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The conversation discusses the impact of timber harvesting on wildlife and ecosystems. Cutting trees affects deer, wolves, and other species, creating different environments. Old growth forests are preferred by wildlife due to better foraging and survival conditions. Wildlife corridors are crucial for animal movement, and managing large-scale areas like the Tongass involves considerations for thinning treatments and wildlife studies. The scale of the area influences study design for wildlife biologists. It is important to balance timber harvesting with conservation efforts to maintain ecosystem health and wildlife populations. I'm, I don't know, are you able to see me? Yeah, we can see you. Can you see us? I'm not able to see you, but I don't know if... I can see myself, so I'm assuming that my video feed says that my camera's on. Okay. I think it should be okay. I don't know what...huh. But, yeah, so the wildlife, sorry about and the... Yeah, we were, I was just saying that when you harvest timber, you know, when you cut trees, you're creating a whole different ecosystem and it affects, you know, deer and wolves, whatever happens to be...I just washed my hands. So you're creating a different environment and it affects lots of other trees or other vegetation growing up. It affects whatever life happens to be using that timber, that timber harvest, that cut. So, you know, there's just other things to consider besides opening up, getting rid of, opening up the area to let more trees grow up. Like Ken was saying, that some of that slash that's cut, left from the cut timber has to be broken up so that it's more usable for wildlife. Yeah. And for wildlife, do they prefer, like, old growth the most or, like, would they still...do they have a preference for, like, the second growth or...it depends on the species. It depends on the species, but in general, almost everything prefers old growth and that's the other controversial thing is, you know, you cut trees down, you know, bears don't tend to use the area, deer don't tend to use because in second growth, there's nothing. It's so dense. There's no forage underneath the trees. There's nothing to eat. It's just barren. You go into a stand around, you know, if you were to wander around here into an old, you know, clear cut that's 20 years old, you could walk through it. There's nothing growing on the bottom. It's barren in most cases. And so there's no reason for animals to be there. It's hard to walk. There's no food. But in an old growth forest, a typical old growth forest is what they call patchy. There's, you know, there'll be a lot of big trees and then there'll be a bunch where a couple of trees have toppled over from a wind throw event or what have you and then you've got all these blueberry bushes and shrubs and things like that that animals can eat and plus they can pass through the old growth area much easier because it's not just this thicket of dense second growth. The other thing is that a lot for deer in particular is that their deer survival is much higher in old growth because what happens, what kills deer is deep snow. Because the deep snow means they can't travel and they can't dig deep to get to the forage to eat. And so, but the old growth actually acts as an umbrella. So the snow is, if you walk in the woods around here and you're in big trees, you'll know that snow is way less dense than it is because the canopy intercepts a lot of that. And so you've got all these dynamics like Ann was saying about having, you know, when you change all that it affects the wildlife. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't even think about that as like the canopy and the protection from snow. Right. Yeah. The other thing related to that is a lot of timber sales spend a fair amount of time in the wildlife section of a timber sale. I mean a timber sale EIS is that the wildlife biologists they kind of map the wildlife corridors because deer and other animals primarily a lot of this is deer to deer movement because people hunt deer. It's a subsistence item and there's so many other things tied to it. But you want to have these corridors that animals can move through. And so they, if you basically just, you know, clear cut the animals. The animals can't go from the beach up to the up higher. They can't move up and down elevationally which they do depending on the snowfall. If it gets too deep up high they move down. If it's not a big snowfall year they can be up higher. But if you remove big band of trees all the way across the whole mountainside then you've created this barrier because once you've removed the old you've got deep snow. You might have a deep snow barrier and they can't, you know, come back and forth. So the wildlife biologists spend a lot of time looking at wildlife corridors when they put a timber sale together. Oh, yeah. Because I, you know for the access it would be way easier just around the beach or like at the low elevation sites. So I could see how it, like a band across an island might make the most sense for like timber harvest. It's an accessibility. But I didn't even think about like for the wildlife corridor how that would cause a lot of issues. Yeah. And also with old growth there's several species that really utilize old growth like marbled murrelets, wild geese and marbled murrelets will use old growth trees and goth tops and martens. I'm not sure about herons but martens and those trees. And so those trees are important you know to the whole life cycle of several animals, you know, in the southeast. Yeah. It's not just their timber value. The wood value. Yeah. My cousin was talking to me a little bit about how all the forest, and he said that a lot of the forest throughout Juneau were like second growth because they had Juneau, are there like old growth pockets on like hiking trails around Juneau? Oh yeah, there are. But there's also a lot of it has been harvested. I mean on the trails that you walk on because keep in mind a hundred years ago they were cutting everything down for firewood or timber from houses or for mining, shoring up mining operations, etc. Yeah. And they used a lot of wood I mean basically Douglas has been cleared, a lot of that's been harvested. You got everything along the Treadwell Ditch you know that whole thing with the wooden frame you can walk up the you know where Montana Creek is, right? Yeah. So if you walk up the trail that goes, not the river trail you know the paved one that goes along the river, but if you walk up Montana Creek and you look at those trees, those have all been harvested. You see trees grown out of stumps and things like that, they were harvested decades ago because they were easy to get. They probably floated along down the creek or something like that and then down the river and like even if you look at a lot of the historical clear cuts, they were taken near the shoreline where it was easy access and they could get them out and then the further back you go, depending on where you are, the trees may be intact. But there's definitely, you can walk in places on the Herbert Glacier trail that are further in and you're walking in some beautiful old growth trees. Okay, yeah. Because I do feel like the canopy there is so thick and like the undergrowth. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. I guess, also I was wondering, I guess this could be as well for like wildlife studies too, but how do you think about management on a scale as large as a Tongass? I guess for like thinning treatments too, you know, if you're hiring thinning contractors, I guess you just choose the second growth site, but I think being in Sweden where it feels like the scale is really small and there's rows everywhere, the idea is just that you can, like every forest field managed very heavily and I, just coming from the Tongass I guess I was interested in what it looks like on a much bigger scale where things are a lot more remote. Yeah, well I think what happens, you know, I haven't been to Sweden, but I would suspect that obviously the scale is much smaller, but also I think the environmental ethic is higher, you know, and so they're willing to spend more money and do things differently and they have equipment and make sure the timber and the landscape is different too that makes it easier to do that, but on the Tongass they may thin, I don't know how many thousands of acres every year, I mean you could look it up and once again if you want more detail I can refer you to my friend in Sitka, but let's assume they do 20,000 acres a year, well the Tongass does 17 million acres and obviously that's not all timber, it's only you know, 500,000 of that may have been harvested at one point but, you know, it would take a long time to fiddle that and I doubt they're doing 20,000 acres, I mean it's probably under 10 way under 10, and they're probably doing, they're probably picking that based on some high value things or where they're trying to get the forest to come back faster. A lot of the Tongass is just growing back naturally and in places where they probably want more inaccessible or less value for certain other things they're just letting it come back naturally and eventually what happens is that thicket of trees, if you don't thin it, over time it will turn into an overgrowth forest it's just going to take much longer. It might even take hundreds of years longer. Yeah. And for like wildlife populations that would be like too long, kind of, or just not? Yeah. Fortunately the forest, you know, the Tongass is so big and a lot of the wildlife populations are still pretty strong. You know, it varies from winter to winter or what have you, but, you know, you've got a lot of population, you know, maybe some other things are involved, you know, with martin maybe or what have you populations, but it can also be due to trapping and fish and game regulations but a lot of the, you know, we're fortunate we have a pretty intact ecosystem in many ways, which, you know, may not have down south, and the scale is so big that animals can move around some animals can certainly move around. So if there's a timber harvest on one side of the mountain, you know, the animals can move to the other side but at the same time you are going to have maybe less animals overall compared to an intact ecosystem. Yeah. For, like and for like designing studies for, as like a wildlife biologist, how do you how does the scale impact how you design your studies? Oh, you mean the scale of the area? Yeah. Would you spend more time just like closer to Juneau or are you going over to Admiralty specifically? Well, they usually look at, I didn't do much research as a biologist, but they usually look at a population that might be of concern, like wolves on Cuyu Island or Prince of Wales Island they had a study going on on goats, there was a study going on that had to do with mining, the Kensington Mine. Mostly a lot of it is where you get your funding and that's what you focus on, the species you focus on depends on the concern of where your funders are. But, yeah, just things that are, there was a study on Marble Deerless, there was a study on Martin because they and deer has been really studied for years, many, many years in southeast Alaska different black bear and brown bear studies, but whether the species, they could be concerned for the species or concerned about some activity that is going to take place on that, on the forest, whether it's going to be logged or whatever and that could be an impetus to study a lot of the populations in that area. Yeah, that's what happened a lot, like on Appleton they did a lot of brown bear studies because of the Greenstreet Mine they did something similar for goats and for Kensington and they've done Martin studies, but I know they've done a brown bear study in Haines and I'm not sure what the impetus may have been because of the mining and the logging on the state forest. So a lot of it is they try to do like a before and after so they can kind of, you know, they know what the base population is and then the development goes in and they can kind of monitor to see if the population has decreased or what, but a lot of it is, you know, there's huge areas and they're making population estimates, it's gotten a lot easier now because they use DNA, they use DNA stuff that they never had access to in the 70s and 80s. They have satellite colors, they have radio colors Yeah, I mean they have drones out there, they have, you know, they've got they catch the fur on, where they used to put barbed wire stuff out in the woods and the air walks by and they get some air, you know, from that and then they can get a population estimate. So there's lots of different techniques out there but they're usually, you know, on an area, like an area like Haines, they're doing it and I just heard they're going to start doing one. They've never done a brown bear study on Baranoff. They've used the numbers from Abilty to guide their harvesting of brown bears on Baranoff and I guess they're thinking that maybe that's not accurate so they want to do a study. Oh, okay I think the study in Haines was because brown bears, the viewing area up in Haines recreational brown bear viewing was because the bears gather on the Chilkoot River and it's sort of becoming a popular bear viewing area this was years ago and they were concerned about the impact of human viewers on the bears ability to fish But they're all different in the population Right, but the image of the study of that wild group of bears was because of the pressure from possible bear viewers in recreation. Oh, yeah That's another reason to study populations to be concerned about certain populations Also, being in Sweden I've been trying to relate back what I've learned and I was wondering I guess it's hard because the Tongass in a lot of ways is very different than a lot of other places but if there's, and it also depends on timing and resources, but if there's specific places that you like I guess not collaborate with but like refer to when thinking about management questions or if there's different areas like, oh in Oregon there's similar problems with this study