Noxious animals, including dogs, the worst enemy of deer, are exterminated by the wardens, who also keep off poachers, and do all they can to promote the well-being of big game and small. In winters of deep snows it is necessary to cut down trees so that the ruminants may be kept from starvation. Ear corn and fodder are often scattered on the snow that covers the natural food supply. The animal mortality in the North Woods is sometimes appalling in severe winters.
It is most common to find a single forest serving two, or even all three of these different purposes. Lumbering may be profitably carried on in protective forests without damaging them as conservers of the water supply, or interfering to a great extent with hunting. It takes a long time and very thorough clearing to overcome the wildness and to expose the floor of our American forests. Young growth from seed and stumps covers the scars made by lumbermen who, as a rule, want nothing but good-sized logs. Fire and grazing are much more effective agents of deforesta tion than lumbering, but lumbering fosters fires by the "slash" it leaves behind.
When forestry is mentioned, commercial forestry is usually meant. Wood is necessary to civilised life, and the production of it is a problem that becomes graver as population becomes denser. The history of European countries may eventually be repeated in ours. First came the cutting down of trees for use and for the clearing of land. Then experimental work of a vague and general nature to check wastefulness, and provide for the future productiveness of woodlands. Then more definite plans, more generally effective in their workings, toward the same end. Last, the growing of wood as a crop, seriously, laboriously, profitably, as a general farmer may at last take to celery culture or to strawberries or melons, and make a fortune out of a few acres. Such forestry and such farming are intensive. They are specialised to a high degree.
Intensive forestry at its best can be seen in Germany. State and private forests can be found in which tree crops are grown as carefully as any agricultural crop. The land is prepared, the seed selected, the'young trees protected, cultivated, pruned and thinned. Such a forest is as clean and as thickly set as a field of grain, and its value when cut and marketed is beyond belief to us whose standard of heavy production has been "the virgin forest."
The plan followed in the administration of these highly specialised forests is to cut a certain acreage clean every year, and replant it. The years required for a crop to mature is the basis of the rotation system. By the time the whole forest is cut over the first plot has a second crop ready to harvest. Most of the German forests are of pine and spruce, with an average rotation period of eighty to one hundred years.
One-quarter of the land in Germany is forest. Not much• of this land is continuous in one great wooded section of the country, but is scattered in smaller forests among the thickly settled districts. Each has its force of workers, its sawmill and a ready market for all the forest products. It is said that the thinnings and prunings of these forests pay most of the cost of the labour put upon them while they are growing. Even twigs are used, bound into fagots or made into charcoal and sold as fuel. Mushrooms and truffles are gathered in these forests. The leafage furnishes fodder for cattle in certain broad-leaf woods, as those of linden and maple.
The city of Zurich in Switzerland has owned a forest for one thousand years. It has been so carefully regulated that it has furnished a definite amount of timber each year for six hundred years and is to-day in better condition than ever before. Its plan of management has not changed in all that time. As early as the year 13oo the peoples of northern Europe applied to their forests the principles of rational forestry, while southern Europe ignored these principles, and is still suffering from this folly.
Extensive forestry, adopting improved methods of handling wooded tracts, without greatly increasing the cost of management, is the type of forestry American conditions call for at present, in most sections. In special regions intensive forestry in con junction with agriculture is justified. The experimental stage will gradually bring us to more intensive methods, but it will be a long, slow evolution. We have seen much destructive lumber ing, but forestry is just begun, here and there. Over the bulk of the country, people have never heard of forestry.