestry and Natural Resources Program. This podcast brings the forest to listeners by sharing the stories and voices of forest scientists, land managers, and enthusiastic members of the public. Each episode, we will bring you research and science based information that aims to offer some insight into what we know and are still learning about forest science and management. Stick around to discover a new topic related to forests on each episode.

Thanks for joining us on another episode of In the Woods. I'm Lauren Grand, Oregon State University Extension Forester and Associate Professor of Practice, and I'll be your host for today's episode. In today's episode, we'll be discussing the role of dead wood in the forest ecosystem, and we'll be focusing on the life histories of woodpeckers and other cavity dwellers.

Hopefully, by the end of the episode, we're gonna see a better understanding of the wildlife biologist's war cry, "more deadwood" and how most of our wildlife species rely on it. We also hope to give you some tidbits on how various management activities and fire events can aid in the increase of deadwood on the landscape.

Today on the podcast, I've got Ken Bevis, who's a stewardship wildlife biologist for Washington State Department of Natural Resources. Welcome to the podcast, Ken. Hi, Lauren. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I'm thrilled to have you, and I know it's going to be a good time. Uh, Ken is such an entertaining guy.

He's so much fun to talk to, and hopefully you'll be able to hear some Information through all the laughs we're going to be having. No pressure, Ken. Hey, did you hear the one about the woodpecker that banged his head on the tree? Yeah. It's a good way to get started.

Is there, is there a punchline to that? No, I just made that up. Well, I got the pleasure to meet Ken when I worked for Washington state university extension. And so far in the 10 years I've worked in extension, it is pretty, obvious to me that Ken's enthusiasm and excitement for teaching about wildlife and their habitats is totally unmatched.

And so we're definitely going to have lots of fun today. Um, Ken, you have such a cool job. Tell our listeners a bit about what you do and how you wound up finding yourself in this career. Okay. Thanks, Lauren. Um, in Washington, the department of natural resources, the equivalent of Oregon division of forestry, uh, has a service forestry program to help small landowners, uh, develop forest management plans, make recommendations for all things forestry.

And there's a wildlife biologist attached to that effort. And that's me. And I'm really, really fortunate to have this cool job where I get to go around the whole state and give classes and do presentations and write articles advocating for wildlife habitat while doing active forestry on small lands, and I just love our small landowners because they can do really pretty much anything they want.

I mean, within a few restrictions, stream banks and such, but people are always interested in wildlife. They're always interested in wildlife. And so I have a, uh, very receptive audience pretty much continuously and, you know, people love wildlife so much. Holy smokes. How could you not be excited about it?

Yeah, definitely. I kind of see wildlife as the gateway drug to forestry because you can get people excited about it and then talking about, "Hey, what are the different things that we can do to promote healthy forests and build the different wildlife species that you have?" Exactly. Whenever we do those values surveys on our small landowners.

The first four are always something like protect the environment, provide for a healthy forest, privacy, wildlife habitat. It's, it's always in the top cluster consistently nationwide. And so I think my role is to help people flesh that out into a what can I do. Not just what did I see. Right, and what can I do to help me see more. Exactly, to help you see more.

Well, um, and our relationship to wildlife, um, has changed a lot in the past. Let's just say 50 years from consumptive emphasis, IE, uh, hunting to observational aesthetic response. Uh, and that's a huge thing. That's a totally huge thing because people think wildlife is this wonderful amenity, uh, until it starts to eat your rose bushes or, you know, dig up your garden or something.

Then that turns into, to animal nuisance response. But sometimes those same animals that are a nuisance will be the ones that they've admired so much. And so I like to do this, Lauren, when I teach a live class these days, I'll have 35 landowners in the room and I'll say, how many of you are hunters? And pretty consistently, it'll be somewhere in the order of five to 15 percent in Western Washington over in kind of the urban fringe, there'll be zero.

There'll be nobody who identifies as a hunter. You go into eastern Washington and even then it'll still be one in five. And so that's a giant shift from how wildlife was viewed just a few years ago, where there was a deer and there was everything else. Now it's like, there's everything. And I think part of my job too, is to

remind people of, of the breadth of the biodiversity that is represented by wildlife. Wow, that's so exciting to think about how, you know, things have changed a little bit and that you're able to just go and have something new to talk about every day. Just because there's so many different people with different interests and so many different types of wildlife.

It's true. There's so many different types. Like one of my emphasis is that much of the wildlife is small and unseen. It's stuff that you don't even know that there's voles under the down log out there because you never see them. Or, you know, and the things that you do see, the big megafauna, the bear, the deer, even the pileated woodpecker is way up here at the top of the food chain somewhere, and there's all this other stuff down below.

There are much less beetles and centipedes. Are they wildlife, by the way, Lauren? Are insects wildlife? Sure they are. Why not? How about slugs? Yeah, why not? Okay. What about bark beetles? Are they insect? I mean, are they, um, wildlife? I know. Insects are wildlife, right? That's what our last, uh, guest told us. I think so too.

I, yeah, yeah. Which means that, um, I've got a lot to do. What about Sasquatch? Is Sasquatch wildlife? Oh, wait. If you're asking me, definitely. I've heard him or her. Is it he or she? I've heard Sasquatch. You would, was it a deep guttural thing? Um, but nevermind. Okay. Um, so yes, so, so my role is, I think my role is to, uh, remind people attempt to not necessarily expand awareness, but expand curiosity.

And, um, then it's almost like. then, then give them something that's actionable, something you can do to support this wildlife. Cause I, I do this to also in a class, I'll say how many of you like wildlife and pretty much everybody raises their hand and then there'll be somebody. And then I'll say how many don't like wildlife and the same person will raise their hand and go, well, I don't like moles or gophers or deer when they eat, you know, so it's like, okay, so we like wildlife until they infringe on something that we desire and then that but it's still the same, you know, set of creatures that are responding to habitat.

So a very important point and foundational and I'll drift off this momentarily is that wildlife is a function of habitat. We very seldom manage in quotes for establishment or even management of very many populations. The thing is there and there's obviously the wonderful exceptions. California condors being reestablished or deer populations with the hunting season.

And so your, your fish and wildlife departments spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the harvestable surplus, what can be taken, blah, blah, blah. You know, but let's just say like deer, um, if you, if you had a population target for a particular deer herd in a certain area, and you'd have a certain number taken by the hunters who were in a, you know, and the hunting is very regulated.

It's a certain number of days, whether it's a male of three points on one side, whatever. And in the meantime, there's cougars, bears, roadkill all happening at the same time to influence that population. But we as small landowners, we don't have anything to do with that. We might shoot a deer, but they're on our place or not.

And so, um, our small landowner audience is manipulating habitat with an outcome that will affect these different species. So I like to essentially remind people that it's like you, you're like controlling the world for a lot of things. And most of them are smaller, small home ranges, things that live on your property, like a, like a Douglas squirrel or a red squirrel in the East side.

So it's pretty cool. Yeah. Okay, well, you talked a lot about how, you know, where, well, I'm not a small landowner, hopefully one day dream submitted. Um, but small landowners do a lot of manage, um, habitat for wildlife. Um, and so hopefully today's podcast will be a great opportunity as to answer, you know, what, what can you do?

This is going to be, you know, big function of what someone can do and I normally say that our podcast that here in the woods is all about keeping your trees alive or, you know, managing for tree health. But today I'm really excited that we are going to just scream from the mountaintops our appreciation for dead trees and dead wood and where that comes from.

So there's probably a few terms that will be thrown around in the podcast Ken like dead wood, coarse woody debris, down and dead wood. Um, you want to share, or do all those mean the same thing to you? What do those mean? Do you want to share any other terms that describes dead wood for our listeners? Snag.

Snag. What's a snag? A snag is a standing dead tree. A down log, well a log, is a dead tree, usually a dead tree that fell over. And we commonly use this broad term, which I don't like by the way, coarse woody debris. Debris, it's not debris, it's coarse woody material that has a huge role in a functional role in the ecosystem.

And even snag is kind of a negative term. People, people, you hear snag and it's sort of, you know, an ugly thing. And I, I don't know how to get around that one, but, um, so right, those would be the main ones. Yes. Well, I had a landowner tell me that a snag is a bird hotel. So maybe we'll just change the name. I like it.

Snags are bird hotels, but we're going to get there in regard to habitat value of these features. Okay. So why is deadwood so important to wildlife? Well, well, okay. So a tree, the thing about a tree for a moment that a living tree, you know, with the, the bark and the cambium and the pitch tubes and everything is a remarkable, uh, organism that is evolved to defend itself from things trying to get into it.

So wood itself as a substance is not only conductive. So you think about the cross section of a tree where there's the, the, the xylem on the outside moving water. I know this is review, but I really like to think like this because the xylem.

Around the outside of a tree is moving water from the roots up to the top, and then the floam outside of that is moving photosynthate from the leaves and the miracle photosynthesis down into the rest of the organism, you know, building, basically building the tree from air and water, which is like, really check that out.

Well, as a tree gets older. The middle part of the tree becomes heartwood, which is no longer conductive tissue. It's supportive tissue. It's holding up all this other stuff going on. But while the tree's alive, it's able to resist the invasion of other organisms that would seek to break down the wood. And so it's got all these cool defense things that are focused on, you know, waxy coatings on the leaves and conifers, uh, the bark itself, big, thick, quirky stuff, the pitch tubes, like I mentioned, spitting out the insect that comes in.

So a tree, when it's fully healthy, let's just say, which kind of means it's able to defend itself against fungus and insects. Those are the two main quote, enemies of trees. When those systems start to break down. And so, so a tree, as it dies, doesn't have to die all at once, but when portions of the function, the functional, oh, what's the word?

Metabolism. The wrong word. The functional, uh, essence of the tree breaks down. Now things can get in there. And wood as the whole series of tracheids, like, you know, wood is basically a series of little tubes or straws or whatever you call it, laying against each other. It is the most wonderful substrate for other organisms.

And as soon as the tree is no longer able to defend itself, boom, in comes, uh, first, usually it's insects carrying a fungal spores or fungal spores, whatever the sequence is. And so that woody structure suddenly becomes available to this whole host of other organisms. And so there's a sort of a sequence. It's pretty interesting because a tree once it's, once it's dead or portions of it are dead, then all this stuff kicks in.

And by the way, this is true of branches, like a branch dies and the whole thing still is going on, but the tree is keeping the soil, not always, but it's, it's still protecting itself at the base of the branch, you know, even if the branch is dead. So the sequence of breakdown, once the tree is no longer defending itself as a living organism, is this, it's this whole amazing, uh, sequence and is that, is that kind of where we were starting, Lauren?

Yeah, sounds good. And that's sort of like interesting because you can think about it in various space and time, right? So, like you mentioned, that can be just a branch on a tree that you can find dead wood, but you can also find dead wood in a snag and then down on the forest floor and the amount of that changes depending on, you know, where we are interacting within the forest cycle and how forests grow.

So, in considering how our Pacific Northwest forests do grow and develop over time, you know, what changes in how forests develop can you start to see influence the amount of dead wood on our landscape? Nice. That's a very good, very good question. So consider, and I'm, and Lauren, I'm assuming that most of our audience is familiar with forest succession and different forest types.

Let's say... We've talked about it a little bit on previous podcasts, but give us a little bit of a reminder, a quick reminder, just in case. Yeah. Um, well, so, so the different forest types, depending on how wet they are, you know, candidly have, uh, varying disturbance regimes, meaning so a forest grows their, their long term entities, but a forest is a collective of all the plant life and wildlife that comes in there.

So here they are. Oh, if you could see me, I'm taking my fingers and wiggling them upwards as if it was the fast motion forest. Um, and as, as the forest grows, not all of the trees survive forever. So think about the time when you went out to the, uh, old growth forest and the Olympic peninsula, or, uh, I don't know, where's, where's an old growth stand in Oregon, Santiam.

Um, and you, and you can win. There's a, the all sea forest is probably the famous one. There you go. So you go out to the Alsea. And there's these great big Douglas firs and some hemlocks and everything. And the trees are like a hundred feet apart, 120 feet apart. And they're six feet in diameter and 200 feet high, but in between them, there's a big dead snag and big dead logs laying on the ground.

And so what's happened is in a, in a old wet forest, that slow motion sequence, a tree will die and it'll stand there for a long time. You get into a fire regime and in say, uh, oh, uh, open space ponderosa pine with low intensity fires, which you probably have touched on in your podcast, right Lauren? The dryer forest, you will still have, you will still have those large structures.

And every now and then there'll be a dead one. And sometimes they're on the ground. And so the, the life cycle of a dead tree can be roughly as long as the tree was alive. So the tree, you know, is, it comes into being grows. Let's, I always like to pretend like a hundred year old tree.

So let's say we had a hundred year old Douglas fir that was in a fully stocked stand and something happened to it. Root rot got it. Uh, drought, the beetles. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, the Beatles, you know, John, George and Ringo show up and girdle the tree. Um, did I leave somebody at John, George, Oh, John and Ringo got there.

Um, and the tree dies. So in year two, let's say year one, the trees is no longer defending itself. It's dead. Um, what happens to that tree in the first year? Pause. Pretty much nothing. The needles might the needles won't turn brown until a year later, the needles will take another year to fall off. So year 3, 4, 5, the tree basically is still standing there with these bare branches on it.

Now, this is barring some kind of a weather event. Because sometimes trees will get blown over. So, so not only are the needles falling off, but the fine roots are falling off too. So down under the ground, the roots, you know, that have been networked holding the tree down, they're starting to break down too.

So all those little fine roots, they're dying just like the needles are dying. So the tree structurally is getting less stable. But it totally depends. I think this is a, Lauren, this is a really interesting tidbit that how long a snag last depends. It just depends on where it is, you know, what, what the soil was like, uh, what the substrate, what kind of tree, where is it on the hill, where does the wind come, you know, does, is it like on the coastal side of a ridge out, uh, near Newport or on the sheltered side?

So the tree dies. In year five, fine branches, year 10, the branches are falling off. It's starting to decay. The bark starting to get flaked off. The cambium is gone. The beetles have come into it early on the decay insects. And there, I think this is really interesting. They're moving a lot of bacteria and fungal spores on their bodies when they go in there.

So the insects, the insects were able to get in there, lay their eggs. And then those little larvae guys are crawling around under the bark and in the wood. And that's what the woodpeckers come in here. And we'll get to woodpeckers in a minute, but woodpeckers are like apex predators on wood dwelling insects, and the dead wood has a lot more than do live trees.

Live trees don't have insects under the bark, hardly at all, because the bark is full of pitch and everything they can't get in there. So this, this, this theoretical tree at year 10, 20, 30, is still standing there. Sometimes if it's a lucky tree somewhere in there, and it's starting to decay inside.

Sometimes there's heart rots in the middle. A lot of times there's rot in the, in the old, uh, uh, sapwood, the xylem, which rot at different rates, which I think is really interesting. There's different fungal, uh, communities that work on different types of wood in a dead tree. Have you, okay, Lauren, have you ever seen a stump, an old, old stump that's there?

And, uh, the rays of the heartwood are still there. All the sapwood is gone. The bark is gone. That's because heartwood didn't get to that, excuse me, fungus didn't get to that heartwood and there it stands, but the sapwood is all gone. So anyway, so as this tree changes, if it's lucky, or if the woodpeckers are lucky, it breaks off.

And so you go out in the forest and these, these stubs, that'll be essentially a woody cylinder of, you know, anywhere from five to 75 feet with the jagged broken tub. That's where your woodpecker cavities are a lot of times. And so the thing stands there for where you're 40, 50, 60. Year 70, let's say finally the roots rot out and it falls over now it's on the ground and it's going to lay there as a log and it's going to rot in 30 years later.

It's still going to be identifiable. It might just be a hump on the ground with hemlocks grown out of it, but it's still identifiable. So a hundred years after that tree died, it's still present in the environment. So continuing on. So the wood, wood is a durable substance. That's why we build houses out of it.

It's great stuff. Um, I mean, it's wonderful material and in the forest, it persists. It's so interesting how it persists for long periods of time. And, and, and, uh, we'll pause there because I'll say something about management here in a few minutes. Yeah, that's kind of interesting, too. If you think about it, it's like, it's almost like the nature created this, you know, the substance that persists and so animals and all the insects and everything had to find a way to evolve to depend on it, you know, and now they depend on each other for those long periods of time.

Well said. Yeah. And when, and when you have a, when you have, sorry, I interrupted. No, I was done. Go ahead. I was going to say in a fire situation, which we're all very familiar with these days with all these big fires, even what happens to the, to the, to the dead trees after the fire burns through, they're not gone.

We're seeing these seas of snags, just seas of dead wood. And, you know, it's charred and everything. But for, for if you've ever been to like Yellowstone, I like to say who's been to Yellowstone since 1988. And 1988 was the big fire that made such a splash. And today there's still probably hundreds of thousands of standing dead trees in '88, '98, '08.

35 later, and there will be for. Oh, and in the meantime, the young forces coming in underneath. So what is a persistent substance in the forest ecosystem in the natural forest ecosystem is evolved for deadwood to be a significant component of many, many elements of it, you know, including soil building.

So, um, uh, lots and even in fire regimes, the wood still persist. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about fire regimes and, um, that role, you know, fire is a major disturbance. And, you know, you sort of alluded to the fact that when fire comes through, there's all this dead wood afterward. Um, and so what about variations between different sides of the state, you know, in both Oregon and Washington, we sort of have a West side and a wet side and a dry side.

Um, and then, you know, some of the frequency of fire and how that plays into it. How does those differences affect the way that you see more or less dead wood on the landscape? So part of the dynamic of dead wood in a particular forest type is it pulses.

It kind of comes through in waves. It's pretty interesting how, um, okay, let's say you have a, uh, a West side wetter stand that has a really long fire interval, even in human, uh, induced realms, you know, it's still like, like that old stuff about the, uh, coast range fires were at 500 year intervals, but in between the forest is growing slowly, and there's this, this continuous recruitment of, you know, a root rot tree over there, a little cluster over here, the wind snapped that one off a fire comes through and all of a sudden you've got this huge pulse of deadwood and it does change everything. It's, it's a very different environment.

Um, and now these because this is a really deep topic that I'm going to just do a teaser on here, that our mid elevation, uh, drier, a mixed conifer forest types, particularly on the east side, but also on the west side that have had a whole generation, 100 years of infill from lack of fire with the grand firs and everything they're burning really hot and with the influence of climate change.

So we essentially have and we don't need to debate anthropogenic influence on climate change, but we can state factually that we're in a hot cycle with lots of drought, you know, so that the short and midterm reality check is record temperatures, dry and the fire people will tell you fires are acting really different than they were earlier in these same people's careers.

They're bigger, hotter, longer, uh, fire seasons. So anyway, that notion of the giant pulse of dead wood on big chunks of the landscape is more frequent. And generally, uh, even with that dead wood, well, no, okay, so the dead wood represents opportunity for forced recovery because it's, you know, it's standing here, uh, habitat for woodpeckers and little birds and everything.

The bird community actually often kind of quote benefits in quote from fire because suddenly it's more open. There's more insects. The shrub and grass layer often recover pretty quickly, depending on the site. But some of these fires, you'd be surprised how lush it is five years later, you know, the stuff on the ground has come back.

And so... Those pioneer species. They work hard to get to come back in right away. They do. It's true. And the, and the shrubby species, many of them sprout from the roots afterwards. So that, that pulsing of the amount of wood is just a reality. Um, when it happens, you know, and that, that's what it is. And then how many of us have been walking around in a wet west side forest and you come upon this burned tree, there'll be some like burned out, hollow, ancient cedar that's got fire all in the middle of it.

You've seen that before. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. And you bump into that and it's like, holy smokes. So that's a relic of the fire that burned through 200 years ago. The Yacolt burn down there in Southwest Washington, that fire ripped through a whole bunch of mature Douglas fir in what? 1910.

Something like that. 14, something like that. Burned a couple million acres, whatever. There was hardly any settlement started in logging slash, but, but that fire, I've been out on landowner's properties in that fire scar. And here are these snags that are like, oh, gosh, I'm holding my arms out four feet, five feet in diameter, 60 feet high busted off and they're ones that they didn't harvest when they salvage logged after the fire because they were already snags and they're out there on the landscape.

And then have they survived subsequent burns? Like is there a concern for, you know, with the fires increasing in severity and becoming more frequent. Specifically, I guess more for west side fires and maybe this relates a little bit to the frequency of east side fires. But is there a concern for a reduction on that pulse of dead wood or like a, you know, maybe there's a large pulse with the first fire and then much of that becomes consumed with subsequent fires?

Is there a concern in that sense? Or are they still far enough apart? And is the wood still, um, still less consumable than makes a difference. Do we know the answer to that yet? You know, I haven't, I haven't really looked into that. I was just thinking when you say concern, I mean, you, you might puzzle over it as an outcome of the fire, but I would say it's not an active management concern.

Pretty much active management, uh, dead wood is an afterthought. I think we're going to get to that. And it's one reason that I advocate for it. So I, you know, I don't know. And I, and I, I really think that the presence absence of Deadwood insistence is definitely, um, I don't want to reuse the word incorrectly, but the pulsing of it is influenced by what happened last time.

Let's say, let's say in a, in a clear cut regime, you know, where you do an even age harvest, you pretty much knock everything over, grow the trees back, do it again. Your snag component is pretty much eliminated across multiple entries. And so you could have a fire situation where suddenly you had all these snags, they're blackened or not.

And like, Yacolt, that's probably a really good example. Subsequently, you come in. Do active forestry under them, leave these structures there, but they're not replaced. And so in 80 years, when they finally fall over another, a log in the tree farm.

It would just change that. It would change that pulse. Okay, so it just transitions to a different type of deadwood, wouldn't necessarily eliminate it per se. Yeah, exactly. It would transition to a different type. And sometimes in fires, I have to say, sometimes in fires, depending on the tree itself, sometimes they do burn up.

Sometimes the, you know, like a standing snag will get fire in it. And the firefighters, it's, it's sort of old school thinking, but there's some truth to it. When you get a hollow punky dead tree, it'll hold fire for a long time. And so they often will fall them out when they're firefighting. And you know, the, the big tree laying on the ground that I'm like, oh man, that was a great woodpecker tree, but they had to cut it down because it was spitting sparks out of the top of it to spread the fire.

And so the, the, the conventional wisdom in the past was once upon a time that all dead trees are fire risk. They need to be cut down and we've kind of come around the ecological value of it has been highly determined. So can I add something about that? Yeah, please. Historically. In the practice of forestry, dead wood was considered waste.

It was considered occupying, you know, growth sites. We wanted to grow trees, you know, nice and vigorous for harvest. And it wasn't until Jerry Franklin and his cohorts at H. J. Andrews In like the seventies, they started doing this research on old growth forest, and they started to determine some of the really important ecological roles of dead wood, which include habitat features for woodpeckers and cavity excavators, which I think we're going to get to here in a minute, but just all of these different intricacies of how the forest ecosystem works and what a hugely important role dead wood carries. Hey, this is the moment to pitch Ellen's book. Ooh, yes, please. Can you, um, I just, Ken's holding up the book right now, but nobody can see it.

Lauren and I are on a zoom looking at each other here, but you guys can't see that. It's called a "Dead Wood: The Afterlife of Trees," written by Dr. Ellen Wohl, from Colorado State University, and I hope she can hear this, because this is just such a wonderful treatment of... Dead Wood. And um, she does a nice job with it.

Published by Oregon State University Press, we might add. So, uh, Lauren, I don't know if you send out links or anything, but I might put a link to that book if you do. Yeah, we have a resources page that, for each of our podcast episodes, so we'll make sure to put a link to that book. I really like it because she writes in kind of, uh, layperson terms, all these things I'm describing.

Just the whole storyline of how a dead tree changes. It fascinated me a long time ago. And I even, I, I'm, I know you've all read it. Lauren, you've read Primary Cavity Excavators in Grand Fir Forest of Washington's East Cascades, haven't you? Oh yeah, sure. Yeah. That was my, it's my. Hasn't everybody? Well, I haven't finished the movie script yet, but we're working on it.

No, that was my master's thesis. I did a master's on snags and woodpeckers and I have to send it my way. It's now I'm definitely interested. I don't think it's digital yet. Oh, that means I have to scan the whole bloody thing. Um, no, that was 1994 or whatever it was, but I, it's just been this, this mind blowing expansion over the years of something that, uh, I had inklings of years ago.

So, uh, Dead Wood, the book does a really nice job of describing some of these kind of storylines without too much technical detail, you know, to bog down in beetle and fungal species and sort of things. Again, it looks like in the book, she sort of talks about the various stages. I haven't had the pleasure of reading it yet, but I'm really looking forward to, to it.

Um, but the various different places in the landscape and then the different stages of, um, forest types. Yeah, and different mechanisms of deadwood function in different ecosystems too. So a big variable in regard to the trajectory of a given dead tree is the tree species itself. They're really different.

Um, in how they decay the different, uh, fungal sources and everything. So, uh, you know, when you're selecting, if you, if you have the luxury of selecting a tree to be a habitat snag, uh, in general, your longer live conifers last longer, you know, but I've, I've had people say like, well, Cottonwoods aren't good wildlife trees, why they don't last very long.

Well, they still stand for 30 years. I'll take 30 years, you know, as opposed to 300 for a Cedar. Okay. Cedar's better, but you know, we take what we can get. So, um, I'm, I'm skipping forward a little bit in regard to management. Cause sometimes the punchline will be like, okay, Ken I get it?

You know, deadwoods, great habitat, which ones. And I think maybe we'll get there, but which ones and how many. Because if you, because if you can, if you buy into the notion that deadwood is an important part of the ecosystem and therefore I should include it in my active management regime, we, we got somewhere because that means we're going to actually choose to incorporate these features as part of our land management.

So speaking of how many, do you have an idea of what stage of forest we see the most dead wood? You know, is it, is it when, you know, all the trees are really close together competing and, you know, so then lots of trees are dying, but it's all small wood, or is it, you know, during an old growth stage where there's lots of, there's maybe, you know, it's bigger wood or when, when do you think is the stage where we see the most dead wood? You mean, uh, in terms of stem count or volume, because you actually just brought up something pretty significant that in your stem exclusion phase, you know, where you're, where your stand is really crowded, you've got 400 trees per acre of whatever species, sure enough, there's a point where crown exclusion and everything starts to kill a whole bunch of trees and you might have.

Oh, and then, then, then root rot starts to kick in. So I'll speak to, to Western Oregon and Washington forest now in many of our, uh, mid seral younger forest, uh, the root rot shows up, which was already in the soil and there'll be this pocket of dead trees, but there'll be, uh, eight to 12 inches in diameter and there'll be a whole bunch of them.

Um, and then in an old, old forest, you know, I mean, we're talking mature beyond. So in terms of succession, uh, mature is a broad phase, let's say from 80 to 250 years old growth is actually a structural condition that we don't have very often. In managed landscapes we don't get there or we haven't yet. I should say, um, and so I actually don't like to refer to old growth other than as an example of a potential, if that makes sense, because my, because my audience is small landowners and small landowners usually are interested in some form of active management to achieve their objective of a healthy, aesthetically pleasing forest.

And so, um, to answer your question, it depends. That's by the way, audience foresters and biologists are notorious for dodging hard questions because people really want an answer. They'll say like, well, how?

Okay. How many per acre we're going to get there, by the way, right? How many do we need? How many do we need? Yeah, Ken, how many do we need per acre of dead trees and dead logs? Good. I said, I have an answer for that. So we are bouncing around here. We were going to get to management last, but we're jumping in and out of it.

So there's been a lot of work done on wood, woodpeckers now. We'll just we'll start here with woodpeckers that a woodpecker is a keystone species in the forest ecosystem dependent on dead wood for key life history characteristics, which I think we can elaborate on here in a minute, um, they they'll have a home ranges.

That'll have somewhere between eight and 25 snags per acre, uh, with the definition of a snag being 10 inches in diameter and 15 feet high. So there's a whole nother thing. What is a snag? Um, and that's biasing for woodpeckers. So to have enough for functional territories of woodpeckers and I like to use a Hairy Woodpecker as my sort of, uh, common woodpecker.

So Hairy Woodpecker's about the size of a robin, they're pretty much ubiquitous in all the forest types. They'll have home ranges of 40 to a hundred acres, and they'll need somewhere between four and eight per acre, for a nesting territory. For foraging, they can use smaller wood and logs and they'll actually expand their territories.

So forest practices in Washington actually requires retention of two, uh, wildlife reserve trees per acre. Which is sort of a dubious standard, but the two comes from the low end of some of those studies of Hairy woodpecker territories. So I will recommend to people try for, try for four, if you're actually counting and make two of them earlier decay hard, two of them soft.

So I will, I will, I will say to people, try for four to eight, if you're really, really counting.

Yeah, we always say in Oregon the law is also two, and we always say, but it's always the minimum, you can put as, leave as many as you want. Exactly. That's the minimum, which is probably not enough, but it depends. I mean, if you had two, you know, 20 inch broken off Douglas firs with cavities all in it and everything and you, and it was a even age harvest, that would be great habitat for flickers.

Let's say so you could have flickers in there, you would have bluebirds perching on the top, et cetera, et cetera. So I, I will say four to eight would be a target, but my qualifier was going to be, nobody really counts. We say all this stuff. We're always given these guidelines of trees per acre, et cetera, but our landowners don't count.

They count on us for the, for the eyeball assessment. So my main approach is to generate appreciation for the value of these structures, and then try to help people know what a really good one looks like. And you keep those or even make them if you're, if you're in an active management thing and you're, and you're willing to either hire a tree climber or when people are harvesting, you got that hot saw thing, you know, the mechanical harvester.

Oh my God. Those are so good for making snags. Reach up 12, 15 feet. A guideline, throw this out all the time is if you have butt defect and you're mechanically harvesting, snip it off, make a, make a high stump and um, they'll get used. Oh gosh, they get used. So 4 to 8. So, okay. So a butt defect, what are some other, you said you like to let landowners know what a good one looks like.

What's, what are some other features of what a good one looks like? Nice. Um, broken off. Larger diameter, um, woodpecker excavations, just telling you that it's being used, that it has, it's already in the rot trajectory where it's being selected for, uh, use by woodpeckers and so that, that's just kind of a way in for, uh, the functional ecology of the dead wood using the woodpecker as your, your representative.

Maybe this is time to talk about woodpecker. I was just going to say, we had a plan to talk about some, some of the different users and woodpeckers are primary excavators, right, Ken? Yeah, well done. Let's, are those the ones? So those are the ones that make the cavities. There's no other animals that do. Do we rely on woodpeckers for that?

Yes. So a dead tree can have a hollow in it. It's sort of like this concept. So hollow basically is a place inside of the dead wood that can be utilized by an organism for something cover usually or nesting. So woodpeckers that that's a descriptive group, by the way, woodpecker is not a single genus.

There's a whole bunch of different, uh, phylogenetic categories within the realm of woodpecker. And woodpecker is a, uh, descriptive moniker for a, a group of birds that have chisels attached to their skull, combination, chisel and tweezer. They tend to have two toes up, two toes back and really stiff tails.

And they have the habit of feeding on insects, mostly insects, not all of them. Some of them will eat fruit and things, but in wood in dead wood and some of them will feed in the bark of live trees, but like, oh, you can't see the picture of the snag behind me full of a hole. So you go out of the forest and you see these big.

Rectangular shaped holes in a dead tree. And if it's a great big one, let's say two three inches by six inches, that's a Pileated woodpecker. So a Pileated would be a great example of a keystone species, meaning an animal that modifies the habitat to the benefit of others. So in the forest woodpeckers have this interesting life history habit of hollowing out a cavity.

In appropriate, uh, appropriate dead wood and that when you see that little round hole, okay, I'm holding up my hands right here in a little circle, then inside of that is this gourd shaped excavation that is usually like four times deeper than the diameter of that hole. And it goes down and this is like this perfect little cave for the woodpecker to lay its eggs and raise its babies in.

So woodpeckers are, um, um, oh, it's the word modern creatures in that the males and the females help brood. So at all times, when there's baby woodpeckers in there, this is generally true, either the male or the female is in there. So the male actually will sit on the eggs. Which isn't very common among bird species.

And so one of them is always in there. And so while those little helpless babies are in there, they're, you know, mom or dad is hanging out on the side of the cave and they've got a bloody chisel attached to their face. And there's only one entrance to their nesting cave. So if a squirrel or some other bad guy tried to come up there and eat their babies, they're really good at defending it.

So woodpeckers have a high fledging rate. And they generally don't double clutch, uh, meaning have a second brood in a given year. And so they, they invest a lot of energy into raising. And then once the babies get big enough and they're sticking their heads at holes, both parents can go out and gather bugs and come back and feed them.

And so they have a pretty high foraging rate. Well, they have this other tidbit that they will make a new cavity most years. And it's just part of their regular nesting and courtship behavior. They're, they're, I like to liken the, uh, oh, and the male woodpecker does most of the excavating. She tells him it's good enough or not.

And he'll... just like in our world, right? Kind of. I like the supervisor. She's the supervisor. The male woodpecker is like the carpenter that won't go to Home Depot. I gotta build my own. I gotta, I gotta build another cavity. Um, and you know, so in a natural system, there would be enough of these dead trees around that they could go find.

Okay, have you ever seen one? Lauren, I know you've seen one. There'll be a tree in the forest that has a whole series of woodpecker holes going down the tree. And they'll just be one above another, above another, above another. That's a tree where the rot trajectory essentially moves down or up in the tree.

And they'll just shift the position to where the wood is of the right, just right. Woodpeckers have this, this also, this percussive prospecting. So they'll go up the tree and they'll, you can hear me. And they'll tap on the tree for multiple reasons. One of them is they're listening for insect excavations and supposedly they have such good hearing that sometimes kind of like robins with worms, they'll, they'll hear the beetles in the tree like, and then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

So they'll go in and they'll chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. So I wish I had a visual here, but a woodpecker's tongue is approximately twice as long as its beak. And it's this sort of cartilaginous structure that has a barb tip and sticky saliva, and they will find that insect cave, slip their tongue in.

Oh, the song says that, um, skewer that little larvae sit back on their stiff tail and their legs. And that was good. Let's find another one. So they, they, and they can also determine where the right, uh, what's the word density of wood is for cavity excavations. And so they'll actually go along the tree.

They did some research where they found that woodpecker cavity selected trees are harder on the outside than inside. So the, the, the outer layer of the tree, be it bark or just is harder than the middle so that the cavity stands up. That's pretty cool. So they all, yeah. Yeah. And they also... maybe they're better carpenters than we think.

Well, they also do this thing and I meant to mention this, this always comes up to you. So give a talk about woodpeckers and you know, I'll say something about their cool life history and somebody will raise their hand and go, then why did they bang on my house at 3 a. m. And most of us have heard that.

And it's on your tin siding. It's on that chimney cap thing. If you have a wood stove, you know, the little metal thing, and it's almost always a flicker, but Hairy's will do it too. And in the springtime, male woodpeckers will percussively display for territorial, uh, claims and they do it. I think this is interesting.

Their, their drumming pattern differs by species and it carries a long ways. And so when they go on the side of your house or a street sign or a, uh, a statue, I saw one doing it on a statue one time, this hollow brass statue thing, but it's like this, it's the boy bragging that this is my turf. And they're not tearing a hole for a nest when they're drumming like that, they, they, if they're on the side of your house and they're starting to like chip holes in it, then they're, they think there's bugs in there, then you gotta do something. But they, they do this amazing for this percussive drumming. They're, they're, they're, they display like that.

So that's their two types of tapping. There's actually three. There's digging for food, the percussive display, and then excavating a cavity. Now, you were describing the tongue before, and I'll never forget, I was sitting in one of your classes, and somebody was saying, asking you, I think, how do woodpeckers not have a massive headache from all this banging?

And I had, I remember you saying it said something to do with the length of their tongue, and when it sucks back in, it wraps around their brain, and that, is that right? Is that, am I remembering that correctly? That it, it helps, um, cushion their brain from all this pecking that they do. That's a really interesting question because I've done a little homework and okay, the tongue wraps around their skull.

There's this special chamber that goes right, and I, and Lauren, I actually had occasion to see where this fellow had dissected a Pileated woodpecker. Oh my goodness. And the tongue, the ends of the tongue split and ended at the nose, at the Aries on the bird's beak. So that meant that woodpecker was tasting from its nose with that, that tongue.

Whoa. Yeah. I was like, whoa. Uh. I was like, that is crazy. They have special adaptations to evade concussion and it was the, the conventional wisdom was it had to do with bursae, little fluids filled sacks in strategic places in their brain. So they had, they have padded brains to a certain extent that's in the song too, by the way, um, and they did some further work and they found that it also has to do with the geometry of the skull itself, that it absorbs the impact and disperses it without damaging the brain.

Um, and so there, there's some sports science types doing research on reducing head injuries in athletics, uh, using woodpecker brains as their biological model. Wow. That's so interesting. That is pretty interesting. And so there's just a whole bunch of angles to that because it makes sense. They're hitting that tree with their head at a really high rate, you watch them. It's like, holy smokes, I can't remember where I got this, but it was like getting punched in the head by Muhammad Ali repeatedly.

And how are you going to have that happen without getting a concussion? So yeah, so pretty cool. So woodpeckers have some really neat adaptations that enable them to, uh, uh, use that habitat resource and if that habitat resource is not present, they don't exist there.

It's like their, their critical limiting factors is the presence of adequate dead wood on the landscape in enough quantity to provide for a functional home range. I really like to make that point that if you want a certain wildlife species on your property, you have to give it everything it needs.

Food, water, cover within a reasonable range so that they can have a home range, meaning a functional area where they can succeed by way of survival and reproduction. If they don't reproduce and they're just surviving, it's a one and done. Right, but they need that wood to survive and to reproduce. Exactly. And to eat. And to find food.

Right. And so the, the wood, yeah, the wood pulse. And so, right. So, woodpeckers... I was going to go back to those cavities. So yeah, let's go to the, the abandoned cavities here in a second. Wait, before you do that, I just wanted to, um, highlight the couple of times that Ken said it's in the song. So for those of you listening, I want to explain what he means by that.

And Ken is not only a wildlife biologist, but an amazing songwriter and he writes a lot of fun songs about the wildlife that he studies and teaches about. And one of his most famous songs is about woodpeckers and we'll make sure to play that song as part of our podcast. Um, but Ken, tell us a little bit about just really quickly before we go into the cavity, um, species, tell us a little bit about your songs and if people want to listen to them.

Okay. Yeah, no, I, I write songs and, um, uh, I've been called a nature troubadour, which is flattering. It makes me giggle. Um, but yeah, I've written songs about bears and woodpeckers, ravens, salmon, uh, coyotes, and I have a whole set of them. Um, and yeah, Google me up and look up my name and YouTube, and you'll see the bear video that was actually produced by one of my friends, a tree farmer up in Washington.

And so I've been doing it a long time. You can find me, Google me, you'll, you'll find my songs and I use them in my teaching Lauren. And they're mostly, um, factual, mostly. I've, I've exaggerated a few things for the sake of humor. Um, yeah, and they're, they're, they're kind of like folk Americana, hopefully upbeat and fun to listen to.

And so this woodpecker song is called, uh, King of the Woods. And it's in the voice of a Kind of generalized woodpecker.

I'm a woodpecker, the king of the trees. I got padded brains, I do as I please. Hey, hey! I'm the king of the woods. I'm a crazy red hammer. I make cavities, holes for you, holes for me. Hey, hey! I am the king of the woods. I climb the tree tapping tappy tap, listening for that insect cave. When I find that hollow sound, I ax my way in and I slip in my sticky, sticky tongue. Yum!

I'm a woodpecker. The king of the trees. I got padded brains, I do as I please. Hey, hey. I'm the king of the woods. I'm a crazy red hammer, I make cavities. Holes for you, holes for me. Hey, hey! I'm the king of the woods. Got rhythm in my bones, I'm synchronized. I bang on the highest place I find.

I play my licks, I whack my tricks, I bang on my tree drum. And sometimes I sing just for fun. Hoot a da ha ha, Hoot a da ha ha, wicker, wicker, wicker, wicker, hey, hey. I'm the king of the woods. Hoot a da ha ha, Hoot a da ha ha, Wicker, wicker, wicker, wicker, hey, hey. I'm the king of the woods.

I'm the king of the woods, I'm a woodpecker, the king of the trees. I got padded brains. I do as I please. Hey, hey, I'm the king of the woods. Hey, hey, I'm the king of the woods.

Okay. So, thank you. Thank you for that plug. Yeah. Let's talk about now. Let's go back to the cavities. And so, you know, you said that woodpeckers or at least a pileated woodpeckers, you know, make a new cavity every year.

They all do. Yeah, oh, they all. Okay. So all woodpeckers make a new cavity every year. So what happens to those, the old ones? Sometimes they will rework a previous cavity flickers do that and they'll kind of clean it out and shake it up. So, but, but that hollow and I say hollow because a hollow in a tree could also be naturally derived from a broken branch or a little bit of heart rot and the tree cracks.

So there are other mechanisms for wildlife to be able to get literally inside of a tree, which is great shelter, you know, food, water, cover. So wildlife needs three things. They got to have something to eat. They got to get a drink either from their food or from water. And they rest, they got to hide. They have to raise their young.

The cover is the thing that we actually can manipulate a lot in our management. Um, down on the ground and such. So, when a woodpecker makes the cavity and moves on, it is sought after. It's hot real estate for a whole cluster of other species. Many birds, um, like, uh, if it's open country, bluebirds are secondary cavity nesters.

Oh yeah, that's the term for the followups or the secondary cavity species. So there's many birds, blue, bluebirds, chickadees, swallows, tree swallows, or obligate cavity nesters. Meaning they got to have one, um, mammals like Douglas squirrels, red squirrels, flying squirrels. Flying squirrels are relatively ubiquitous in forests that are old enough to hold them.

But they must go inside of something during the day. They're fully nocturnal and they just love woodpecker cavities. So, um, yeah, and insects too. Like a lot of times like paper wasp will make their nest inside of these cavities. So the woodpecker cavity. Once it's no longer used becomes, uh, uh, uh, opportunity for a whole bunch of creatures, uh, Marten like to use them.

They'll get inside of them. Uh, so yeah, there's a whole bunch of second. Oh, I like to point out owls. So owls being a really interesting group of species, no owl in the world knows how to make a nest. They have to find something, a platform, uh, something, a broken top tree, like the big owls, like great horns, uh, love to find broken top snags that have got a hollow spot.

And sometimes they'll use, uh, uh, uh, old platforms and things from mistletoe and things, but the small owls, like the little saw-whet, the screech, the pygmy, they have to have something to go inside of. And they utilize abandoned woodpecker cavities big time. And so kind of a classic are our screech owls, uh, using holes in cottonwoods, uh, where woodpeckers have made their holes.

So the small owls need these cavities. So lots of things using the abandoned woodpecker cavities. Um, and so that is, that's where their Keystone role comes in. And Keystone is a species that affects the environment in such a manner that it benefits other species. Um, beavers are a great example. They make wetlands for all the wetland species and they kill a bunch of trees, by the way, beavers will flood.

Yeah. Forest land and create this cluster of snags, I read something that suggested that tree swallows that can't really go into the deep forest, but they use cavities may be co evolved with beavers creating snag patches around wetlands, which would be open. And then the woodpeckers would put holes in those and then the tree swallows could go right into them.

Wow. That's. That's kind of an interesting tidbit there. So yeah, so the secondary species are usually, and then you start thinking about all the creatures that we like in the forest and a whole lot of these birds are predators on insects that otherwise damage the trees. So I would suggest, and we've never really codified this, but maybe we sort of have the very fact that the forest practices acts include wildlife trees.

I think that's giant because that's acknowledging the importance of all this stuff we're talking about. Um, that a truly healthy forest has a full cohort of these predatory species, birds in particular that eat the bad bugs that would want to kill our trees. And so there, there's, I don't, I don't know if it's been very well documented, but you know, how many woodpeckers does it take to suppress bark beetle populations that are attacking other trees?

A chickadees, a nuthatch is going up the side of the tree, eating a spruce budworm larvae, other songbirds. Uh, and so bird predation on bad bugs could be hugely important for maintaining some sort of, uh, forest health stability, you know, because, because the whole concept of forest health is way more than a, uh, happy green tree that can resist drought, though.

That's kind of our emphasis. Right, yeah. I had a professor at school that always said, you know, a healthy amount of a healthy forest has a healthy amount of dead trees. And so... Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, just thinking about the role that, you know, dead wood plays and keeping wildlife habitat, but that point that you just made and.

In making homes for insects that feed, you know, the wildlife, but also save some, maybe save some of those healthy trees from becoming future dead trees. Um, Yeah, seriously... at too large of an extent is, you know, a benefit. Right. I bet there's a sweet spot. I seriously think there's a sweet spot. And Lauren, this might address something that was coming up.

It's like, well, how much deadwood is too much. I don't know if there's too much or not. I think there is such a thing as not enough. And if you wanted a metric to make that statement numerical, it would be whether or not you were providing successful home ranges for your selected species of woodpeckers.

So let's, let's say, let's use a Pileated, let's speak to Pileateds for a second because Pileated woodpecker for those who, I bet everybody on here is familiar, but they're the woody woodpecker. They're like the size of a crow. They're, they're big, biggest North, biggest North American woodpecker. And they need trees at least 18 inches in diameter because they're a big bird to excavate into.

And they eat. Carpenter ants is one of their primary foods. And so carpenter ant colony in the forest would either be in a down logger in the heartwood of a live tree. And they have really big home ranges. Their home ranges can be 500 to 5000 acres. And this is from radio telemetry work, right? And so they're moving across the landscape to these key features.

So you could probably have Pileated woodpeckers persisting on the landscape with patches of the really good stuff for nesting and then down logs hither and yon for feeding on and so, you know, you could, you could use that as a focal species for landscape scale, uh, deadwood management. And I think the forest services actually sort of address that, but on a smaller scale, I would suggest a healthy forest includes adequate deadwood to provide for the woodpeckers as the representative of all those other things, because I don't think you could, you know, candidly in a meaningful manner, say what, how, what is the right number of down logs to be adequate for termites or ants or which one? I don't know. It gets hopelessly complex. Um, and I'm sure there are smart people at Oregon state university who are, who are working on that.

So I don't know what the right amount is. I almost want to say like, it's as much as you can leave as much as you're willing to tolerate within the realm of safety, usually safety becomes the rubric that the small landowners will operate under. Yeah, and that's why this podcast theme is around the wildlife biologist war cry that I came up with, more dead wood.

And that's only because I've never had a wildlife biologist tell me this is our war cry. But everyone I speak to who is a wildlife biologist, the first thing that comes out of their mouth is, well, we need some more dead wood. Need more dead wood. Well, you know, okay. The reason for that, too, is that human activity tends to remove it.

I mean, how many of us, I like to ask this question. Here we are. We're in the life class. Okay. Everybody listening. All you podcasters out there. Have you ever cut down a snag for firewood or been with someone who did raise your hand, raise my hand. Right. Bigger ones are better. Cause they're better firewood.

Yep. And while we do that, if there is a road. And you can get at it and people have been gathering firewood for years and years and years. They're gone. They're actually gone. There's vast areas of the forest where there aren't any large diameter snags within a hundred yards of the road. Cause, and you know, land managers have encouraged it for reasons of consideration of safety, the notion of waste.

There are people who think they're ugly. This is what I think I really can push back on is, Oh, we gotta, I had a tree die and we need to, we need to get that out of there. And so they'll call the tree service and the tree service guys. To their credit, you know, do good work, but they'll say, sure, I'll take that tree down, they make more money if they take the tree all the way down.

So hazard to habitat, I get to pitch this. So if you have a tree in a developed setting, say like in your backyard and it's recently died, ask your arborist if they can make a habitat tree. And there's a whole bunch of them who know how to do this now. And what they'll do is essentially mimic the broken off tree.

They'll take the crown out, jag it up a little bit, and leave it where, if it did fall, it either wouldn't hit something, or they'll leave it so that it's short enough that it's not a short term threat. And then if they did have to remove it years from now, which can be 20, 30 years later, there's a place to drop it.

And so hazard to habitat is a, uh, a practice that is usually significant because of the developed footprint. You know, there's so, there's so much land out there. Um, and so the war cry of more dead wood is really a pushback on human management where we remove wood. And I, I have to, I have to describe this too, because our modern harvesting these days, we're doing it with these mechanical systems and a lot of it's whole tree yarding.

I don't know if you've seen this, but we all have. And the big snipper comes out there, snip, snip, snip, snip, snip, tong, skidder, takes it to the landing. They do the processing with another machine. They make this giant pile, this giant slash pile. And all of the wood came off of the site. And when they're done, it's really clean, even, even a few years back when you're, when you're hand falling with chainsaw and you'd leave the top out there, the top is out there in the unit.

So a lot of our modern harvesting is really cleaning up the site, probably outside of ecological goodness, if you want to call it that. So part of the reason for the war cry is to remind everybody the importance of this stuff. And there's ways to do it. And if it's, if it's incorporated into the management, it can be great.

I like that. The war cry more dead wood, more dead wood. Yeah. And then the, the foresters are like sometimes rolling their head or rolling their eyes I mean, is it you again? You again? No, it's true. It's true. And, and, and, and in those mechanical harvesting units, and I, I think I mentioned this earlier, it's really pretty straightforward to, to create a snag that's safe because here's one, the operator is in the cab and they can reach up and snip it off and there it is.

So yeah, you'll see those around. You'll see those on the landscape, uh, actually in quite a few places now where there'd be some harvest unit and there'll be these 20 foot stumps. And I've had people say like, why'd they do that? I'd say, well, that's a habitat feature. Yeah, I've seen, starting to see that more and more.

It's pretty great. Yep. Okay, so we talked about, you know, nesters, cavity nesters, um, of the primary sort and of the secondary. Okay, so then those are ones that are typically in snags, right, so our standing dead trees, and then those trees tend to fall. And become dead wood. Is there, so then we see a new host of characters, right?

Nice. That, that use up our, our downed logs. Yes. Yeah, so the down log on the forest floor, a whole new set of things starts to happen. And some of them are birds. So there'll be like a wren, uh, like a winter wren, uh, could be down there on the ground and the bark on the, the down log is starting to separate.

They could nest right in there. They're foraging on it. And now, now the piece of wood is, is either right next to, if it's not in contact with the ground. Immediately it will be when the whatever branches and such that are holding it up fall and now it's in contact with the ground and this whole, uh, pretty remarkable decay sequence happens there where, you know, there's more moisture, even in dry settings, there's a lot of moisture and wood holds moisture.

So this thing will be like a big, uh, compost, uh, roll. Is that somebody described a down log as a, as a compost roll and it'll be moist. And down underneath of it, a lot of the organisms, the wildlife, well, not the first, first insects. I mean, there'll be springtails. I mean, do this sometime, go out in the forest and where the duff is around a big rotting log, just kind of pull it apart slowly.

And you'll bump into a centipedes, uh, those, those roly polys. What are those guys? Those little guys, they'll be in there. Sometimes you'll see termites. If you're really lucky, you'll bonk into a salamander that's down there in some, some interstitial tunnel. And it's always surprising to me when I do that, how many open spaces they're down there in that.

In that, uh, rotten, you know, duff pile, um, even going up under the log. So some of the other organisms that live there are amphibians. So in Western Oregon and Washington, uh, down wood is critical habitat for a whole bunch of our amphibian fauna, uh, the little frogs, the salamanders, uh, that live in those tunnels that are sometimes created by small mammals, so there'll be voles, for example, that will go down there and make their little, and mice too, that'll make their little labyrinth of tunnels down under that, uh, rotting log, which stays moist.

And so these guys will be down there eating the insects that are eating the fungus that's growing on the wood that came from the tree that Douglas fir built. Or you don't remember that house, the house that Jack built. And so there's a whole nother ecosystem that emerges from the down, the down log, which is just, uh, it's pretty much only reptiles too.

Uh, so that's where a lot of like our, our garter snakes and in drier country, uh, lizards really like down logs for these sort of things. So a lot of the organisms that are, oh, what's the word? Supported by down wood are little. I mean, every now and then there'll be like a, a rough grouse would stand on the log and flap its wings or a bear come along and tear the log apart to eat bugs, to eat termites in there.

Everything. I've probably seen that. I like that, that a bear would feed on a down log. Supposedly, and this count is, it's variable, but, um, about a hundred of our vertebrate wildlife species in the Pacific Northwest forest are dependent on deadwood for some part of their life cycle. And so it's somewhere in the order of 25 to 40 percent of our vertebrate species are somehow dependent on deadwood.

Some more than others, woodpeckers, you know, but their life histories are tied to it. And because yeah, Of that level of, of, uh, value, that's one reason that I promote it all the time, because it's something that is heavily influenced by our management strategies. And it's something we can, we can actually work on, you know, we can, we can apply these concepts to provide it.

So the down log is a pretty remarkable feature itself. Yeah, that's such an interesting point that we know when we're managing for wildlife, you'll often hear people say, you know, well, what kind? Because each wildlife species needs different habitat characteristics. But when you're with the person who's like, I want it all, then you can be like more dead wood because it'll help most of them if you can.

And, and you're gonna, and you're gonna get the other stuff by default. Or, you know, so the shrub layer, uh, you're going to grow trees, you know, so in forestry, we're really good at growing trees. That's what we do. We space them out. We get the right species in the place.

We reduce competition, you know, all that cool stuff, which is totally laudable and totally wonderful. And in general, whatever shrub layer we get is something we tolerate as long as we've got the overstory going. Cool. You know, and so the shrub layer usually, I mean, like, uh, you know, you go into a West side stand, even East side, uh, the shrub layer, it occurs sometimes it's different.

Sometimes you can enhance it, but we don't have to really pound on that, uh, in regard to habitat management. So, um, yeah, I know, I know I have my own bias from, from my background, but that's a big part of the reason for banging on a dead wood so much that it's something we can actually actively include in our management.

That might be a nice segue to enhancements too. Yeah, sure. So, um, great, so what other, so we talked a little bit about putting more dead wood, um, or put creating more snags and, um, finding ways to not remove sort of the dead wood, but what are some other ways that we can manage for increasing dead wood on our landscape?

Well, many of our stands that we're managing are overstocked. You know, they're in an earlier seral phase for whatever reason. They're growing back from a fire. We planted them densely and we'll have all this material. Oh, and in, in drier forest fuels reduction. If you're in a dry forest to a fire guy, a tree is fuel. To a forester it's a tree. To a biologist it's a habitat feature.

Anyway, you're going to have all this material. To work with, so a couple of things you can do and Lauren mentioned that you could actually, uh, maintain or create a snag. Like, you might have a dead tree in the wrong place. And if you could manage to take the top out of it somehow, then it's no longer as much of a hazard, meaning it's, but that you can make, uh, piles of the dead material.

And I like to call them habitat piles. So if you have a whole bunch of material, uh, and there's too much on the ground and you want to consolidate it. I always ask how many people have ever seen a chipmunk or a bird on a brush pile. You know, pretty much everybody. It's the fastest thing you can do to benefit wildlife in the short term is to put all that material together.

And if you build a habitat pile, meaning one that you intend to retain, meaning not burn up or chip, then there's, there's methodologies for creating that, where you basically put the larger material on the bottom, finer material on the top, at least six feet across something like that, and it'll get all kinds of use from, from species.

And if it's a habitat pile, you don't mean to burn it or dispose of it. So those are really good feature two per acre by the way, I know you're going to see how many, um, and when you're doing a thinning project, you're going to wind up with 20 of them. We're doing, we, Washington's DNR is promoting fuels reduction all around dry forest.

We even pay for it. Is Oregon, do you have some programs like that? We do. We do have some cost share programs for fuel reduction. And so if people want to include wildlife habitat as one of their values, then retaining a few habitat piles is a recommendation. Another one is you can make a log surrogate, which is you take the smaller diameter stems and lay them parallel to each other in a little pile.

And so you basically have a concentration of wood. That's a, well, it's a surrogate for a larger log. And because people are worried about the fine fuel. So most, most of what carries a fire are the, the finer branches and leaves and every, or excuse me, uh, needles and such. So those you can remove and you can make these log circuits.

Another one is a nest box. And so nest boxes are replacements for cavities. They're not a perfect replacement because they're made out of, you know, wood you rough up the inside, there's lots of different ways to do them, but I really like nest boxes because they will get used by the secondary species immediately.

And you can put them all over the place. And there's lots of different methodologies and sizes and everything. But if, if people choose to do nest boxes, I always suggest do a bunch of them, do 10, do 20, do 50, um, and, uh, put them where you can clean them out and look at them and you will get chickadees, you'll get squirrels, you'll get all kinds of stuff.

So, uh, concentrations of down wood. Maintaining snags where you have them, maybe creating them if you have the opportunity. Piles, surrogates, boxes. It's kind of the same, that's my, that's my songbook. I always go back to the same, the same stuff. Is there a way during various, so you're, so you talk about, um making snags if you can, and you talked about using a hot saw to sort of like top trees, um, during like clear cut operations.

What about during thinning operations? Are there ways that you can, you know, cause we, there's a lot of, you know, we do a lot of thinning to, for healthy forest and we'll usually remove trees from below, which could potentially have been the future trees to die.

That would be creating snags. Is there a way that we can create snags? Or would you just still recommend the same process to do topping trees during thinning operations, too? Well, you know, thinning, you're on, you generally, your, your workers are on the ground, right? You're not, you're not using the hot saw.

Yeah, it would be an expensive thinning. It would be a totally, yeah, and that's, that's cost prohibitive. No, one thing you can do is, uh, in order to kill some of the trees that you want to get rid of for Drew's company, you can girdle them and, and make a four to six inch, uh, swath around the bottom. It kills the tree.

It stands there as a food source. And I actually saw this one time. This guy had done a bunch of thinning. It's NRCS or somebody had recommended girdling and he had girdled hundreds of trees in this unit like 20 years earlier. A bunch of them were standing there with all kinds of woodpecker feeding holes in them.

And a bunch of them had brought it out at the girdle and had fallen over. And so now you have a bunch of down wood. So, but that is one way to do it. And in a thinning, you're going to have lots of material. My God, you're gonna have so much material. Um, so yes, girdling would be one way to do that. Great.

That's a great idea. I totally forgot about girdling. Okay. Well, awesome. Anything else you want to add Ken to our discussion? Those are all the topics that I think we had discussed about touching. Anything else? More dead wood! More dead wood! More dead wood! More dead wood! Charge! Oh, wait, no, um, yeah, and for those who've worked with, uh, biologists and foresters, that's, hopefully I've offered some thoughts on why that always comes up because it's just such an important element in the natural ecosystem that it's an easy thing to overlook.

And, uh, you know, we tend to, we tend to use deadwood for firewood as one of the biggies, or we're afraid of it and the value for all of these cool species. Is, is pretty enormous.

And so I've become a woodpecker aficionado over the years. So Lauren, I'll offer this. So my, I live in Eastern Washington. We have, my wife and I have 15 acres and it was a Ponderosa Pine Savannah with a bunch of bitter brush. And we got a fire and our fire started on a flat tire on a trailer on the highway.

I live up in the Methow Valley and it burned through here. The firefighters saved our house. That doesn't say, right, but it killed all my pine trees. And so in an irony of the world, the snag guy owns a snag patch, right? And it's been nine years now. And for the first couple of years, the trees were all standing intact.

We had, uh, Pileateds coming in at year three, two and three flaking big chunks of bark off to get at beetles underneath. They didn't nest there and they were in, there was, there was like four or five of them at a time. They're gone. They've moved on. A bunch of the trees have broken off, a bunch have tipped over.

But we got Lewis's woodpeckers three years ago. So it took six years for the trees to soften enough for Lewis's woodpeckers. And then bluebirds and kestrels. And all of these things using these stems and those species did not occur here before the fire and the shrub layer, I might add, has responded like crazy.

And we have, we have, it was a total shift in the bird community, you know, right in front of my eyes. And so just, just that, that the, the, the pulse, yeah, the pulse to reuse the word from earlier of dead wood in our particular little microcosm of a forest, uh, has been kind of eye popping, uh, for how that changed the bird community.

So I don't think there's any good or bad. I always find that an interesting. Uh, terminology to throw in there because it just kind of is what it is. And as small forest landowners, we have the opportunity and I would suggest responsibility to manage our forest well, to provide, provide for all the benefits that we get from our forest lands.

That's pretty good closer, right? Yeah, yeah, pretty good. I love that you have that whole story that we talked about with how forests grow and and how fire plays a role in that and then sitting you were sitting on this little story of your own personal experience of of this exactly happening. And so that's so great that we can.

Not only see that, you know, from experience from the different research and the larger landscape that how deadwood is developed and, and, and sticks or how long it takes to be on the landscape and sticks around. And then you get to sit there. It's probably a pretty scary experience and maybe a sad one at first for your property to, um, have fire move through it.

But you know, the, maybe the little light of being able to watch the different woodpeckers come in and see it in real life is been. But that's well, that's well said. Yes, it was extremely shocking because it burned down to dust and it killed all the trees. By virtue of heat. And so, yeah, so in regard to dead, in regard to dead wood and living with fire, I got cred.

You got cred. Yes. Okay. Cool. Well, Lauren, thank you so much. I'm just tickled to get a chance to participate with you here on this wonderful podcast. Well, I loved having you, Ken, and I loved learning from you and, um, but don't leave us yet. We still have our lightning round and for all our listeners today, if you had any other questions come up or we didn't cover a topic related to Deadwood that you were hoping we would, make sure that you visit us on our website and leave a comment.

Um, or a voicemail so that we can answer those questions on a future episode. Okay, Ken, stick around. We're gonna ask you some more personal questions.

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Okay, Ken. So as usual, we have a few final questions that we ask all of our guests. And I feel kind of silly asking the wildlife biologist this question.

Um, but what's your favorite tree? A dead one. A dead one. You mean like species? Perfect. Yes. Well, I meant species, but a dead one is a perfect answer for this podcast. So, but if you'd like it to add a species, you're welcome to. Or give us your favorite woodpecker or bird? Um, west Western Larch. And uh, Pileated Woodpecker.

Western Larch. Western Larch is a good one. Um, I'll never forget when I was, um, it was great. I was out on a field trip on the east side and I was with a land, uh, forester that I just totally respected. I thought like knew everything about forestry and he pointed to a couple, a pack of trees and he was like, well, what's with these dead trees?

And then he was like, oh, wait a minute. These are larch and forgot that it was the winter. So they had, um, shed their needles for the year. And it was just so humbling because I was like, okay. We're not all perfect, and we don't all know everything, and, but this is also this awesome tree that has this unique ability to act deciduous.

Okay, so our next question is, what is the most interesting thing that you bring with you into the field, whether it's in a cruiser vest or a field kit or your pocket? What do you mean interesting? I don't know, anything. What do you bring in the field that helps you do your job that, you know, most that, you know, if you didn't have it with you, you would, it would be hard for you to do the work you do.

Oh, binoculars. It's the binoculars are like the badge of office for a biologist. You know, like foresters, it's the hard hat and the vest with the D tape and everything in there. And the biologist has to have their binoculars because you're going to see something up there in the tree and they go, what's that?

And you're supposed to be able to look at it and say what it is. Right, and you need those binoculars to do that. Okay. And then, um, lastly, what resources would you recommend to our listeners if they are interested in diving a little bit deeper into dead wood? I guess we have our Dead Wood book that we spoke about earlier, and we'll have a link to that.

Is there anything else? Woodland fish and wildlife. That series of articles, so woodlandfishandwildlife.com, and there's a whole library of articles for small landowners. That's a really cool 30 year collaboration between Washington and Oregon and a whole bunch of different people, myself included. OFRI, Oregon Forest Resources Institute, has a whole bunch of neat publications.

And, uh... So does, um, well, Washington State University and Oregon State, but, um, uh, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has a couple of pretty cool, uh, little pieces, one, one called snags, the wildlife tree. That's an old essay. Um, so, you know. Um, I think if you, if you started with OFRI and does OSU as a library to, you know, don't you have a publication library?

Yeah, we keep, we, we have a few that we keep on the, um, knowyourforest.com website. There you go. That one. Yes. Yes. So I think those are good places to start. And then, you know, as with the, the universe of the internet, once you hit one, you can bounce to others. Look for, look for ones that are higher level overviews and not too far down into the weeds on, um, of the science of it because it gets so bloody complex.

Mm-hmm for appreciation of the ecological role of dead wood, there was a book that the Forest Service put out, Chris Maser put out a few years ago called "From the Forest to the Sea," and as this wonderful, uh, little descriptive journey of a tree turning into a snag, turning into a log, going to the ocean.

And I think that's available online. Chris Maser. Sounds interesting. And then what about, um, I know that you've developed some plans for creating wildlife habitat piles and bird boxes. Are those available online somewhere? Um, I think so. Do you want me to send them to you? Yeah, well, how about I will put them up on the website for that.

Okay. Yeah, I think that I think they are. I've developed a couple of handouts that were, I mean, I didn't invent them, but they were sort of like, what's the word boiling down to something useful for a landowner, you know, like a habitat pile. How do you build one? Well, here's a recommendation, a nest boxes.

Like if you go online and look up nest boxes, you're going to get boggled. There's going to be so many different sizes and holes and everything. And I'm convinced it's not that critical as long as they're deep enough. And the starter hole is about right. And you know, if you get a squirrel or a woodpecker, uh, flicker makes the whole bigger, so what great.

Right. Great. So, yes, yes, yes, there are, there are some resources like that out there. Okay. Lots of cool stuff today. I am so excited you joined us today, Ken. I have to say, I did not know that owls have no idea how to make a nest, so glad you shared that with me and that, um, Uh, really excited to dig under big logs.

I dig under logs anyway, because I, as you know, love amphibians and I'm a salamander, uh, enthusiast. And so, um, now I'll dig and see what else I can find under there. So when you dig, when you dig around in the duff under log, how often do you find like a little Ensatina or something? Uh, not as often as I'd like.

Exactly. And I think they're faster than you think. They hear you coming. Yeah, that must be it. Yeah, but I did find an Ensatina once while a mushroom I was I was actually looking for mushrooms and we were I was out picking chanterelles and I turn around and I look up and I was at the foot of a stump and I saw I actually what caught my eye was the little orange that's in their armpits.

So Ensatina have like little orange in the in the armpits of their arms and legs, and then I saw it and it was a little baby one and a juvenile and it was very cute. So. Very cool. See, there you go. Dead wood, amphibians. Lauren being a salamander aficionado.

Exactly. Nice. Well, I'm hoping that everybody that listened to this goes out and digs around under a dead log, you know, soon after this and does it enough to find some insects and stuff. Oh, and you might like bring a magnifying glass, take a kid with you, take a kid with you and start digging under a log and get excited about the bugs and the worms and things.

It's cool so dead wood has a lot going on there's life and dead trees as the old Forest Service saying was. That's a perfect way to end the podcast. Thanks, Ken. Thank you, Lauren. Thank you for having me. And, um, uh, nice to meet everybody out there in Oregon. Reach out to me if you, if I can be of help to you.

Thanks. Thanks, Ken. So this concludes another episode of In the Woods. Join us in a couple weeks to explore another topic on Oregon's amazing forests. But until then, what's in your woods?

Thank you so much for listening. Show notes with links mentioned on each episode are available on our website, inthewoodspodcast.org.

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Who are all members of the Oregon State University Forestry and Natural Resources Extension Team. Episodes are edited and produced by Kellan Soriano. Music for In the Woods was composed by Jeffrey Hino. And graphic design was created by Christina Friehauf. We hope you enjoyed the episode and can't wait to talk to you again next time.

Until then, what's in your woods?