| A unit of Lasting Forests
evolving since March 30, 1999 |
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A Total Forest Management Plan
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Food plots are usually small areas of a field planted in grains or grasses for wildlife. Clearings are small cleared areas within or at the edge of a forest planted to wildlife foods or where natural foods are encouraged. "Wildlife openings" and managed forest gaps are terms also used.
The wildlife managers of Rural System are very selective and anxious to take only necessary action to feed wild animals. Feeding must be very specific. Some animals have surplus foods; others may need some. Meeting the needs , the difference between what nature produces and what the animals need, every month of the year is the task of management, not just growing foods during a short period. Our recommendations are based on your objectives as well as site conditions, available food supplies, their costs, and their expected production of forage.
We evaluate your needs for animals, then animal needs and conditions, then the costs of changing the condition on the land to the desired one. Computers select the optimum plants and fertilization for a five-year period (after this, a new analysis is needed to re-evaluate plant success, changed soil conditions, and even your changing interests and needs).
On many areas, food plots will not be needed. On such areas, artificial feeding may be more cost-effective than trying to plant areas and grow foods. The Lasting Forests Feeders should be considered for the specific wildlife desired.
Changing forest land or fallow fields to crop land or hay fields that can be worked with machinery can be very expensive (e.g., $500 per acre if all costs are counted), depending on the soil, topography, tree size, and equipment and labor available. Planting small tracts into grains annually, say four one-quarter-acre plots, costs about $125. Many people prefer to leave strips of crops from normal operations for wildlife. This is one way to reduce these costs.
Annual plant crops are very effective for some species but more expensive than growing plots filled with perennial plants. The specific needs of the animals being managed or those being emphasized must be matched with available fund limits. The computer can provide guidelines for the most effective expenditure of these funds.
The general guides that you will see within the more specific ones (should you select them) are:
Openings in forests should be viewed as the hole in the doughnut. The edges are the important part for game bird and other nesting birds, not the center. The interior, the opening, is for brief, but critical and abundant production of insects. The grass is pretty and conspicuous but it is not important to many animals. It is vitally important to insects and rodents, the food base of many communities. Fairly large areas of grass must be created (if not already present) on your land to feed deer if deer are one of your objectives. (They eat 6 to 10 pounds per day!). "Hay" food plots may not be feasible, but if desired, they should be developed on the best land available and near roads and trails where the costs of maintenance will be lowest and sightings of deer the highest.
There is some controversy among observers of birds about the desirability of field and forest edges. It cannot be resolved briefly. Cowbirds are a problem in some areas. The manager/owner needs to study the number of nests likely to be in the edges with those throughout the forested area, to concentrate on the species being actively managed (e.g., grouse and wild turkey) and realize that tradeoffs are commonly made by managers of any system relative to numbers of a species gained and numbers lost. Time and cost to achieve the stated desired number of animals should be the major criteria for food plot decisions, not the likely loss of probably-present song birds to cowbirds.
Deer have relatively small home ranges so no more that an average of 6 will forage regularly, daily, on a plot. If each eats 10 pounds per day and it stays 360 days, then the total forage consumed annually is 3600 pounds. Hay fields produce about a ton (2000 pounds) per year, so in gross terms, the largest plots (or nearby plots in a group) should be 10.8 acres. Most are much smaller. Some people recommend planting them along the sides of roads to get the desired length and narrow width...and (usually) ease of maintenance. Where deer are very abundant, over-grazing can destroy food plots or make them useless to future deer herds as well no longer a source of insects for various birds. Deer control may be needed. Food plots may be one way to "pump up" antler size by providing highly nutritious forage. There are many tradeoffs to be made and most are based on the needs of the owners and users of areas, rarely on knowledge of plants or animal biology.
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| A square opening or wildlife clearing in the forest. Each such opening is unique. There are many tactics and structures within each such area. |
Unique Meadows
Ratliff(1982) observed that "...no two meadow sites are exactly alike. Meadow sites are discrete entities and each site has characteristics peculiar to it." He then asserted the need for classifying them and for an improved classification system. He said that "To assist land managers, applicable cultural treatments ... reseeding, weed control, gully stabilization, and grazing management ... need to be developed for the varying kinds of meadow sites (author's Italics) rather than for meadows in general." This last statement may have signaled a regrettable turn in the road. We now see that since each meadow is unique, we can use its characteristics to move toward meadow-specific prescriptions (as we can with other types of land such as forests and ponds). While Ratliff (1982) thought that classification "...can provide managers with a means for clearer communication of knowledge about meadows, a basis for grouping similar sites ..." he failed to suggest that grouping hides knowledge about meadows. Generalizations are made about particular things already observed and recorded. We believe that using the following limited set of observations can result in (potentially) 18,433,900 "classes." It is unlikely that many meadows will fall into any one class, thus each meadow will be unique, about one per class. There will be dominant plants but, as Ratliff (1982) found, they will not be very expressive of conditions since there are too many permutations of past events that have caused or allowed a meadow to persist (e.g., grazing or mowing intensity, fire or flood occurrence) therefore other factors (than plant species present) need to be used to describe the unique meadow. Ratliff's work was valuable in pointing out these factors, now readily tallied (and even processed) with field computers. The trend is away from grouping and organization (Major 1958) and toward descriptions that allow predefined objectives to be achieved [Without a stated objective there can be no grounds for deciding whether any classification system is "good," i.e., provides understanding of what?
The description factors with suggested number of condition sub-groups or ability to do consistent, accurate field discrimination over many years:
Because two or more conditions can result in the same apparent meadow (i.e., the phenomenon of equifinality) it is not surprising that there has been great difficulty in naming groups of meadows as similar based on occurrence of dominant plant species. Twelve factors recorded on a field form are likely to yield more positive benefits in the environment over the longrun than time spent in classes and field trips learning a land-use specific classification system (one outmoded when the use changes.)
Expert systems can be created to prescribe for treatments for unique meadows to meet decided objectives.
If there are no clear objectives, then watching the unique meadow is a good thing to do. Change in plants and animals is expected and a good challenge exists to gain predictive abilities for these changes (faunal succession of transition). Perhaps the change in some topic of interest will be found to be related well to changes in one but probably more of the above 12 factors and then secondary changes (e.g., as from plant competition.)
Robert H. Giles, Jr., Ph.D.
under development: scent posts in meadows; aerial photographs; insects;snow pac; linear programming re objectives and low cost; radio telemetry of animals near or in meadows; coggin's data; Larson's thesis critique; permanent picture points; old photos; distance apart for openings?; total forage yield; benefits/costs; importance to the agency -doing all they can for the hunter - thus low success is the hunter's fault
References
Major, J. q958. Plant ecology as a branch of botany. Ecology 39:352-362
Ratliff, R.D. 1982. A meadow site classification for the Sierra Nevada, California. USDA Forest Service, Gen. Tech Report PSW-60, Berkeley, CA 16pp.
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Giles, Jr.
Last revision January 17, 2000.