Creating wildlife trees

There are several techniques used for creating wildlife trees.

These techniques may be of value for restoring or enhancing wildlife tree habitat. They are not intended to replace natural retention strategies. The natural retention strategies are the preferred method.

1. Stubs
2. Tree topping
3. Fungal inoculation
4. Nestboxes and cavity construction
5. Planting standing dead trees (snags)
6. Blasting
7. Stem girdling

Stubs

What should forest managers be doing to retain natural stubs?

One method of creating wildlife trees is to high-cut stumps when harvesting with mechanical feller bunchers. This leaves small standing dead trees called stubs (see Figure 11).

Stubs provide structure within second-growth forests and create future coarse woody debris.

• Candidates for stubs should exhibit some defects in the lower bole, which reduce their timber value but enhance their habitat value.

• Stubs cannot replace attributes associated with full height wildlife trees, but still provide limited stand level structure.

Recommendations
 for stubs

Are there other recommendations? If so, what are they?

Stems suitable for stub creation should have some visible defect (such as a canker, scar or conk) in the lower bole and little or no lean. Trees which do not have heart rot prior to death (i.e., stubbing) will not develop this critical WLT attribute.

Tree topping

What other hints can you add to tree topping?

Tree topping can be employed in situations where the installation of a no-work zone around a high value wildlife tree in order to protect the work area from aerial hazards (e.g., a large spiked top or large dead limbs on a class 2 tree) is not appropriate. 
 

Healthy class 1 trees (trees with no visible external defects) can also be topped to simulate natural breakage and promote standing dead tree recruitment. This may be appropriate in even-aged stands with little or no structural diversity.

Trees can be jagged-topped to simulate natural breakage, thereby facilitating weathering and decay processes.

Only highly experienced and trained personnel should be used to climb and top trees.