 Welcome everybody. My name is Sally Stockwell and I'm a wildlife ecologist with Maine Audubon. I'm here today with several colleagues to walk you through how to fill out the detailed habitat assessment form for forestry for Maine birds. This is a form that's designed for professional foresters to use and we also have a some forestry students that are interested in using it. As a way to augment other information you're collecting about the forest from the bird's perspective. And so first I'd like to introduce my colleagues Amanda Mahaffey from the Forest Stewards Guild and Andy Schultz from the Maine Forest Service. And then we have our budding forester Maddie who is also with us today. So the first thing that I'm gonna walk through the different components of the habitat assessment form and Amanda and Andy are going to tell us what we see and what we should be marking down on the form. So the first thing Amanda and Andy that we need to figure out is what the forest habitat association is and our major choices are northern hardwoods, northern mixedwoods, northern softwoods and oak pine. When we're filling out this form what we try to think of is kind of in a big circle of a stand that is more or less homogeneous than look around what a visual acre is and what do we see within that visual acre that's what we're going to be recording. So you can't just look in one direction you have to spin around and look in 360 degrees to get a really good representation of what we're seeing and the idea behind these habitat assessments is that you do different habitat assessments in different stands to get an idea of the variability across a property and to get an idea of what different kinds of birds might be seen in those different kinds of stands. So when we start our stand assessment there are a few important items at the top. First of all is the landowner. Who's a landowner here Andy? I believe it's the town of Famba. Nice good to know and what is today's date? October 23rd. Exactly 2020. 2020. We're still here. A year that just won't quit. Yeah. Who's the forester here Andy? That's a really good question. It's neither you nor I. Or it's both of us. Or it's both of us. All right. Now I should mention that the town of Falmouth has worked with Paul Aravie and to manage other parts. This particular area has not been harvested recently but they do do some active management and of course they're very very concerned or you know wildlife has a big piece for the town on land. That is significant and then the weather today. Overcast, fifties, light, breeze. Yeah. Perfect weather. Perfect for taking some stand data and it's important to record this information because when you come back to your notebook later and you wonder where was I? What was I doing? Who was I with? Then you'll have that information written down so it's always important to start your stand assessment with some basic information. Now, more location info. We have a stand ID so we don't actually have a stand map for this particular parcel so we might you know we might call this stand one. Works for me. And within that stand we need to identify what plot we're doing. I would call it plot one. Sounds good. Agreed. So how many plots might we want to do in a stand? Well it depends. Now really as I mentioned a lot of times you might be doing this as part of a timber inventory where you either you're looking for a certain percentage of coverage and you might take a plot on a grid of say 10 chains every 10 chains and then set over 10 chains. I could throw chains and I don't know if anybody still uses chains. Is that still a thing? Good. But actually a lot depends on how much information the landowner wants. The landowner is actually requesting this or interested in it so a lot also depends on the variability of the stand. If you find that really you're coming up with the same answers in a lot of spots there's no need to keep adding data. You can make your sort of draw your conclusions. Better to look at the overall stand map and say well we have maybe two or three very different areas. Make sure you get a couple or three in each one so you have some averaging. So however you decide to do your forestry inventory when you're doing a forester's for the birds inventory or forestry for main birds inventory it's probably good to do at least one plot per stand and be prepared so that you get a good picture again when you kind of average your data and average what you're seeing then you have a good picture overall of what is going on in that forest. Of course when you start to draw stand lines this becomes the the art and science of forestry and it gets back to that lump or splutter thing. So back to our habitat association what do you think we've got here. We definitely have oak trees we definitely have pine trees and those seem to be our dominant species here would you agree. I concur. So at least from a forest habitat association I think we're probably looking at oak pine rather than one of the other forest habitat association types which is a fairly common type in this part of the state also it's the southern part of the state and then you can break that down into four subcategories and those four subcategories would be northern red oak red oak mixed hardwood red oak white pine red maple white pine hemlock and hemlock oak pine which of those would you say this is and why. So having walked around the the acre and being a little bit numerically inclined I know that's roughly 209 by 209 square you know the radius right offhand no doesn't matter and it's the visual acre you don't actually have to go out and step it off but the point is I did just walking around and I think that we are looking at a lot of I think we're looking at the red oak white pine red maple as the sub association. I agree I think especially as we're looking at our over story species that kind of define the stand we are looking at a lot of red oak and we have white pine up there and some red maple yeah it's a different story in the under story but we'll get there we'll get to that all right so the great thing about this form is that it makes it really easy just to circle the answer which I've done so now we're gonna move on to stand structure class and this we have three major categories young intermediate and older and different birds cue into these different age stands so we want to try to get a good sense of what we have here and so from just the young intermediate and older what would you say we're looking at the intermediate yeah no question and then under intermediate there are two choices there's the intermediate single-aged and there's the intermediate two-aged so in other words are we just seeing one layer all of the trees more or less the same size and height or are we seeing two different layers and we look at you want to look around again spin around look in all different directions and what would you say is the dominant I'm gonna say that there's really two distinct age classes here I think we will find that we we're gonna have some canopy cover in different layers but basically there's an overstory and there's an understory here and that's fairly typical also of a lot of the stands in this part of the state and really across the whole state where you know something started from old field succession probably or agricultural abandonment and that's become you know 50 60 70 80 years ago maybe a little bit more and that's our overstory still not really old forest yet and in the meantime a regeneration layer has started and we see that around this year so that's the kind of second general age class and even though there's some small trees they're not really probably a different age I mean smaller saplings they're not a different age they're probably as old as the overstory they're just suppressed and and so from a technical standpoint our description of the intermediate two-aged is at least five to ten inch diameter breast height 30 to 70 percent overstory cover and then this also suggests that there is a mid-story cover over 30 percent which we don't really have here but we have the understory that's over 30 percent so I get a little technical I think part of that distinction that we had I think when we were putting the form together had to do with softwood stands that have been harvested in a certain way so that was intended to capture it but from the general description this is definitely an intermediate aged forest and it definitely we're feeling confident we see two age classes here so even if our exact numbers don't match it to a tee I feel that from a forest from the forest perspective that's what we have going on here would the birds agree the birds would agree right and part of this is trying to see the forest as bird would see it not necessarily as the way I was trained as a forester to see it in terms of timber product timber value and to sort of translate between those two things so just to point out that like every form and every sort of attempt to put everything into a box it's not the real world isn't going to fit it exactly we definitely agree that we're in an intermediate age and yet we've got we do have some trees well above 10 inch dbh and this is indicating a 5 to 10 inch dbh in fact most of the overstory trees I'm going to say are greater than 10 inches at dbh few fives and then our other age class that reach the understory which you know we'll get to measuring that in a different way but nothing there is five inches yet so it's a little little different than what's on here but nonetheless I think we'd all agree it's an intermediate age and even in an intermediate age forest you might have a few remnant trees that are fit into that older category or a number that fit into the younger category so it there can be variation but what we're looking at is overall what's the the age and the class and the stand structure so now this second page of the form we're going to be looking at the overstory which is everything that is over 30 feet high the mid story which is everything that is between 6 feet and 30 feet high the understory which is from one feet one foot to six feet high and then also the ground cover which is under one foot strictly looking at woody vegetation in this case so we're going to start with the overstory which is over 30 feet and we're going to look at what are the dominant species in that overstory looking above 30 feet I see a lot of red oak so those are two species we could write down Sally all right red oak and white pine Andy are you seeing any other dominant species we should take note of there is a little bit of red maple that is dominant or co-dominant co-dominant in the overstory above 30 feet okay and for that layer would you say the cover is very low less than 5% cover low at 5 to 30% cover medium at 30 to 70% cover or high over 70% cover and that by cover we mean as you're looking up through the trees how much of the sky is blocked out by the the vegetation the vast majority of it is 70% or greater so I would give it very high we did discover one gap though which we'll get to in a minute I think it's important to remember that right now we're in late October and so some of the leaves have fallen off of the trees here so we have to use our imaginations and imagine the leaves on the living trees as being leafed out when we're thinking about that overstory canopy cover I might disagree a little bit with Andy I could go with with medium but Andy is saying hi I'm not going to argue with him there I could I think as we look around and look up and look down in the overstory in particular I could agree with hi that's the tricky thing about doing this assessment luckily well we won't maybe do it today but we could take we could do several more of these and come up with an average yes that's that is the ideal thing to do is to do the same habitat assessment at multiple sites and then kind of come to some consensus of what you have okay and then in terms of composition we're going to look at we're looking at what's the proportion of hardwood species to softwood species and we are that's dominant hardwood is it mixed hardwood softwood or mixed softwood hardwood or dominant softwood so Andy I would approach that is to get out my prism and take a prism plot I'm gonna make this little pine tree my plot center and I'm gonna around and basically boy it's close it's about 170 square feet and it's 90 in the hardwood and 70 in the softwood so it's very close to an evenly mixed stand but with that slight edge to a hardwood so it would be an HS as far as that goes that might be another thing that taking a few other plots it may push the balance one way or the other but and at the overstory level these are all trees almost every tree that I tally is in the overstory at 30 greater than 30 feet so for that right for that piece and what would you say the canopy height is we need to look up for that yeah so our choices are 30 to 60 feet or greater than 60 feet in terms of canopy height for the overstory yeah I'll go with over 60 plenty of pine to pull that average up and even a lot of the oak I think is greater than 60 no that's not I agree okay just want to say that's not sometimes when we're doing these assessments people disagree a little bit and that's okay we we talked through it and we come to an agreement okay so over 60 for canopy height now we need to look around in this visual acre again and determine whether or not we see any canopy gaps because these canopy gaps are places where birds like eastern wood pee weas or other fly catchers will perch on the side of the canopy and then fly out into the open and feed on insects that are flying around in that canopy all right now we're moving on to the midstory layer which is six to 30 feet high and the first thing we need to record which is just the same for the overstory are the dominant species so Andy Amanda what do we have here hemlock fur beach talking that midstories that's six feet a little taller than I am up to 30 which is a 30 sorry a three-story building you're looking in that sort of range and it is a little different than those overstory species right we definitely didn't have beach and we didn't have balsam fur in that overstory before really hemlock and right here but they are present and it's both a combination of really understory trees that have grown above six feet so they're into the midstory and some of the beach is actually in the overstory but the lower branches which persist with leaves so from a bird standpoint that's cover in that six to 30 range I guess I would add that red maple which doesn't have its leaves on right now is not contributing to the midstory significantly whereas the the beach is so I wouldn't count red maple in our midstory as a dominant species and then in terms of cover are we looking at very low less than 5% low 5 to 30% medium 30 to 70% or high over 70% yeah having walked around the acre the spot we're in now probably has the most of anywhere and even here I would I would call it low less than 30% right yes right and from what I've seen in the rest of it's even lower I wouldn't say it's less than five so I would put it in that 5 to 30 therefore low well it's just interesting when we look at our next box of canopy cover what we're gonna do is combine that overstory with that midstory so what we're averaging is basically high with low to very low but from a bird's perspective that still averages out to high so in other words between six feet and the sky essentially we have a lot of potential habitat branches leaves twigs that birds can use so I'm gonna go ahead and circle high for that and then we have to back track a little bit and go back to the question of what's the composition of the dominant composition of that midstory so are we looking at hardwood hardwood softwood softwood hardwood or softwood it's very close to an even mix but I would give a little more to the hardwood excuse me remember it's October we got to put some leaves back on a few trees to really get the the full picture the softwood understory that's growing up into that zone isn't really as much as the hardwood that is already there so we got two more layers to go the understory between one and six feet we might as well do that while we're here what are the dominant species we see so right here we have an eastern hemlock and interestingly that's not the only softwood species that we've been seeing in this understory zero to six feet yeah got the hemlock got balsam fur I think hemlock fur and yeah a bit of beach because there are some beach probably stump sprouts from old not from harvesting in this spot but didn't see any red maple down low but there is red spruce there is some red spruce in the stand okay now we're talking dominant dominant species would you include the red spruce in the dominant species I thought in one of the other plots we looked at it was there was a fair bit of it we might not have included it in the overall species count in the overstory it is here but it's certainly not dominant present but not dominant I agree in terms of the layer cover very low low medium or high I would go maybe medium it's patchy but where where the patches are it's pretty heavy so overall I would go with medium well the great thing about the medium category is it's really big it goes from 30 to 70 percent so Amanda you have anything to add to that medium okay and our final layer is the ground cover layer which is less than one foot high oh Andy's got his tape out there's a foot less than a foot it's very sparse I would say very low low amount of cover the species over there would be baltem fur a few white pine a little bit of hemlock is in that range or has a lower branch and undoubtedly there's a spruce out here there is some beach and a couple of seedlings yes in fact white oak which is not present really in the overstory here we've not yet so do we call it very low less than 5% or do we call it low 5 to 30% and there is this on the form there is that handy key that might help us visualize looking at that I'm tempted to say over the visible acre which includes a couple of recreational trails I'm tempted to say very low for ground cover would it be on the high side of very low it might be I could accept that well if it were on the high side of very low you might actually get to the low side of low I think you know very low is really almost nothing so I think we have more than more than nothing I'd go for the low so you know clearly this is a highly scientific endeavor I'm being very precise Sally speaks to the birds I'm gonna go with what she says she says low so just as a recap so just as a recap what we have now is dominant overstory species of red oak white pine red maple with a high canopy closure with hardwood strong hardwood component but mixed hardwood softwood over 60 feet high and some very small gaps for the mid-story the dominant species are hemlock balsam for beach so that's different than the overstory low which is also quite different from the overstory similarly dominant hardwood softwood and relatively high overall canopy cover understory different again hemlock balsam for beach actually that's similar to the mid-story but very patchy in some cases we have some pretty good patches of growth and others it's very sparse so we went with a medium cover which is 30 to 70 percent pretty wide range and then for the ground cover we've got a lot of seedlings coming up in some places balsam for white pine hemlock and white oak and relatively low coverage on the low side of the 5 to 30 percent so as Amanda mentioned at the bottom of this first page there is this great little visual representation of what that different cover looks like and that can be really helpful when you're trying to determine this and and although you know there's some back and forth about which category certain things should fall under I wouldn't worry too much about getting it exactly right for each time you fill out the form because really we want to fill out the form in multiple stands and then get an average overall so Maddie do you have any questions or comments that you want to add at this point I guess my biggest question is like what does this all mean for the birds then like what are they going to prefer and like what what do the like the dense areas of like the mid-story or the understory mean for the birds compared to these open spaces so typically the short answer and if you want a longer answer I encourage you to go see our other forestry for main bird videos the short answer is that the more vegetation there is in all layers the more places you have for different species of birds to nest find food and hide from predators and that's what they're looking for they're looking they're looking for eight different species uses a different part of the forest and a different feature within the forest so the more vegetation you have the more places there are for different species and then multiple individuals of those species all right now we get to move on we've finished with our live components in the forest and now we're going to move on to the dead components of the forest which are actually really important let's go find some snags so now we're moving on to the dead components of the forest wood that once was live but now is dead and the first thing we're going to be looking at are snakes or decaying trees and the goal here is to have lots of dead standing snakes because that's where woodpeckers and flying squirrels and raccoons and all kinds of animals will nest and are done and so we want to look at the number of small snags less than nine inches the number of medium snags nine to twelve inch diameter large snags 12 to 18 inch diameter or very large snags over 18 inch diameter I just hear chickadee chickadees are cavity nesting birds so they will use smaller snakes but something like a piliated woodpecker that's a much larger bird needs really big snakes so Andy and Amanda looking around we've got this great example of this birch snake right here but what else do we see in our visual acre walking around the acre there are not many snags of any size one of the few is right here and what are what your size of categories on whether it's less than nine inches nine to 12 12 to 18 or over 18 so he's got to go pull out his tape measure it up for us when you say less than nine inches you're talking about diameter breast how this one is roughly an 11 okay so that would be a medium size was there a height component to that has to be over six feet high okay clearly over six yeah so just the one you think in that cat in that size category now there's a few fur that might also be 9 to 12 no less than nine so we've got one from nine nine to 12 and two or three in the smaller category so that's not very many typically typically like to have at least a minimum of six and preferably including one that's that's large or very large so it can be tricky to spot snags when you're used to counting live trees in a typical inventory right you're looking for the live trees and you're looking for their timber value and then to you know sort of switch gears like said that bird brain thing and once you do it though for a while they'll start to pop out at you but that's another reason why it's so important to either walk through the stand or at least spin in a circle and really look carefully so you can try to find those dead trees because you're right they don't always pop out this could be a good time to mention that a lot of times you could be doing this habitat assessment along with a standard timber inventory so you've laid out a grid and you're going plot to plot and you may do this habitat assessment at the plot center where you're measuring everything else or you may be taking general impressions in between plots or you might have a whole separate series of plots that are strictly for habitat so that you can make that mental switch and not be so you know focused on the on the live trees and when you say that you want a lot of snags that's a relative term a lot usually that just means a few more than you have right because the more the more the better the bigger the better as they take home messages okay so this is the ecologist versus the forester who says for a lot of wood lot owners they would like a fairly large proportion of live trees but learning to appreciate the not live anymore is part of the whole forestry for main birds point of view yes and speaking of appreciating not live trees the other thing that is important are down woody material so we have two categories of down woody material we need to take inventory of the first is coarse woody material and these are logs or branches that are over six inches in diameter and over four feet in length or tiny snags that are less than six feet high so Andy you just measured that what have we got there right and it's only about five inches diameter at the big end so it's not going to count as the large or the course however it does have some length to it so it is almost 17 feet long so that's a that's a plus plus side yeah but it's it's a little bit on the small side so let's get a better example of what might fit that category of a large woody debris we were just looking at a small example of woody material that was down on the ground but now we have a much better example of what would qualify as coarse woody material so Andy's over here he's going to take a measurement of this one remember it needs to be over six inch diameter and over four feet long so I'm not going to be able to actually wrap a detaper on it so I use the other side of the detape and estimate at about 16 or 17 inch there we go now we're definitely qualifies yeah and but our threshold on length was only four feet so we definitely got more than nearly more than four feet no need to even measure that and if we look around behind Andy on the forest floor we'll also see some other examples of this coarse woody material and the goal here is to determine whether we have a high number over 20 pieces a medium number from six to 20 pieces or a low number less than six pieces so just looking behind us what what would you say we have here I think it's low so it's helpful if you actually really identify and count each piece that you see and the in order to determine the number the low would be less than six pieces which I'm having walked around I didn't see six okay I don't think I don't think we have it so we've got a low number and Andy you want to say a little something about that that this is that that's another way of noting that we don't have a really old forest here can you say more about that right I mean a forest a truly old forest would have had trees that grew up fell over and died much more than what we're seeing here so even though we have some fairly large diameter stems certainly over 16 inches so that bodes well for the future ecological structure as some of those do break off die or become cavity trees in fact this piece clearly came from was a one branch of a larger pine when this when this one came down and broke off it created a column of rot in that tree so this tree this overstory pine here is actually got a much higher habitat value than timber value and we'll continue to contribute towards that you know at some point in the future you'll come out here and there will be a lot of stuff in your way if you try to walk around which is one indication of a mature forest and a lot of those down would he would he material that's the reasons it's important for birds is because something like a roughed grouse uses that for drumming and attracting a mate but also you might find food mixed in on that dead decaying area and also things like fishers or squirrels will use those to move through the forest and they can find food underneath that woody material like small mammals or amphibians salamanders and frogs and whatnot so we also want to look at how much fine woody material we have on the forest floor and what we really like to see our piles of this sort of fine woody material I'm not seeing great examples here but we because what you really want are this fine woody material that's piled to the point where a bird could fly in there and hide from a predator and find insects that collect in that area so looking around our options are do we have a high number of piles over five a medium number one to four or a low number I think Amanda I think we have a low number of fine woody material piles I would agree again it just hasn't been enough material come down yet and then our our last category is the hardwood leaf litter and this is important particularly for oven birds that nest on the ground and so we need to know whether we have an adequate layer which is over one and a half inches or an inadequate layer which is less than one and a half inches I would say that right here it's barely adequate this red maple certainly is given a lot of leaves but I don't think it's quite enough for a oven bird to really be at home however there are other parts to the stand where the leaf litter did appear adequate so I might say adequate patchy would that be acceptable Sally that's good no yep and then we have just three other things we want to try to fill in that is have we seen any signs of invasive plants in here and if so what are they and how prevalent are they what's the percent cover luckily I have not know which is kind of remarkable for something yes yeah we are to developed areas yeah in this stand however if we when we go back over by the wetland I believe we saw some invasives the last time we were here but for this particular stand luckily there is not a noticeable population of invasive plants and how about insects and disease any signs of that nothing major going on right here over there definitely some diseases to be aware of that are in the in the general area but nothing I don't know what do you see anything else Andy the one beach tree I saw did look like it had the beach spark disease pretty pretty common doesn't necessarily kill a tree right off so you can still get get a lot of bird habitat value out of it even though it has that disease where there's hemlock in this stand and we're definitely in the hemlock woolly adelgid zone it's something to look out for didn't notice any on this particular spot but it would be it would be logical to find some around here not a lot of ash in the stand so not a lot of concerns about emerald ash borer right here gypsy moth hasn't made its way here yet I haven't had an outbreak for a while and with the oak component though that could be a concern in the future okay and the final thing is whether or not there are any riparian or forest and wetlands in the forest and I don't think we had any in this particular plot but nearby us there are some nice little small wetlands and little swampy areas and the great thing about having those in your forest is that it brings in a whole different component of trees plants and then birds that key into that so we're doing our typical inventories of standing timber and we tend to not want to go into the wetlands you know because that's not what we're focused on but yet how would you capture that in a habitat assessment would you actually make a separate go there and and do a stand assessment in a wetland area or a forested wetland it's it's more just noting it on the form so right here what we say our note if it's present in the area okay and riparian habitat which is that forested area right along a water body is particularly important because you often have some larger trees in that area you also those trees fall into the water and create structure within the water but also a lot of birds will queue into that habitat something like a Canada warbler likes that shrubby thick shrubby area that's right next to a wetland for example so it's more you don't necessarily need to do the habitat assessment in the wetland but noting its presence is really important as to the diversity right and that's kind of that that whole landscape piece of looking at things not only on the track but on the neighboring parcels and in the area you know is there a lot of prevalence of wetlands or riparian type habitats having determined that this is an intermediate stand with maybe a few larger trees is that what's next door is there a lot of the young forest around is there even older forest you know what's it what's in that you take it out really to 2,500 acre blocks if you can find a way to determine either using Google Earth or other methodology yes and that is something that you can do you can look at back in your office after you've collected these habitat assessments in a number of different stands and you can you and we have some other forms as part of our guidebook for foresters for forcing for main birds that will guide you through that process well it may appear from from this video that it takes quite a while to do this of course it takes longer when you're trying to make a video like many things if you do one or two of these you get used to it you can pretty well zip through those the stand assessment form in fact there is a short form version of that that is included in the forestry for main birds guidebook it's on the main Audubon website under the resources for foresters under forestry for main birds and you can get to the point of probably doing it in just adding five or ten minutes to a to a regular inventory plot