Background

Through his forest management businesses, Randy Paff manages 230 acres of forestland and wetland near Peck, Wisconsin in Langlade County. Passionate about conservation and wildlife, Randy set out to “wholistically” manage the woodlands with the goals of improving forest health, wildlife habitat, and hunting opportunities in mind. Since 2017, Randy has enrolled in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP), Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), and Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) for financial and technical assistance with accomplishing those goals through conservation practices.

Highlights

With assistance through NRCS programs, Randy has performed successive alder shearing treatments across 26 acres to encourage healthy forest regrowth and provide beneficial habitat to birds such as golden-winged warblers and American woodcock. A wetland scrape was established to restore standing water and provide beneficial open water habitat for wood ducks, amphibians, and other wetland wildlife. In addition, Randy created wildlife habitat for a variety of species by building brush piles and girdling trees to create snags for bird species including woodpeckers and nuthatches, and potentially bats and other cavity-dwellers once cavities form.

Over the past year, Randy’s approach to forest stand improvement has created over 20 acres of patch openings across 10 openings that were predominately aspen. These patch openings add an additional age class of aspen to the forestland and provide both cover features and food sources for wildlife such as ruffed grouse, white-tailed deer, raccoons, mice and many songbird species. He also implemented a single-tree selection harvest across 55.6 acres to limit competition by cutting ironwood, elm, musclewood, and balsam fir from the understory and midstory to promote regeneration of sugar maple and red oak seedlings and saplings that were being outcompeted.

Emerald ash borer, a parasite whose larvae feeds on the inner bark of ash trees and disrupts their ability to transport water and nutrients, has spread increasingly farther across Langlade County. To address this growing forest health concern, Randy harvested four acres of black ash from a lowland stand to salvage before it could become infected, allowing him to maintain income while ash markets are high and start establishing new plants sooner into the area where the ash were harvested.

Future Plans

Randy plans to continue his conservation efforts by applying for edge feathering or early successional habitat management to help address the broken and leaning trees afflicted by severe thunderstorms. “I’m excited to see how the aspen patch cuts turn out,” said Randy. He plans to continue closely monitoring their progress, as well as observe the utilization of girdled trees and brush piles by the different species of wildlife.

Original source can be found here.