While I’m quite sure that none of this is good for my personal health, it is a fairly organic part of the publishing process. There’s a chain of custody with each issue of the magazine. The individual parts are born of the writers and photographers who create them – each piece its own being, its own stand alone statement. Then the writers and photographers relinquish control of their work to me and my editorial staff. We modify their work to fit our template, to fit our overall vision, then we re-assemble the individual pieces to create a larger whole – this magazine. The fact that I no longer have any sense of the thing is, in some ways, the point; the magazine’s no longer mine once it’s published, it’s yours. I’ve relinquished control to you, the reader, and it’s your job now to make of it what you will.

In time I’ll go back and rediscover each issue as a reader. Someone will ask me why birch trees are white and I’ll consult Mike Snyder’s autumn Woods WHYS column to remember the answer. Maybe I’ll read something and disagree with it – this has actually happened before – and I’ll try to get some like-minded person to take us to task in a letter to the editor. On good days, though, I’ll read a back issue and simply enjoy it for what it is, a nostalgic feeling that brings me back to the days before I had anything to do with anything, days when I’d sit up in camp and wile an autumn evening away with a pile of Vermont Woodlands.

Before I sign off I would like to highlight one part of the autumn issue that I know, even now, will be a success: the poem, STOVEPIPE. The poet who wrote the poem, Verandah Porche, is a favorite of mine – a sentiment based both on the merit of her work and on the fact that she’s one of the people who taught me to love language in the first place. Like many kids who grew up in the Northeast, I first met Verandah as a grade schooler – she came to our school to show us how words can paint pictures, how they can make you laugh or ache, remember or imagine. How language can stimulate the senses – even touch, as certain words can feel physically pleasurable as they roll of your tongue. Language as song, as prayer, even as math. Look closely at her poem on page 65 and you’ll see it’s an acrostic – a form of poetic geometry. We could have tipped her hand with bold-faced caps, but I liked the idea of leaving it a secret for certain readers to discover. I never asked Verandah her thoughts on this presentation, but there’s a better than average chance that many years ago she’s the one who put this subversive idea into my head in the first place.

The amount of honey they can make astounds me, as it has for the past 45 years. There’s no getting used to it. In a week they can sometimes completely fill the nine frames that fit in a super – an astonishing feat if you consider that a fully loaded bee carries a drop of nectar that is about the size of the head of a pin.

Nectar is about 80 percent water and honey has less than 20 percent water, so, in the course of making the roughly 40 pounds of honey that fit in a super, the bees have brought in about 160 pounds of nectar and, in the dark stuffy confines of their hive, have evaporated about 120 pounds of water (14.4 gallons). All this in a week.

The construction of a wild bee hive – a pattern that beekeepers imitate – is astonishing as well. Hexagonal cells – and only hexagonal cells – fit together perfectly and bees use them interchangeably to raise new bees, store the pollen that is fed to the larvae, and to store honey. Each cell is tipped upwards at a slight angle, matched to the viscosity of honey, so that their sustenance doesn’t run out before they cap the cell with wax.

I do what I can to help them succeed. I’m the one who nailed all the parts of their hive and the frames together, and fitted each frame with a sheet of wax so the honeycomb would be straight and strong. In the winter a Styrofoam box gets duct taped around them, and a folded piece of hardware cloth across the entrance will keep mice out.

In the fall I’m going to leave them with 60 or so pounds of honey to carry them through the winter. I’ll take all the rest away from them. It will go to friends, into tea, and on to biscuits.

How much honey a hive produces in a year depends on a number of ecological and zoological variables – one factor that doesn’t come into play, however, is bee work ethic. They don’t make 70 pounds or 100 pounds of honey and then call it quits. They make every last drop they can. They don’t go on strike; they don’t work to rule. Instead, they go from one goldenrod floret to the next, as fast as they possibly can, from early morning to dusk.

People like me, with just a few hives, invest a huge amount of time and money into their insects. In economic terms, the bees aren’t getting ripped off.  I try any fad that comes along to reduce the damage done by varroa mites, replace hives and bottom boards that have a bit of rot at the corners, and replace aging queens at $29.00 a shot.

And still, as I stand watching all the traffic around a busy beehive, the unconditional industriousness on my behalf makes me feel immoral, as though I’ve duped and exploited them. Six weeks of flying wears the wings right off a bee, and my little, golden, furry friends perish by the thousands from over work, making honey that will soon be stolen by the bucketful.

The tree was an apple, a Cox’s Orange Pippin to be exact, and what I was trying to kill was the roundheaded appletree borer, which was doing its best to kill the tree. I knew it was there because I could see the orange, sawdust-like frass at the base of the tree, which showed that the larva was munching away.

In June and July, this insect lays eggs beneath the bark at the base of a tree. When the larvae hatch in two or three weeks, they start eating wood beneath the bark, tunneling up a few inches. They’ll stay in the tree up to three years, and their tunnels diminish the tree’s capacity for nutrient flow and compromise its structural integrity. I’d lost four planted apple trees to the borer 20 years ago when we planted them in the side yard the year we built our house. I don’t want to go through that again. First, the tree started to lose its leaves early. The next spring its foliage was sparse, and the third year, it didn’t leaf out. When I went to remove it, it broke off at its base, a sure sign that it was the work of the borer.

I’ve been to workshops for apple growers, and many of them have not been plagued by the borer. Lucky them. We have hundreds of wild apple trees on our land, most of them concentrated in an old pasture. Through the WHIP program, which pays cost-share funds to landowners to release and prune wild apple trees to benefit wildlife, I have freed 105 trees from competing trees. Some of the removed trees were softwoods, some cherries and soft maples, but many of them were fellow apples. In those cases, I had to choose which one to keep, based on form, fruit, and a little intuition.

Cutting the competing apples made it abundantly clear to me how extensive our borer problem is because nearly every one of the trees I cut showed tunnels in their stumps. The good news was that the wild trees had succeeded in growing more wood around the tunnels and had attained sufficient diameter to overcome the borer’s wounds.

It’s the newly planted stock that is most vulnerable, because the tunnels can constitute a large enough proportion of the trunk that it will snap off at ground level. Go take a look at your young apple trees now. Bring along a knife and a length of wire and be ready to put them to use if you notice orange frass at the base of a tree. Follow the tunnels with the wire and see if you can impale the larva. It’s a cream-colored legless grub that will grow from 1/8 inch on hatching to longer than an inch as it develops. Be willing to cut away the compromised bark that covers the tunnels. Keep looking. Kill the bug. Your tree’s existence depends on you.

For more on the roundheaded appletree borer, go to Cornell’s Integrated Pest Management website. Or read The Apple Grower: A Guide for the Organic Orchardist by Michael Phillips.

Before joining the team at Northern Woodlands, I served as Executive Director at NorthWoods Stewardship Center, a non-profit conservation organization in northern Vermont. A common refrain heard around the NorthWood’s office was that Vermont is like the country used to be, the Northeast Kingdom is like Vermont used to be, and the northeast corner of the Kingdom is like the Northeast Kingdom used to be.

Regardless of the validity of such comparisons, that corner of Vermont does contain some authentically beautiful country. If the Kingdom’s rich concentration of un-fragmented forestland – under various ownerships – were colored green on the state map, it would rival far better known protected tracts in the northern forest region. The near-boreal habitat adds another interesting dimension, with the likes of black-backed woodpeckers, spruce grouse, gray jays, and good numbers of moose and bear.

The area is also distinctive in its concentration of mountain hiking trails.  NorthWoods and author Luke O’Brien just published a hiking guide to these trails entitled Northeast Kingdom Mountain Trail Guide. Besides maps, the guide contains brief histories of the area and its fire towers, as well as other tidbits of interest that add depth to the hiking experience.  While I was only peripherally involved in this guide while with NorthWoods, to see the book in hand is cause for some personal celebration and this blatant plug.

Beyond the text and maps that guide the hiker from point A to B, the grounding in Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)  history and land ownership transitions reinforce the significant changes that forested landscapes have undergone over the decades, despite present appearances that may suggest little has changed over time.  Ironically, calls to establish a new iteration of the CCC model under present economic conditions can be heard from various voices.  How different would a 21st century CCC be from a 20th century one?

Sometimes a hike is just a hike – simple physical exercise in the great outdoors.  NorthWoods’ new guidebook can support that endeavor.  But it can also provide rich context to your journey through this neck of the northern forest.

A few weeks back, the Pinchot Institute, a national conservation organization, issued a press release that began:

Washington DC, June 11, 2010 – “Bioenergy technologies, even biomass electric power compared to natural gas electric, look favorable when biomass waste-wood is compared to fossil fuel alternatives.” Thus concludes a study released this week by the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, and by the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources, which funded the study.

Ten days later, the Biomass Thermal Energy Council released essentially the same press release:

WASHINGTON, June 21, 2010 - The Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study, a recently released report commissioned by the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (MA DOER) and authored by the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, affirms the environmental benefits of using biomass for thermal energy.

What’s surreal is that during this same timeframe, anti-biomass organizations nationwide were using this same 182-page study to claim that biomass is worse for the environment than coal. And unfortunately for those who see biomass as a proactive fuel source, most media outlets seemed to glom on to this later version of events. Google the words “wood worse than coal,” then take a gander at all the news outlets screaming just that in their headlines (and we’re talking ABC news, CBS news, AP, not just Coal Industry News.) I had a different incarnation of the Manomet-says-wood-is-worse-than-coal story come up for the first 49 entries in my search, an unbroken stream of misinformation until chowhound.com broke the string with a lively debate on wood/coal vs. gas barbeque techniques.

To their credit, the Manomet Biomass Study Team has released a more crisply worded statement of their findings. (See it at: http://www.manomet.org/sites/manomet.org/files/Manomet%20Statement%20062110b.pdf ). In this clarification, they state unequivocally that ‘wood worse than coal’ is an inaccurate interpretation of their findings. They reaffirmed the conventional wisdom that while burning wood does emit more green house gasses initially than fossil fuels, these emissions are removed from the atmosphere as harvested forests re-grow.

We’ll see if biomass proponents can use this statement to lure the cat back into the bag.

In the meantime, we’re hard at work on a story that sets the record straight on biomass. Across our region, communities are grappling with how best to harness biomass energy, and we aspire to be a source of information that people can use. The piece will cover biomass basics, and explore some of the frequent questions that seem to be swirling around the debate.

I’d love to know, as we’re working on the piece, what you think, what you wonder. What questions do you have about biomass? What don’t you understand, or conversely, what do you understand that’s not being reported? Thanks for your insight, and stay tuned for this story in the autumn issue.

In at least one case, our questions have been answered.

Many readers have contacted us in the last few weeks to ask about white pine needle damage. Around here, many white pines looked, in late May, like Tamaracks in November; as I write this, brown, dead needles are blowing off the trees around the office, leaving them looking pretty thin and scrawny.

Turns out the above average precipitation we had in May and June of 2009 is playing a role in the brown needles we’re observing in 2010. In Vermont, the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation reports that at least two different needlecast diseases have been identified on symptomatic pines. One is the Brown Spot Needle Blight, caused by Scirrhia acicola. The other is white pine needlecast, caused by Canavirgella banfieldii. Both of these fungal diseases were enabled by last spring’s wet weather, when ideal conditions allowed fungal spores to infect the interior needles of the trees.

Of course scientists, being scientists, are never content to blame any malady on just one source. Many suspect that the late frosts we had this spring – frosts that in most areas are going down as the worst on record – have also played a role in the needle damage. The early warmth, followed by the record cold, combined with the fungus, created a perfect storm. Oh, and by the way, the pine leaf adelgid – an insect pest – has also been reported as being more common than usual in certain areas.

Similar white pine needle damage has been reported throughout our readership area. The majority of calls to the Maine Forest Service this week involved questions about shedding white pines. The New Hampshire Division of Forest & Lands reports that on many sites, fungal outbreaks have been bad for the past three years, which makes this year’s dramatic damage troubling.

The bottom line is that if your brown pines are growing on a good site, and they’re otherwise healthy, they should be fine. They will shed their dead needles but their new shoots should grow normally. Mortality on lower branches may accelerate, but by July, the trees should be green, even while they look thinner than normal.

If the needles on your new shoots are still brown in July, you don’t have healthy trees. Foresters indicate that it’s certainly possible that this event could cause mortality among the weaker trees in a stand.

Fisherman love felt soles because they provide exceptional purchase on slimy river rocks. Unfortunately, the felt has a habit of staying wet for a long time, even though it can seem perfectly dry to an angler. It also traps dirt and silt. This makes it a Petri dish and a conduit by which aquatic invasives – including rock snot (didymo), whirling disease, and invasive plants – can spread from one stream to another. (To learn more about rock snot, check out the story we did on the subject.)

There seems to be broad support for the ban. Trout Unlimited, with its “no felts by 2011” policy, has been a driving force in legislative efforts around the country. More locally, the Vermont Traditions Coalition, a group who advocates on hunting and fishing issues, also supports the measure. The fishermen I talked to directly were none too happy about having to replace their boots, but all of them saw the need to do their part.

I spoke with Tom Ciardelli at Hanover Outdoors about alternative styles of boot, and he says that the new models feature rubber soles with metal studs added to them. On average, he said that the boots are slightly more expensive than their felt counterparts. He also stressed that they’re not a magic bullet – the rubber is less conducive to invasive spread, but it still has treads, and can still spread didymo. He gives away a free 5-gallon bucket with every pair of waders, and encourages fisherman to use bleach baths to sterilize their boots after every outing.

Ciardelli no longer sells felt boots, saying “it’s the right thing to do,” and reports that he hasn’t experienced much, if any, negative reaction from his customers. Some guides were upset that the metal studs on the new boots were marking up their canoes, but this is being worked out.

The counterarguments I do hear against the felt sole ban are pretty tepid. Troll the fishing message boards and you’ll find a few folks playing the public safety card, though I’m old-school enough that this just seems silly to me.

It is fair to wonder if, in the big picture, this added level of bureaucracy will have any lasting effect, since felt soles are far from the only way that aquatic invasives are spread. This gets into a broader question that can be applied to all of our invasive battles – namely, what battles are worth fighting, and when do we cut our losses? While driving recently, we’ve probably all noticed stooped landowners diligently pulling the chervil along their road frontages, only to crest the hill and find impossibly large swaths of the plant on an apathetic neighbors parcel.

Here at Northern Woodlands we recognize that there’s a hunger for answers to these know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em questions, and we’re actively looking for test cases where invasives control worked, and where it didn’t. When we find good answers, we’ll report them.

In the meantime, I’ll open the floor to you guys on this. Is the felt sole ban justified? Or is the horse already out of the barn? Are you a glass-is-half-empty person when it comes to invasive control efforts – if so, which invasives, specifically? Or do we have an ethical obligation as environmental stewards to battle these plants on every front, wherever we find them?

Where’s the line?

Turns out your hunch is accurate, at least about the buds and the Claritin.

Tom Simmons and colleagues at the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation have been monitoring sugar maple bud break at the Proctor Center in Underhill Center, Vermont, since 1991. The researchers’ primary goal is to monitor pear thrip populations, but their data also prove useful in tracking weather anomalies.

In the accompanying chart, you’ll see the evolution of this year’s sugar maple buds, in blue, compared against the 20-year average, in orange. The numbers on the vertical axes refer to different stages in a bud’s development. One is the initial bud swell, two is extended bud swell, three is when the bud scales begin to separate and green starts to show, four is “budbreak,” when the bud scales have fully separated, five is when the peduncles, or stalks, of the tree flowers extend, six is when the leaves begin to appear.

As you can see, everything is dramatically ahead of schedule this year.

It all leads to the question of what this is going to do to the trees. Simmons says that he has noticed some slight frost damage on leaves, but he says that this is not out of the ordinary. And barring anything really freaky, it seems that the trees are out of the woods by now. Like pear thrips, frost is most damaging in bud stages four and five, when everything is compressed. He analogized it to folding a paper into a tight square, and then cutting into it with scissors. Once a leaf has fully opened, which most have by now, late frosts can nip at the edges, but the damage is more dispersed and more easily absorbed.

One interesting question is whether the head start will help the trees, and Simmons says he doesn’t see why it wouldn’t. Assuming the weather returns to normal patterns, which may be assuming a lot, thirteen extra growing days are thirteen extra growing days.

For those of you not up on baseball, here’s a brief history lesson:

While there have been a variety of woods used to make baseball bats throughout the ages, far and away the most common is ash, or, was ash. We’ll get to that part. Ash works well because it grows fast, is sufficiently dense, and has straight grain. It became the industry standard and prompted poetry from not just baseball types but tree types as well.

Here’s Donald Peattie in A Natural History of North America Trees:

“Every America boy knows a great deal about White Ash wood. He knows the color of its yellow-ish sapwood and the pale brown grain of the annual growth layers in it. He knows the weight of White Ash not in terms of pounds per cubic foot but by the more immediate and unforgettable sensation of having lifted and swung a piece of it, of standard size. He even knows its precise resonance and pitch, the ringing tock of it when struck.”

Ash’s ubiquity was challenged when a Canadian company, Sam Bat of Ottawa, started making bats out of hard maple. Their first major league client was a guy named Joe Carter. (Toronto Blue Jay fans will know Carter as Touch ‘em all Joe, the larger-than-life catalyst of the 1992-1993 back-to-back World Series winning teams, teams that stand among the finest that baseball has ever produced. You’ll have to forgive this authorial segue here – I’m a Blue Jays fan and it’s rare to the point of non-existent that I have a chance to crow about anything these days. While I’m crowing, I may as well remind folks that this later championship came at the expense of the Philadelphia Phillies, a fine thing for us beleaguered fans to remember as we endure the sight of our former ace, Roy Halladay, mowing down NL batters like they’re little leaguers in his shiny new Phillies uniform.)

Despite the fact that Carter crushed the game winning, series winning home run in 1993 with a maple bat, they didn’t really take off until Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs with his in 2001. After that, everybody wanted one. MaxBat, an MLB-licensed manufacturer out of Brooten, Minnesota uses the slogan: “Our maple kicks ash.” Twenty other bat makers sell maple bats to the big leagues as well. Today, about 50 percent of players use them.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the maple bat’s popularity that is exploding; the bats themselves are, too. Both anecdotal and scientific evidence seems to point to the fact that maple splinters in a way that’s much more dangerous than ash; you may have seen this on your woodlot, where the hinge on a hard maple tree will often break cleanly while ash, being more fibrous, will tear. Anyway, check out this well-written story by Yahoo Sports writer Jeff Passan on the subject of breaking maple bats, a story that gets right to the point with the lede:

Someone’s going to die at a baseball stadium soon.

While many baseball players swear that maple bats perform better, this may not be true. According to Passan:

In 2005, alarmed by the increasing number of broken bats, baseball gave $109,000 to a man named Jim Sherwood and asked him to compare maple bats with the ash ones that used to be the norm. Sherwood runs the Baseball Research Center at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, and the conclusion of the study did not jibe with the hundreds of players who swear maple leads to better performance.

The study also found something evident to anyone watching baseball: Ash bats crack while maple bats snap.

In the interest of full disclosure it should be pointed out that there’s also a counter-argument floating on the web that maple bats have larger “sweet spots” than ash, and that breaking bats can also be attributed to the players shaving the handles down. I’m in no position to know anything about the validity of such claims.

What I do know is that baseball finds itself roiled in a wood-species controversy. On the anti-maple side are people like Pittsburg Pirates coach Don Long (who almost died recently when a shard of maple lodged in his cranium), Yankees catcher Jorge Posada (probably all catchers are non-to-fond of maple shrapnel, but Posada is one of the more outspoken ones) and Tampa Bay Rays Manager Joe Maddon, who calls maple bats the claymore mines of baseball.

On the other side are the pro-maple baseball players who, like most baseball players, are looking for an edge. Any edge. This spring, MLB banned maple bats in the minor leagues. Stay tuned to see if a major league ban will follow.

But even if I engaged in this effort full time, I’m afraid I will always have more invasives on my conscience than I can possibly eradicate.

About forty years ago, we planted 100 autumn olives on the place where I used to live in Corinth. I think they were free; if not they were very cheap. A long list of wildlife species was going to benefit from our plantings. We were going to be delighted by the countless mammals and birds that would be drawn to our yard by the tasty fruits.

Plus, autumn olive was known for its toughness. These little babies weren’t going to disappear into the grass like the elderberries and viburnums I had spent good money on in earlier years.

And how true this last part turned out to be. I haven’t lived at that place for 25 years, but when I stopped by last fall, I was horrified. Autumn olives are everywhere. They are scattered all over the abandoned fields and are well established on a neighbor’s land. The dense shrubs were loaded with small pinkish berries the day I stopped by, ripening up and getting ready to advance the front line.

I have even found autumn olives growing several miles away, although I hold out the dim hope that someone else has these farther flung ones on their conscience. I can’t deal with the thought of having caused that much environmental degradation.

How could I have done such a stupid thing? It wasn’t a glossy catalog photo that seduced me. It was the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife. As I recall, I picked the plants up when I was collecting the red pines, white pines, white cedars, and larches that I also planted that year. Across the region, government biologists were extolling the virtues of autumn olive, Russian olive, and worse, multiflora rose. Today, we all know better.

The dogged advance of these and other non-native plants is something to behold. Not only do these invasives lack native predators and pests, they also engage in chemical warfare. Autumn olive secretes a substance that interferes with native plants’ ability to obtain nitrogen, and then walks right over them.

Scientists are currently studying these chemical mechanisms in hopes of neutralizing this unfair advantage. Whether it will result in successful ways to fight back is not clear. We could all use some more effective ammunition than clippers and Roundup.