Hi Peter and All,
   Ants are very successful and will be around long after the
'superior' animals such as Humans have made earth hostile to Humans and
much more via climate change. I do not recall details but ant strategy
is build around 'hive wisdom' ?
   If an ant sees something which needs to be done it proceeds to do
it without delay. One could do worse than adopt ant mentality; act
according to individual judgment.
   Manipulating the natural world resembles steering a container ship
with one horsehair. But there is, given the safety of numbers, always a
chance that one seed of many will become a tree.
   Over time I took several Plant Ecology courses and came away with
the notion that animals had no effect on plant cover; but they do. One
year I planted about 100 Oak seedlings and gradually all were bitten
off. In 1980 when I bought the North Alton woodlot an Oak about belt
high caught my eye. 42 years later it is still belt high after being
girdled by mice and gnawed off by rabbits numerous times in spite of
1/2" hardware cloth mouse guards.
   But the old saying "Little drops of water, little grains of sand
make the mighty ocean and the pleasant land" also says that one should
think and act like an ant.
   The great menace facing forest cover is climate change; especially
prolonged rainless periods during the growing season and high winds.
   Another menace are those who use forest products every day by using
paper in various forms, live in wooden houses and have wooden furniture
but denounce logging. e.g. the new math-- "What do you think of a man
who will murder 1000 trees a day just to feed his wife and family ?"
   A recent wind (2013 ?) uprooted or broke off nearly all of my large
live Spruce so I considered salvage; horse logging to brow along my
woods roads and conversion to lumber by portable mill so I contacted a
nearby mill owner. He had over 500 large Spruce down and intended to let
them rot in the woods because, as he explained, regulations forbid the
sale of other than certified wood and certification is expensive. Unless
you can use the lumber there is no point in having it sawed out. So I
gave them to a friend to salvage for firewood.
   This is extremely two faced because Fir lumber is now classed with
Spruce. In former times when one could sell Spruce lumber without
certification, even the lowest crook would not have had fir sawed to
lumber because it is brittle and weak. Consequently potential lumber
rots in the woods and more demand is diverted to Crown Land.
 Dave, Kentville
On 5/2/2021 8:48 AM, Peter Payzant wrote:
To clarify, I was wondering if there was any point in
trying to
re-establish Beech here once the existing ones are gone. When would it
be worth the effort, if ever?
It seems that the National Tree Seed Centre is not well-stocked with
American Beech seed, by the way.
--- Peter Payzant
On 2021-05-01 4:37 PM, John and Nhung wrote:
I wonder if the National Tree Seed Centre in Fredericton
(
https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/science-data/research-centres-labs/forestry-researc…
<https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/science-data/research-centres-labs/forestry-research-centres/atlantic-forestry-centre/national-tree-seed-centre/13449>)
could help. A couple of years ago, I was in touch re. Hemlocks
(threatened by the adelgid) and black ash (Thought I’d hit a lot of
them down here in God’s country, but they turned out to be a European
species!).
Donnie McPhee (donnie.mcphee(a)canada.ca
<mailto:donnie.mcphee@canada.ca>) is the go-to guy and can probably
identify go-to people in N.S.
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