Don't Rock Your Saw!

Northeast Oklahoma was hit by a bad ice storm two years ago, and in addition to the inconvenience it caused, and damage to improvements, the ice broke up lots of timber. My uncle's little farm has a stand of young upland timber, with scattered leftovers from previous stands. He has never thinned it, and the closely spaced trees lent support to each other, so even though his timber looks bad, he still has plenty of undamaged trees with the potential to produce sawlogs. He has put in many hours reopening his trails, and cutting downed wood off of his fences. He uses a homeowner size Homelite, and he gets along just fine with the little saw as long as he keeps it out of the rocks.

I first ran chainsaws in Iowa, on black loamy soils where a person could be careless about letting the running chain touch the soil. When I moved to Eastern Kentucky I soon learned not to let the chain touch down. The soils in the area where I worked were sandstone derived, and a chain would be dulled with one little touch. In Southern Illinois our soils are generally classed as silty clay loams, and you can get away with minor touches with the soil when cutting firewood or bucking logs. Click on the above photo and look at the soil around this black oak. You do not let your saw tag the soil here!

The soil on my uncle's Oklahoma acreage is a marvel to look upon. It appears to be mostly chert, so I checked it out on Web Soil Survey to see how it is described. The soil on his hills is Clarksville Stony Silt Loam (Note that Stony comes before Silt.). Parent material is Loamy Colluvium (Soil that has tumbled and slid downhill), over residuum weathered from cherty limestone (That's Chert!). The description says this soil is somewhat excessively drained (It is mostly rock!), with no flooding or ponding. The best part of this soil is the lack of restrictive features (bedrock or fragipan); it has more than 80 inches of this rocky, gravelly, silt mix for trees to grow roots. It's not very good, but there is a lot of it!

The black, white, post, and blackjack oaks growing on this stony mix are making the best of the deep rooting opportunity. Stumps show that the trees can grow with about six rings per inch where the trees have a little room, which is not bad growth at all. My uncle will be 76 this year, so I don't think he is about to go out and thin his timber, but a good thinning would make a huge difference on this site. (This stump was a tree restricted by other trees on three sides, and free to grow on one side. Releasing it from competition would have allowed all four quadrants of the tree to grow well.)