When she was young, Pam Wells aspired to be a forester. It was the late 1970s, and as she now wryly recalls, “I was not encouraged, as a woman.” So she directed her smarts and considerable energy elsewhere, including a twenty year career as a children’s mental health social worker.
Pam’s fascination with the woods remained, however, and in 2004, she and her husband Bryan made an offer on 1050 acres of land just seven miles up the road from their home in Old Town, Maine. The property was in bad shape – poor logging practices had destroyed most of the forestland’s commercial value, and Pam remembers riding out with a game warden in the ruts left by equipment.
But it was cheap and beautiful, with stunning waterfalls. It presented endless opportunities for a woman inclined to forestry-related projects. After a few years, as the forest grew, she says, “I began to think, now what?”
Pam’s answer to that question has led to continuing, escalating ambitions as a landowner. She has gone back to forestry school, not for a degree this time but for the specific purpose of learning how to care for her woods. She has also thrown herself into the physical work of management (for example, with her forester Kirby Ellis, she spent a summer with a host of University of Maine students, measuring stands of trees on her property). She and her husband have provided access to their land as a stewardship educational site, and have plans for stream restoration activities. In 2017, Pam and Bryan were recognized as Maine Outstanding Tree Farmers of the Year.
For the past several years, Pam has also served as a landowner advisor/contributing photographer to What Will My Woods Look Like?, a booklet just published by the Maine Forest Service. It’s an easy read, and an excellent resource for anyone who ever wonders what their forester is talking about, but is afraid to ask.
The booklet’s design is simple. Each section presents before and after, and sometimes during, photographs of a common harvest activity. Accompanying each image are observations from the perspective of a landowner, forester and logger. There is also information on likely wildlife habitat outcomes. As Pam notes, this approach encourages conversations about how each person measures success, in what time frame. Photographs can also help landowners overcome often-daunting forest industry vocabulary. “Precommercial thinning – what is that? Quit talking and show me.”
Andy Shultz, the Landowner Outreach Forester at the Maine Forest Service, notes that the idea for What Will My Woods Look Like? isn’t new; “we’d talked about making something like this for years.” A critical group of individuals and organizations had to come together to make it happen, to put together both the writing and photography from sites around the state. Shultz credits key support from the Maine Outdoor Heritage Fund and the Sustainable Forest Initiative, and in-kind support (paper) from Sappi North America. A pdf of the booklet (including a list of acknowledgements) is found here. As for Pam Wells, you can read a description of the Wells Forest and see a gallery of her photographs here. Be sure to check out the image of baby moose.
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