Hi & Ho, We Plant Trees

Several years ago, Peter Krahn (of Peppermill Records) released a compilation of tree planting songs, written and performed by tree planters, about planting.  He made this available as a free release from Peppermill.  The compilation was titled, "Hi and Ho, We Plant Trees."

I've always been impressed that I've gotten into planting trucks at several different companies and heard songs playing that were on this compilation.  It's been shared widely over the past several years, and I'd like to continue to share it.

Here's the cover art for this album:

Many thanks are due to the individual artists, for making these songs available, and also to Krahn, for putting this project together!


Free Downloads

To download these songs, there are three choices:  Dropbox, RAR Archive, or SoundCloud.

To download from Dropbox:
1.  Go to my public Dropbox folder:  www.replant.ca/dropbox
2.  Go into the "Canadian Reforestation" folder.
3.  Go into the "Planting Music" sub-folder.
4.  Go into the sub-folder called "The Flagging Tapes, vol 1".
5.  You can either pick MP3's to download (good quality 320 kbps, smaller file size) or WAV files (uncompressed audio, slightly higher quality, larger files).

If you're able to uncompress RAR archives, this download would be a slightly faster way to download the entire compilation:

www.replant.ca/music/Hi_&_Ho_full_album_MP3_format.rar

Finally, to download individual songs from SoundCloud, click on the download arrows on any of the SoundCloud widgets throughout the rest of this page.




 

Andrew Nikiforuk's "Empire Of The Beetle"

“Empire Of The Beetle,” by Andrew Nikiforuk, is a pretty interesting book for anyone who is interested in forestry. The subtitle of the book is, “How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests.” But the book is about more than just beetles; a few other pests are also discussed.  I read this book several years ago, and wrote a short review at the time.  Since the spruce beetle is now becoming more of an issue in British Columbia, I thought it would be good to re-visit "Empire Of The Beetle," so here is my initial review.  I'll be talking more about the spruce beetle in future posts.

Many people have probably heard about the Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB) epidemic in western Canada. But the pine beetle is just the most visible face of a larger issue. In the past few decades, several species of beetles have girdled and killed more than thirty billion lodgepole, pinyon, ponderosa, and whitebark pines, as well as white spruce and Engelmann spruce. This sort of devastation is actually quite normal for forests, when Nature is left alone to do its work, but the economic consequences of this destruction have caused the current epidemics to be labelled as a “problem.”

Beetles are probably one of the most successful examples of life on our planet. Beetles (Coleoptera) make up a third of all life on Earth, and a quarter of all animals. Estimates for the number of different species of beetles are in the vicinity of ten million. If you took just one part of the beetle family, the bark beetles, there are more than a thousand more species than there are types of mammals on Earth. Beetle fossils exist that are a third of a billion years old (significantly older than dinosaurs), and various species can live in almost every environment: in rivers, lakes, jungles, caves, forests, deserts, and mountaintops. Bark beetles cooperate on a social level, and bury their dead. If you look globally at species of animals that are smart enough to hunt in packs, there is only a very short list: humans, wolves, hyenas, lions, killer whales, piranhas, ants, and bark beetles.

One interesting thing is that bark beetles themselves do not kill the trees they inhabit. Beetles, like some other insects, act as a sort of mobile zoo, carrying all kinds of other life forms with them. The spruce bark beetle, for example, can carry up to ten different species of fungi, six different kinds of mites, and nine different types of bacteria. All of these organisms work together as a complex mini ecosystem, as the life cycle of the beetle continues. It is the effects of these various organisms, in concert, that lead to eventual conifer mortality.

The interesting thing is that beetles are not necessarily bad for the forests. Some people would disagree, particularly those who focus on an immediate snapshot of the forests, and who worry about the current economic potential. But in the long term, over decades and centuries, beetles are unquestionably an important part of forest maintenance. You see, beetles basically act to keep a forest healthy overall, in the longer term. There is no need to protect the trees from the beetles; the beetles and the trees have been living in a symbiotic relationship for millions of years.

Starting about a century ago, North Americans began to focus some efforts on fire suppression within the forests. The obvious rationale was that if forest fires were suppressed, there would be more wood. But nature relies on regular fires (every few decades) to keep a forest “tidy” and healthy. By putting out the small fires, what happened was that fuel loads began to increase. When a fire eventually came along that couldn’t be put out right away, it could grow to enormous size.

Many people have mistakenly assumed that beetle-killed trees would lead to increased forest fire risks. I actually believed that myself, several years ago. That seems logical, because when you look at a dead tree that has been killed by a beetle, it's dry and reminds you of firewood. But when you start to get experience with forest fires, you quickly realize that the majority of major forest fires are “crown” fires. Rather than the coarse wood (the thicker primary branches and trunks of the trees) burning, it is the “fines,” the needles and leaves, that provide the quick fuel that burns fast and hot. Although you would think that living green trees would be moist and less prone to fire than dry and dead stems, the exact opposite is true. Fire likes smaller pieces of fuel with more relative surface area that is exposed to oxygen, and fire also likes density, so flames can jump from fuel source to fuel source. You get this with living trees, but not dead ones. When a tree has first been killed by beetles, yes, it's a high fire risk for the first year or so. But once the needles drop off, it is not a high fire risk. The lesson here is that determined fire suppression eventually guarantees either a catastrophic fire or a bark beetle epidemic.

Any competent forester or woodsman will tell you that a diverse forest is the best kind. But logging companies like to work with monocultures, large tree stands where all the trees are the same species and the same relative age. When forests are harvested and replanted, they are usually planned as a plantation of just one or two dominant species (spruce, pine, fir, or cedar) and all the trees end up having the same approximate age. But it is this kind of forest that is most susceptible to damage from beetles. Basically, the beetles see these forests as a massive free lunch, and in attacking the trees, they are really just protecting the trees from themselves (from overcrowding). When forests are left to themselves, beetles attack a very small number of trees each year, in a system which promotes diversity and balance. It is only when “unnatural” large concentrations of a single species are allowed to grow together that true epidemics become possible. As foresters said in East Texas in the 1980’s, when southern pine beetle growth exploded, “What we have here is not an epidemic of southern pine beetles, but rather, an epidemic of southern pine.”

At this point, the decision about what to do with beetle-killed forests is what concerns me. Many foresters prefer the “mow it down and salvage the wood” approach, resulting in more clear-cutting than would have otherwise been the case. As a tree planter, I initially wished that the BC government would take more of the beetle-killed areas that they couldn’t salvage log and just bull-doze the standing dead wood, and then let our industry replant new forests (preferably multi-species). But since then, I’ve learned a lot more about the interplay between various parts of the forest ecosystem. The northern boreal forests are very efficient carbon sinks, perhaps more so than tropical rainforests. A beetle-killed forest left standing to rot slowly will also release carbon slowly, over a period of many years. As that gradual release takes place, the carbon loss is offset by new undergrowth, which happens very quickly as the sunlight can easily penetrate through to the forest floor. So effectively, leaving dead trees standing is an effective carbon sequestering strategy, probably much more wise in the long run than cutting the dead wood for use by wood pellet factories, where the product gets shipped halfway around the world. Of course, we tree planters could probably still speed up that renewal process by planting a mix of several species in these understory plants.

I won’t go any further into the ground that the book covers, because that would spoil things for people who are planning to read the book. But I should note that a 2001 provincial review in British Columbia suggested that in terms of the “costs and benefits of clear-cutting beetle-kill ... a forest renewed by bark beetles was a much smarter economic proposition than a monster clear-cut designed by humans with forestry degrees.” I personally don’t want to suggest that the pine beetle epidemics are a good thing in an absolute sense. But I do think that a moderate level of pine beetles is an important part of natural renewal, and beetle renewal does have positive aspects that politicians and logging companies sometimes seem to ignore in favour of short-term economics. I guess the best thing though, would be for you to read the book and form your own opinions. Here's a link to buy the book:

Empire Of The Beetle on Amazon.ca

Tree Planting Books: Eating Dirt

About five years ago, a book came out that focused on life in the coastal tree-planting community.  The book was called "Eating Dirt," and was written by Charlotte Gill.  I eagerly read it as soon as I got my hands on it, and wasn't disappointed.  Charlotte was a tree planter, but the book didn't focus entirely on planting. There was also a lot of background about the logging industry in general, and some background on tree physiology and historical biology, with both local and global perspectives.

At the time, I wrote a very short review and made some notes.  I've been tempted to read the book a second time since then, but I'm also working on writing a couple books of my own.  I really don't want anything in her book to influence what I'm writing, which is why I've reluctantly refrained from a second reading.  However, I took my original notes and I'm posting them here today because I want to remind planters about this book.  At some point over the next several weeks, I'll share some notes about three or four other books that should also be of interest to planters.

Charlotte Gill, the author, was a planter for over twenty years.   She started in Ontario, but moved out west.  When she was still working in western Canada (up until just a few years ago), she worked eight or nine months each year, predominantly planting coastal projects (the professional part of the industry), plus a bit of southern Interior work in the early summer months.  Many of the people that she mentioned in the book are people I know.  When I'm planting on the coast, I usually work in the same area where she did a lot of her work (the north Island), and I've worked for the same company that she often worked for.




Here's an excerpt from a review by Quill & Quire:

"A thoroughly Canadian story, Eating Dirt is not out of place alongside other classic memoirs of the bush by Susanna Moodie or Farley Mowat."

Eating Dirt was the winner of the BC National Award for Non-Fiction, and was also short-listed for both the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust

There were a few things in the book that really caught my attention. For instance, she was talking about the amount of ground that a million trees covers. When this is quantified in acres or hectares, it somehow seems less impressive than her way of illustrating: one million trees covers five hundred city blocks in Manhattan. My own camp usually plants close to six million trees a year. I didn't really think about how much ground we cover until I thought of it as almost three thousand city blocks.

Another interesting fact is that when you're in a full forest canopy and you look up, it probably looks like the branches of adjoining trees are all intertwined above you. But they aren't. The trees are able to somehow sense their neighbours and the branch tips almost always stays a few centimetres away from each other. Of course there are occasional exceptions, but natural avoidance is generally the case. Charlotte mentions a lot of facts about trees and nature that seasoned planters take for granted, but which would probably surprise readers who aren't planters.

Charlotte also talks about the number of calories a planter consumes in a day: around five thousand. If anything, I think this is an under-estimate. It's hard to count calories accurately in a bush camp, because most planters just load up without measuring portions, and shovel the food in as quickly as possible. But I've always been curious about caloric intake, I've always tracked my own personal food costs while planting on the coast, and I've sometimes made attempts to measure my calories. A normal person might be shocked. Here's a fairly normal example of what I might eat in a day on the coast:

Breakfast: 970 calories

3 yogurt cups = 240 calories
3 cinnamon buns with butter = estimated 375 calories
Bowl of strawberries = 45 calories
Four hard-boiled eggs = 310 calories

During Day, While Planting: 3,835 calories

4 pepperoni sticks = 320 calories
8 granola bars = 1280 calories
About 1/3rd block (150g) of marbled cheddar = 600 calories
A cup of chocolate chips = 805 calories
Anywhere from 8-12 bottles (500ml) of water = 0 calories
Three bottles of Gatorade (591ml) = 390 calories
One half of a large bottle of Clamato juice = 440 calories


Dinner: 3,415 calories (which I eat over a period of a couple hours)

Two cups of rice (bazmotti/risotto/brown/long grain) = 400 calories
1/2 bag of cheese perogies = 840 calories
A third of a bunch of asparagus = 30 calories
1 large chicken breast = 165 calories
Half of a bunch of broccoli = 105 calories
Half cup of butter (1/4 pound) on these previous items = 810 calories
Half cup of cheddar cheese on these previous items = 265 calories
1 litre of almond milk = 360 calories
Large bowl of ice cream = 440 calories
A couple gatorade containers of water that I take to bed = 0 calories

Total for the day: 8,220 calories
(and about a dozen litres of fluids)

A lot of planters who work hard for 8-10 hours per day can eat this much food, day after day, and still lose a significant amount of weight as the season progresses. Back when I planted full-time in the Interior, before I was a supervisor, I typically lost about 25 pounds in the first 6-7 weeks. By the way, I vary my diet a bit from day to day when I'm coastal planting - I really enjoy meat, so some days are a lot more protein heavy (fish, chicken, or red meat), and pastas or quinoa are often a staple on the coast too.  It all depends on my mood.  I've been having a lot more smoothies full of fruits and juicing greens lately too.

Tree planting is a job that most people would hate. For actual tree planters, it's more of a love/hate relationship. For people who've never done it, this book is a great insight into one of the strangest industries in Canada. Check it out if you can. Here's a link to order a copy from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.ca/Eating-Dirt-Charlotte-Gill/dp/1553659775


And while you're waiting for your copy of the book to arrive in the mail, here's a link to a lot of tree planting photo galleries that I've taken over the past ten years. Each of the photos on this page is actually a link: click on it, and you'll be taken to a page with dozens of other photos. In all, there are several thousand photos that I've put online:

www.replant.ca/photos

 If you'd like to learn more about the Canadian Tree Planting industry, visit:

www.Replant.ca

 

Photos of a Moose Rescue in Northern Ontario

This happened a while ago (spring of 2012), but I was just looking at some photos and thought of this again and thought I'd post it to share it to a wider audience.  It's the story of a moose that got trapped in a fiber pond in Ontario.  The notes below are taken from the email that I received about it:

Sunday April 15, 2012 dawned cloudy and cool in the little community of Terrace Bay, located along the north shore of Lake Superior.  My friend and fellow Conservation Officer Jeff Anderson stopped by the house, my wife Eleanor made fresh coffee and we were enjoying a day off now that the fishing season for walleye had finally closed.

When the phone rang that morning, it was to alert us that a moose was helplessly mired in a spillway next to the towns pulp mill. Normally, the hustle and bustle of a busy factory would discourage wildlife from getting too close, but in this case, the mill had been idle for quite some time and the mill yard was quiet and tranquil. 

The large man-made ponds that surround the property are part of a system used to treat waste water. They are all fenced except for the one closest to the buildings. Its unclear as to how the young adult bull wandered into the first one, maybe he was fleeing a vehicle on the nearby road, or perhaps he just thought it was a marsh. Whatever the reason, he attempted to cross the football-field sized settling pond and began breaking through the deep layers of sodden wood fiber. 

We quickly hatched a plan and began gathering some rope, hip waders and snowshoes while Jeff grabbed a patrol truck, uniform and shotgun. It was important to be prepared for any eventuality! When we all rendezvoused at the site, we were faced with the saddest looking animal you could imagine. Utilizing the snowshoes to stay on top of the layers of fiber, we were able to approach the bull, fasten a chain knot around his neck and attempt to pull him free utilizing the winch on Jeff’s patrol truck. Unfortunately, we could not pull him horizontally with sufficient force to drag him out without the risk of injuring him, so we needed a new approach.

Mill staff came to the rescue and arrived on scene with a large, tracked loader equipped with a boom grapple. The rest of us shovelled a space around the moose’s chest around which we were able to secure a heavy line. With this new ability to lift and pull from around the animals girth, the big bull was slowly drawn out of the muck and onto the bank. 

It appeared as though he had been there overnight and he was near death from exhaustion and stress.  Remarkably, by supporting him in a prone position, giving him a couple bottles of water to drink and rubbing his legs to restore circulation, he began to perk up! After 20 minutes and several attempts, he stood up on wobbly legs for the first time in many hours. He tolerated us as we held him up and later, as he began walking with our assistance. It was a very strange experience to calmly accompany him for the long walk around the ponds perimeter, but we all felt the same heart-warming feeling when he quietly stepped into the bush under his own power, and disappeared from sight.

Terrace Bay is a town on the north shore of Lake Superior in Ontario, Canada about 150km East of Thunder Bay.

This was written by Paul Dennis, Conservation Officer, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources.

Starry, Starry Night

One of my checkers from last year (Mike Ross, known online as Lars Zergun), put together a YouTube video a few years ago which I really liked. I'm posting it here instead of on my music blog because I think the people here would enjoy it more (specifically the tree planters).




The video is a compilation of shots that Mike took, some of which are from planting, and some of which are not.

The background track that he set the clips to is called "Vincent" by Don MacLean of "American Pie" fame, which was actually on the American Pie album. It's a beautiful (and pretty famous) song which has been covered by dozens of other artists.

The song refers to Vincent Van Gogh, the famous post-impressionist painter who shot himself when he was 37 years old, long before his paintings became famous. Click here for a bit of background on the meaning of the song.

Audio Versions of Tree Planter Training Material

I've been working on a project for the past year and a half that involves a comprehensive training program for first-time tree planters in western Canada.  I've also spent the past week turning all of the information into a series of twenty audio files, to match the twenty videos in the training series.  All of the audio files are in MP3 format, at 320 kbps.  I've posted the files onto my SoundCloud account, in case people want to listen and/or download just individual specific sections.  Also, as an alternative download source, you can go to my public Dropbox folder, then go into the "Canadian Reforestation" section, then into the "Planter Training" section, and see all of the mp3's there too.

djbolivia.ca/dropbox

The final versions of the videos can be found by visiting www.replant.ca/training but for now, here are all the SoundCloud links in one place:

Introduction to the Industry

Why Do We Plant Trees?

Health

Working Safely, Hazards

Rules & Regulations

Camp Life

Map Reading

Nature & The Environment

Basic Silviculture Knowledge

Stock-Handling

Common BC Coniferous Trees

The Planting Prescription

Planting Gear

Planting a Seedling

Meeting Quality Requirements

Spacing, Density, & Excess

Site Preparation

Maximizing Productivity

Behaviours & Attitudes

Wrap Up

 If you'd like to learn more about the Canadian Tree Planting industry, visit:

www.Replant.ca

 If you want to join Replant's tree planter group on Facebook, visit:

facebook.com/groups/replant.ca

 

 

Introducing the Salmonberry

A couple years ago, I was planting on the coast in the fall.  The owner of the company, Nick, stopped by our room one evening after dinner.  He looked at me, and said, "I'm sorry."  I was puzzled, so I asked him what he was sorry for.  He said, "For tomorrow."  That sounded ominous.

The next morning, seven of us went out to a block together.  At the crew's tailgate safety meeting that morning, Nick had said that we were going to a very challenging block.  It turned out to be two giant patches of salmonberry, over our heads, that needed to be fill planted.  Luckily, the forester had herbicided the block, so although we'd have to work through a fairly thick tangle of brush, at least all the leaves were gone, so we could see where we were going.

It didn't look that bad, and Nina and I set out together on the low side of the road.  After the first four trees, I realized that it was going to be a tough day.  I don't usually bother to ask the tree prices, but I made an exception:  "Hey Nina, did you ask what the price was on this block?"  She said, "Eighty cents."  I started to laugh.  That was the last time that I laughed that day.

The moral of the story is, "When you think you want higher tree prices, sometimes you are wrong."

Anyway, that wasn't the point.  The point is that this purpose of this post is to teach you what salmonberry looks like.  Well, maybe not so much the plants, but at least the berries.  Salmonberry berries are often a very colourful orange-yellow colour, which I've never seen in other berries.

Salmonberry berries can also turn red after a while:

Occasionally, they can get to be quite large:

And most importantly, they're tasty!

So now you know what a salmonberry berry looks like.  Aside from the fact that the plants can grow to be taller than tree planters, and are extremely thorny, and you need a machete to force your way through them, they're a pretty cool plant.  The salmonberry is fairly common in coastal areas throughout British Columbia.

Here's a link to the Wiki, if you want to learn more:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubus_spectabilis

 If you'd like to learn more about the Canadian Tree Planting industry, visit:

www.Replant.ca