An uncommon forester
Bill Haywood's solitary crusade to save the oak-hickory forest and make sense of our place in the natural order
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| Photo by Rollie Henkes: © Midwest Woodlands & Prairies |
It's possible to manage trees for profit and not hurt the timber. But each time you step up in the money game you lose the diversity and integrity of the system. Trees become merchandize and everything else weeds and brush.---Bill HaywoodBill Haywood stopped playing the money game as a forester years ago when he found the price too high.
Haywood still makes his living as a forester, but on his terms. He writes about those terms in his new book, Forest on the Fringe, a scientific and spiritual inquiry into man's relationship with the natural world---in particular, the oak-hickory forest, an ecosystem fighting for its life between farm fields on the west and the advancing maple-basswood forests on the east.
Haywood lives with his wife, Wahneta, on an acreage in the Cedar River Valley 20 miles north of Cedar Falls, Ia. As we sat in their back yard enjoying the shade of a giant maple--- ironically the species whose shade is snuffing out the oaks---Haywood told how his calling seems to be working in the woods, saving the oak-hickory forest one acre at a time. "That has very little impact when you think about the millions of acres of timber that needs saving," he said. "But if people read the book, I thought I could have an impact that way."
Change of heart
In 1990 Haywood went out on his own as an independent forester after working 10 years as a forester for the Black Hawk County Conservation Board. "My thoughts back then were mostly how my clients could manage their timber and still make a profit," he said. "Otherwise, I and other foresters knew the land owners would just turn in cattle or neglect the timber completely, and we'd lose it. But we were losing the timber anyway as land owners and the timber industry chased the dollar. That realization--- and the fact that I knew I was never going to get rich in this business---affected my work in the woods. On bid jobs, the client wanted me to do this and this, but I knew the woods needed more than what he was willing to pay for, so I just went ahead and did it."Today, Haywood works mainly for two clients who are willing to pay him for what he says needs doing in their woods. They include the Trappist monks of the New Melleray Abbey west of Dubuque, Ia., where he manages the Abby's 200 acres of hardwood timber. On most Mondays for the past four years, Haywood has loaded his chain saws and herbicide containers and climbed into his old Ford Pickup to make the 100-mile drive to the Abbey nestled in the Mississippi blufflands. His home away from home is a 10-foot travel trailer parked in a grove of ash and pine trees on the Abby grounds.
It is here in these threatened oak-hickory woodlands, Haywood said, that he has found his place. It's a place, he writes in his book, where conditions include "rain, cold, snow and heat, compounded by strenuous work and poison ivy, nettles, thorns, mosquitoes, ticks and flies"---reasons, he notes, why neglecting the woods is much too easy.
Powerfully built on a compact 5' 5" frame, Haywood, who is 59, weighs the same as he did as a 19-year-old football player for Norfolk Junior College in Norfolk Nebraska. He grew up near Emmetsburg, Ia., in a family of five boys. "We loved the outdoors and did a lot of hunting and camping, yet I still liked to read, especially science." he told me. He pursued his bookish bents after serving in the military in Viet Nam, attending two more junior colleges on the West Coast, and then the University of Iowa, where he took botany, geology, microbiology and other basic science courses. He went on to earn a master's degree in forest biology at Iowa State University.
Genesis
Haywood's thirst for knowledge coupled with his primal, almost mystical connection with woodlands set the stage for Forest on the Fringe. He said he got the idea for the book in 2000 while sitting deep in the woods on a creek bank looking at stones more than a billion years old that had washed in from a glacier. "I thought those elements are in us," he said. "To help people understand the ecology of the oak-hickory forest, I wanted to show how everything is connected."The book takes the reader through a dizzying sweep of time, back to almost the very origins of life, in which bluegreen algae began the first conversion of solar energy into simple sugars via photosynthesis and the release of oxygen. You eventually enter the world of an oak-hickory woodland. Here you meet a community of plants, along with a human member of the biome named Sapien.
Be prepared for a book unlike any you've ever read, unless you remember your childhood books where plants and animals actually talked. An aspen, a gooseberry and other members of the oak-hickory community take up the narrative from an insider species point of view. They lecture Sapien, taking him to task for screwing up in just 200 years a wonderful ecosystem that they of the plant, microbial, insect and animal kingdoms built over a period of 65 million years, working in concert.
A white oak tells Sapien, "We have withstood meteorites, glaciers, droughts, floods and fire. We have withstood continuous and relentless predation. But until the rise of your species, Sapien, we never absorbed the destructive blow of a calamity to which we couldn't adapt."
The calamity, in this case, was Sapien's settlement in the tallgrass prairie, which led to its destruction and spelled the end of the fires that swept into the oak-hickory woodlands, keeping them open so the sun loving species of the community could regenerate.
Sipping an iced tea, Haywood painted a scenario that would send chills down the back of anyone who appreciates a diverse woodland. "We're not only losing the white oaks and bur oaks," Haywood told me, "but the collapse of the ecosystem threatens a host of other important species, including black walnut, shagbark hickory, black cherry and shrubs such as pagoda dogwood."
"The spring ephemerals will decline," Haywood continued, "along with May apples, Jack in the pulpit and columbines. Also threatened are the turkeys, squirrels and other animals that depend on the mast and acorns of oak-hickory forests. These forests also provide an important flyway for neotropical migrants.
"Hard maple, meanwhile, is really benefitting from lack of fire and non-management," Haywood continued. "Some land owners may not care. Maple is worth good money and is easy to grow. Meanwhile, shade-tolerant species like bitternut hickory, hackberry, ironwood and blue beech will fill in the understory. But the forest floor will be largely barren. That's because maple leaves intercept so much sunlight. The trees rob moisture from understory plants because of their spreading root system and voluminous leaf area."
"What about the condition of forest floor in northern forests where hard maple is native?" I asked him.
Haywood explained that the nutrient cycle turns more slowly in cooler, wetter climates. Here, maple shares its home with conifers and mosses, lichens and ferns. Enough water and nutrients are available to other plant species in the community, Haywood said.
Haywood's book holds out a glimmer of hope for the beleaguered oak-hickory ecosystem.
Members of the forest community tell Sapien how they built the ecosystem through millions of years of evolution. They've done all they can, they say. To save what they built, it's now up to Sapien as the highest order of life on the planet. "It will take thought, planning and action," the plants tell Sapien."
The tools
If the ball is indeed in Sapien's court, he has the tools to save the oak-hickory forests, according to Haywood. Prescribed fire is one option, of course. Another is planting oak seedlings in stands veering toward maple. "The price of tree-tubes is going down," he said. "If land owners maintain those tree shelters and make sure they get 20 or 30 oaks per acre, then I see good things happening. You don't necessarily have to wipe out hard maple stands, but thin them with a chain saw to get sunlight to the forest floor. In addition to herbs, trees like black cherry, shagbark and maybe black walnut might come up. If you add oaks in tree shelters you're going to be in good shape. But you have to think long term. It could take 25 years to turn a stand around. "In the book, the fate of the oak-hickory forest becomes a metaphor for the larger question of our relationship to all ecosystems. As Sapien, we are part of these ecosystems, charged with their care.
A fungus known as the ornate scarlet cup adorns the book's cover instead of an oak. Though little noticed, it's quite common in woodlands. "People see the trees, but the trees wouldn't be here if it weren't for the fungi," Haywood said. "They make nutrients available to trees by breaking down waste. And they have a lesson for us. The scarlet cup knows that if it consumes to the point of killing its host, it will die, too."