WV Yellow Poplar   Fores-@aol.com   Nov 03, 2004 19:05 PST  Ed: For the past month I have been working preparing a timber sale on a property that has not been harvested since the early 1900s, long before the chestnut blight hit. In that time, I have encountered numerous trees between 35 and 48" DBH but the yellow poplar today was the largest so far.   The tree was just over 51" in diameter and I checked the CBH at 13.4' The tree was growing in an area that an 80 year old neighbor said was an old corn field on a fairly steep slope. The tree had it's top taken out decades ago and had a spreading crown with five separate leaders that splayed out from the bole about 60' in all directions from the center. The largest of the three leaders were each about 3' in diameter with the smallest branch 20". I could see the tree for a couple hundred feet before I got to it and was surprised by the diameter. This tree is not the largest diameter poplar I have ever encountered but it sure was in the running for the most biomass. It is being retained as a legacy tree along with several others I have encountered on the same tract. I stood under the tree for a good five minutes trying to imagine how a person could ever get an accurate height on the monster. Based on other trees in the same area I would figure it was at least 140' tall. Still.......it was far from 25' CBH like the one Jess mentioned. Russ Re: WV Yellow Poplar   Fores-@aol.com   Nov 04, 2004 04:53 PST  The parcel in question is privately owned and the current owner was willed the land by a relative. The new owner is a working class retiree and the thought of getting $2,000 to $4,000 per acre from the timber is too much of a temptation to pass up. Fortunately, the owner recognizes the value of good forestry and is allowing many of the most outstanding examples to remain uncut. A tract like this farm is uncommon in some of West Virginia but not extremely rare by any stretch of the imagination. On some of our best cove sites, 100 year old 140' tall trees are not unusual. We have lots of extremes in WV with poor sites holding 200 year old hardwood trees and barely 4,000 board feet per acre on one end and 50 year old stands that hold 20,000 board feet per acre on the other end. There is nothing prettier than a 22-30" DBH red oak or yellow poplar that has 50 to 65 feet of clean knot free stem topped by a live crown that is more than 50% of the total tree height. A little known factoid is that West Virginia contains 1/10 of 1% of the forestland in the US but it contains 5% of the most productive timberland in the entire country. The funny thing about this sort of property is that I was retained by the property owner because of my reputation for protecting the integrity of the woods. His other option would be to get a recommendation for cutting to a 12" diameter stump which the majority of industrial types would recommend.......ugh! You should see some of the WV trees I will never sell! Russ Re: WV Yellow Poplar   Fores-@aol.com   Nov 05, 2004 04:28 PST  Gary: A tremendous amount of land is gradually being set aside as Monongahela NF becomes increasingly off limits to timber harvesting. The Mon contains some extremely productive land and cutting has been reduced to the point that annual harvest is approximately 1% of growth. There are 12,000,000 acres of private forest in WV and 46,000 acres in the entire WV State Forest system. The most unfortunate aspect is the general apathy among resource professionals towards taking any responsibility as to how they treat the resource...unless it is a photo op or PR effort. Otherwise, diameter limit harvesting would not be so pervasive. However, because poor roads, poor access and poor markets for timber from the woods of privately owned land in WV persisted well into the 1990s there are many areas where patches of impressive timber and forest are still quite common. The most important difference between NE and WV is that we are nearly 100 years behind New England in terms of clearing for agriculture and other open land uses. Where the peak of conversion of forest into open or agriculture land occurred in NE prior to the Civil War, WV clearing for agriculture and subsistence farming did not peak until just prior to the Depression and reached a 70/30 open to forest ratio...where it is now 20/80 open to forest ratio. On the big tree front is Kanawha State Forest covering about 9,000 acres near Charleston that has been set aside as a no harvesting zone. Many of the growing sites there are good but not great. The SF with the best growing sites is considered to be Kumbrabow SF where some of the land is capable of producing over 1,000 board feet per acre per year in hardwood growth. To date, I am aware of no effort within WV to document any aspects of tree extremes in terms of size, age or volume. I will say that every logger I have ever dealt with has a story about a tree they once harvested that yielded 4,000 to 7,000 board feet (Doyle). The largest tree I have ever personally sold was a red oak that had 120 growth rings at the stump and scaled at about 4,000 board feet. The tree was sound, perfect and yielded the 17 property owners (that is why it was cut....money had to be split 17 ways) about $3,000. It may not sound like a lot of money for one good oak tree but that figure represents 10% of what the entire 325 acre farm appraised at when the elderly owner died in 1990. A partial harvest of the 100 acre area of older timber on the farm yielded $475,000 for the family. Some of the trees that were retained on the property were as good or better than this one and nearly 10% of the 100 acres of older growth of the farm was left as a legacy as I made a convincing argument that they would never be able to head down to the local "used tree" store to replace all of the giant old trees and that there would be a diminishing thrill associated with taking family members to the woods so they could see the big "legacy stump". The most important thing to consider is that the general population here has a utilitarian attitude towards all natural resources be they animals, trees or minerals and the preservation mentality common to the "enlightened" northeast does not fly well in Appalachia. Protected portions of national and state forests are going to become important aspects of our genetic reserve. However, our woods still contain an estimate 80,000,000+ wild ginseng plants! I like it here! Russ   Home