Twenty-five years ago, Sam Doyle of Hanover, New Hampshire, had just met Erhard Frost, a consulting forester from across the river in Thetford, Vermont, who was just beginning his career. Doyle loved his woods and hired Frost to manage them, and they quickly embarked on some work removing poorly formed red maples in favor of the straighter, more valuable red oaks. Doyle was excited about the project, because he knew that mature oaks would mean more acorns for the deer and bear that inhabited his woods. In the midst of this work, Frost suggested to his new client that he should enroll in the Tree Farm program.
Doyle said, “I remember saying to Erhard, ‘Why would I do that? You know I’m not going to plant Christmas trees.’ But Erhard said, ‘No, you don’t have to. It doesn’t necessarily mean planting. What you’re doing is working to improve your forest, and that’s exactly what Tree Farm is trying to encourage. You’re a natural for it.’”
Frost was right. Not only has Doyle been happily enrolled in the program for 25 years but also his 492-acre Huntington Hill Tree Farm was named New Hampshire’s Outstanding Tree Farm in 2004.
Doyle’s initial misapprehension of the Tree Farm program is one that has been repeated by many landowners. Tree Farm conjures up images of trees planted in rows and grown only as crops. That’s a particularly troublesome image in the Northeast, where trees usually don’t need to be planted. Here, much of the art of silviculture is creating the right conditions for the desired species to regenerate themselves, and the acreage devoted to tree plantations is dwarfed by that in natural forests.
“The confusion over the name is unfortunate,” said Nory Parr, a forester with the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension (UNH Extension), one of Tree Farm’s sponsors in New Hampshire. “I would love to have more people become tree farmers. The challenge is to get them to understand what the program is really about.”
One of the best ways to get people to understand is through the kind of field day that Sam Doyle hosted in September in conjunction with his award. An estimated 275 visitors saw the results of the work he has done over the years while working with foresters like Frost and Parr and wildlife biologists from UNH Extension, New Hampshire Fish and Game, and the U.S. Forest Service.
As practiced by Doyle, tree farming means taking an active role in improving the woods. It means keeping miles of trails open to the public: “Foot travel welcome,” his signs read. It means planting food plots for wildlife. It means creating diversity in the forest structure in order to attract and benefit more wildlife species. It means working hand in hand with his current forester, John O’Brien, to plan pre-commercial and commercial harvests that will improve the stands of red oak and white pine that dominate his old hill farm.
What impresses Nory Parr about Doyle is his hands-on approach and his complete familiarity with this piece of land. “From day one, he’s always been into the outdoors. He’s been a hunter, a fisherman. And in his 40 years of owning this land, he’s crawled over every inch of it hundreds of times.”
At 79 years of age, the energetic Doyle leaves younger people in his wake as he heads down the trail, walking stick in hand and Meg, his Welsh terrier, at his side. “It beats golfing,” said Doyle, his blue eyes sparkling.
When Sam and his wife, Joanna, bought the land on Huntington Hill in 1961, he was a physician with an ear, nose, and throat practice at the Hitchcock Clinic in Hanover. He worked 12-hour days, and when he got home, he relished the time on his own tending his land. “I was very interested in wildlife and really enjoyed the outdoors. I was up to my ears in people all day long, and I saw the land as a place for relaxation,” Doyle said.
There was a second house that came with the land, and a second family came with that house. Tom and Etta Goodfellow, brother and sister, had never left the farm they’d grown up on, and they had a life tenancy arrangement in that house. The Goodfellows were a godsend to the Doyles, continuing to farm the land and, in the process, teaching the three Doyle children, Rick, Kristin, and John, a great deal about the outdoors.
They kept sheep and cattle, and Tom Goodfellow got in his hay and his firewood with work horses, and he taught the Doyle kids to hunt and trap. They helped Goodfellow with his sugaring operation until, one spring, the sugarhouse burned.
As well intentioned as Goodfellow was, his use of the woods was not having a particularly good effect on them. It’s with an affectionate but rueful smile that Sam recalls how many buckets Tom would hang on his overburdened sugar maples each spring. And he can chuckle when recalling that Tom always chose the straightest oaks for firewood because they were easier to split. But in the 1960s and ’70s, red oak wasn’t particularly valuable, and in many areas it was worth less than the pine that grew alongside it. Paul Sendak, a U.S. Forest Service forester who has studied stumpage price trends in the Northeast, said that foresters at that time commiserated over their “red oak problem,” not clear what to do with all the small red oak. Hindsight shows us the correct solution, of course, was to let them grow, because the species would become valuable. Coincidentally, it was in 1979, the year Doyle became a tree farmer, that red oak began to increase in value, a trend that has continued to this day.
As was the case with many woodlots in those days, there had not been much concern about the future composition of Doyle’s woods. Nory Parr said, “Whatever understory they had was there by happenstance, not by design.” Happenstance sowed a lot of red maple sprouts in Doyle’s woods.
So the land that the Doyles bought in 1961 and the woods that Frost began to manage 18 years later were not the showplace they’ve become. The woods had been hit hard by the 1938 hurricane, so that much of it was in early stages of succession. The sugarbush was on its last legs. Said Frost, “It was a young forest. What he had at the time was a lot of old-field succession. I venture to say in those early years we did in excess of 100 to 150 acres of timber stand improvement (TSI).”
The TSI meant that Frost and his crews went through the young stands that had plenty of oak and pine and girdled or felled the poorly formed trees – predominantly red maple – that were impeding the progress of their more valuable neighbors.
To be sure, there were some stands of pine and oak that were more mature. But when Erhard Frost suggested that there was some value there ready to be harvested, Doyle replied, “I’m not in this to make money now. I want to improve the timber for someone down the line. And I want to do something for wildlife.”
Frost said, “Sam was very receptive. He had a lot of latent interest in the woods, and he was willing to learn.” A hands-on guy, Doyle at first would follow behind Frost’s crew and clean up after them, lopping the tops of the felled trees and piling the brush neatly. But that would change when he began to learn more about wildlife habitat, and one of the big lessons he learned was that messy is good. Messy means safe cover.
In the early 1980s, Doyle began his long association with wildlife biologists from UNH Extension and New Hampshire Fish and Game, and over the years Charlie Bridges, John Kanter, and Ellen Snyder have consulted with Doyle. “I knew nothing about non-game species at the time. I was interested in deer, grouse, and woodcock, and Charlie called what I was doing ‘gunpowder management.’ They moved us toward thinking about songbirds and the other species that benefit from creating diversity of food and cover.”
His opportunity to further immerse himself in learning about wildlife and the land presented itself one day in the mid-1980s in his office at the clinic. He’d not been pleased with changes he’d seen in the way medicine was being practiced. “Then, one day I had a visit from one of the M.B.A.s who had been brought in to do an efficiency study of the practice. He reported to me that I was spending too much time with my patients. ‘You’ve got staff and nurses who can do that,’ this fellow told me. Well, I had enough time in to retire, so I decided that was it.”
Around that time, a program called Vermont Coverts had just started, and Doyle was one of its first participants. Believing that landowners could be trained to be effective ambassadors for forest stewardship, Coverts conducted three-day intensive workshops focused primarily on techniques that forest owners could employ to increase wildlife habitat on their land. The program’s graduates would then spread the word to their neighbors and friends.
Doyle is a warm, amiable man who loves to tell stories. He’s equally at home with the loggers working on his land as he is with the board members of the various organizations he’s volunteered with over the years. Given his personality and his passion for wildlife, Doyle was a perfect Coverts cooperator. He became a sponge for all the information he could find. Providing food, cover, and water – the essentials of wildlife habitat – became his quest. He experimented with new techniques. (“Millet, sorghum, buckwheat, warm-season grasses, I’ve tried them all at one time or another,” said Doyle.) His farm and forest became a laboratory, and he invited others to participate every time he experimented with something new. Nory Parr said, “Sam likes to have people learn from those efforts. His place has been used all the time. He’ll call me up and say, ‘We’re going to have a Brontosaurus in here working. Should we get some people in to check this out?’”
Ten years ago, Ellen Snyder was a wildlife specialist for UNH Extension. “Sam was the first landowner we worked with whose primary interest was in the wildlife,” she said. “He was very enthusiastic about Coverts and was certain that New Hampshire should create a program. I give credit to Sam for helping create New Hampshire Coverts. He is so quiet and unassuming about everything he does. He shows that you don’t have to shout it out in order to lead.”
Doyle shrugs off accolades and in turn insists on giving credit to all the various experts he’s worked with. But it’s clear that his enthusiasm has made it happen. Interested in the woods since childhood, his retirement years have seen him turn that passion for wildlife into an art form. Whether it’s with his chainsaw or his brush hog, Doyle has left his mark on Huntington Hill.
What is especially significant about Doyle’s tree farm is the tremendous diversity he has created. He’s got everything from newly planted switchgrass in his fields to huge old red oaks still producing acorns. There are brushy openings adjacent to hayfields, beautiful stands of mature oak and pine that have tremendous timber value, and pole-sized oaks that regenerated in small clearcuts.
Over the years, Doyle and his foresters have employed many of the tools available to land managers. They’ve done crop tree release, which removes the competition to the trees with the best form. They’ve pruned 8 acres of white pine. Interspersed throughout the forest, they’ve made small patch cuts, including one of 6.3 acres. Girdling and felling, they’ve accomplished pre-commercial thinning and weeding on hundreds of acres. They’ve had a number of commercial harvests, ranging from thinnings in the oak and pine stands to a whole-tree harvest that removed 446,000 board feet of sawlogs, 306 cords of pulp, and 2,700 tons of biomass. And yes, they even planted 5,000 pines, mostly red.
One of Doyle’s techniques for maintaining brushy habitat is brush-hogging fields that he lets grow for three to five years. These old fields grow berry bushes and saplings of many sunlight-loving tree species. When the trees get to a certain height and girth, Doyle gets out his tractor and his brush-hog mower. When a visitor marveled at the size trees that he was planning to mow under, Doyle said, “If I can bend it over with my tractor, I can chop it up with the brush hog.”
Snyder applauds Doyle’s work to maintain shrubland. She said, “If you have a hayfield, you can mow it. A forest you can cut, and create young forest. It’s all pretty straightforward. It’s much harder to maintain shrubland habitat, because it’s more dynamic, more ephemeral. But it’s a really important component and it supports high diversity of wildlife.”
Winding their way throughout the property are 3.5 miles of maintained trails, some of which resulted from logging operations, some of which were created specifically for walking. Doyle seeded them with conservation mix, limes them as necessary, and mows them a couple of times a year. Word has spread widely about his trails and the beautiful views of the Connecticut Valley the openings in the woods provide. “We get all sorts of people: cross-country skiers, birders, people out looking at the wildflowers, people walking their dogs,” said Doyle.
And they learn something about forest management when they run into Doyle out on the trails.
“Isn’t that a clearcut?” one hiker asked when seeing a patch cut.
“It sure is. And you watch and see what happens in there,” Doyle answered.
That 6-acre opening is filled with berry bushes and saplings and is visited regularly by black bears. Ben Kilham, noted bear expert who lives in nearby Lyme, showed Doyle that bears were using one of the red pines on the edge of the clearcut as a communications center, marking it with their claws and their teeth. Doyle was delighted. “I want people to see it. I think we have converted quite a number of people over the years, people who were just coming here for a walk.”
It’s easy to sum up Doyle’s philosophy of land management. Wildlife comes first. Income from timber sales is delayed, and when it comes, it is reinvested in more improvements to the woods, the trails, or the fields. It’s not that he’s averse to cutting mature trees, says John O’Brien, who has been Doyle’s consulting forester since 1997. “If a tree has a problem, if there’s dieback or wind breakage in a nice oak, and there’s value in it, Sam has no objection. We’ll take it. But if it’s a big bully oak, it will never come out. That’s [providing] mast and that’s going to stay. We’re trying to grow trees as big as we can get ’em.”
There are plenty of big trees, especially red oak and white pine. The soils on most of the land are too shallow and not rich enough to grow sugar maple and yellow birch, but they grow beautiful oak and pine. Oaks with as many as three veneer logs in them are common throughout the property. These trees are providing regular crops of acorns for wildlife and storing their value on the stump for, as Doyle puts it, “someone down the line.”
Ah, yes, the future. What’s to become of this nearly 500-acre gem in Hanover, home to Dartmouth College and thus one of New Hampshire’s more desirable locations? While Doyle learned that messy is good for wildlife, he’s always been aware that in legal matters, it’s important to be neat and tidy.
So he and Joanna have made sure that the land’s future is not in question. They discussed the property’s future with their children, who all agreed that it should never be broken up or developed. So the Doyles have conserved their land through an agreement with the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department that is monitored by the Upper Valley Land Trust. The land is now officially known as the Huntington Hill Farm Wildlife Management Area. The conservation agreement preserves its wildlife habitat and open space and allows for continual recreational enjoyment by the public. The agreement specifically allows forest management and agricultural activities. In fact, believing as he does in experimentation and innovation, Doyle made sure that the agreement requires that future owners of the land update their management plan every 10 years. And in a move that has since been copied by others, the Doyles created a fund that will pay for those updates.
Now, that’s tidy.