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NARRATOR: Stewardship is a path with many steps.
The steps landowners take are linked to their goals,
their values and their vision for their land.
In Standish, Maine, in the Presumpscot River Watershed,
the Portland Water District
owns and manages forest land around Sebago Lake
with one major goal in mind: clean drinking water.
BRIE HOLME: Sebago Lake has such excellent water quality
in large part due to its mostly forested watershed.
The watershed is 81.5% forested, we determined back in 2001
by looking at aerial photographs.
Lakes that have mostly forested watersheds
typically have excellent water quality.
The forest purifies water, prevents erosion
and helps store water also.
In the forest, you have the canopy
which intercepts the raindrops.
You have the duff layer on the forest floor
made up of leaves and decaying organic matter
that acts like a sponge to absorb water
and protects the soil from erosion.
And you also have the uneven floor of the forest
with dips and depressions in it,
which helps to slow down water and capture it and store it.
Whereas in a developed watershed
we pave over, smooth out the landscape, build houses
and shopping complexes and parking lots and driveways
and create these hard, flat surfaces
which cause runoff to speed up, move much more quickly,
and pick up pollutants along the way and cause a lot of erosion.
In Connecticut, there was a study that was done
to try to figure out
how much forest does a lake watershed need
in order for the lake to have pure water quality.
And they determined that
once the watershed gets down to 75% to 80% forested,
that's when they could detect changes in the water chemistry.
The Sebago Lake watershed is currently at 81.5% forested,
so we're getting near that threshold
of where we could see changes in water quality
due to loss of forest in the watershed.
We have a land acquisition policy
that allows us to purchase land from willing sellers
around the Lower Bay of Sebago Lake.
Any properties that are within 500 feet of the lake
and also within two miles of our intake
we buy from willing sellers
and then if there's a house or structure on the property,
we tear it down and replant trees
and allow it to grow back into natural forest land.
The Sebago Lake watershed is 300,000 acres.
We own only one percent of the watershed.
A lot of water suppliers own all of their watershed,
but the greatest part of Sebago Lake watershed
is privately owned.
We also have a land preservation policy.
We support landowners.
We will give them some money
towards the out-of-pocket expenses that are needed
to put a conservation easement on their land.
So at the Portland Water District,
we treat the land that's closest to the lake
as if it was zoned for resource protection,
which means it has a higher level of protection.
We harvest fewer trees out of that zone,
which is 75 feet from the lake.
Our forester, Rene, was overseeing harvesting
in an area back from the lake.
I mark the stem up high so that the logger can see the paint
and I also mark the stump
so I can come back and check the stumps
to make sure that the logger cut the trees that were marked.
I don't know if that shows that opening,
that old opening there, or not, but what I'm doing is
I'm coming along on the south side of this opening
to release that regeneration-- there's hemlock and oak
and some beech in there, seedlings and saplings--
and I'm going to expand the opening
and give them a little bit more room to grow.
I encourage all my clients to mark their boundary lines
with blazing and painting trees.
You can see that hemlock
has got at least three ages of blazes on it.
It's been a line tree for a long time.
Our company did the boundary maintenance the last time,
and I can tell you that blaze was put in at that time
and it's probably about 15 years old.
The word "sustainability" has become in vogue,
but foresters have always used it.
Sustainable management, sustainable harvesting.
We don't want to cut more trees than we grow.
And so we come back every ten, 15, 20 years
and thin the same forest stands.
And trees are convenient:
they keep growing back, we haven't run out.
We've been cutting trees here for 400 years
and we still have plenty of trees.
The water's actually going down on these all easy,
coming back out there.
So in fact if we reyarded across it,
we'd just squish right down into it.
It's an old cross, and they probably used the dozers
back in the '50s, but it probably wouldn't hold us up.
We'd just make a mess rutting it up.
We just throw the bridge in real quick
and keep right on rolling.
NARRATOR: One excellent tool for protecting water
during an active harvest operation
is a temporary portable skidder bridge.
WING: Three pieces: it's two wider outside
and the middle one's actually a little easier to handle
because it's a little narrower,
but it's three pieces and you pick them right up.
You can pick them up with a center hook
in the middle of an excavator if you want to.
We just set them with a grapple skidder.
That's just what we have here and it's easier.
NARRATOR: The Maine Forest Service
can help logging contractors and woodland owners
purchase or borrow wooden or steel bridges
which can be taken from site to site as needed.
Skidder bridges are used effectively
in a variety of weather and soil conditions
during most seasons of the year.
RENE NOEL: You can see we crossed here
ten or 12 years ago,
and if I wasn't here to say
that there had been a skidder crossing here,
I think most people would have a hard time
telling a skidder had ever gone across that brook.
The water district prefers
to have soft wood on its lands rather than hard wood
because hard wood leaves cause them a problem
in their water intake and treatment process.
So I try to encourage softwood here as much as I can.
NARRATOR: The Maine Forest Service
assigns a tracking number
to timber harvests across the state.
At the end of each year,
woodland owners report on the forest products
harvested on their property.
NOEL: This is planned to be an integrated harvest operation.
All products will be produced.
Saw logs will be produced from the pine, hemlock, oak;
hardwood firewood
from the smaller hardwood stems that are cut;
pulpwood from the tops
and trees that aren't suitable for saw logs;
and firewood and chips
from trees that aren't suitable for pulpwood.
WING: Nope, I started chainsaw,
I just started on the same skidder as my father did,
my grandfather's old 1968 440A, that what's I started on.
I didn't start cutting by mechanical until '95.
I started logging actually in '92.
Yeah, it's definitely safer, because, I mean,
it's amazing how many things can crash down on you.
Definitely more expensive.
When we started, when I started
we probably burned six, seven gallons a day.
And right now, the way the operation is now,
we burn 300 gallons a day just in the woods.
So we used to move, average, two of us with a cable skidder,
we averaged two load a day every week.
And now I can cut up to ten, most I've done is 15 load a day.
You have to leave limbs out to rot
because that's what generates, that's what makes dirt healthy
for trees to grow is limbs to rot away.
And a lot of it does break off, so it does get that.
It's less of it because we chip it
and we are lugging it all out
versus conventionally limbing it out here.
But 99% of our work today is done chip.
NOEL: Been leaving that red oak there.
It's about three feet in diameter.
Its center is rotten,
it's got some dead branches in the top that are rotten.
It's a pretty nice wildlife tree.
You can see places on it
where woodpeckers have been working up in the crown.
It's a good sturdy tree.
It's going to be there a long time,
provide cover for some species of wildlife.
HOLME: So the land that the Water District owns
around the lower bay of the lake,
and we call the Sebago Lake Land Reserve,
and most of that is open to the public.
We have a lot of trails.
People like to come
and snowmobile on them in the winter
or cross-country ski or snowshoe.
And we do allow hunting, also in the fall.
And people love to use the trails for walking or hiking on.
There's a Sebago to the Sea Trail
that is nearing completion.
It's a trail that will allow people to walk
from the ocean in Portland
all the way to Sebago Lake out here.
JOHN SARGENT: We're in what I call mixed growth habitat.
It's great habitat for deer.
And the nice thing about this land reserve is
it's got 3,000 acres which is within 15 miles of Portland.
It's very quiet.
It's solitude.
You don't have to think of the hustle and bustle of the world.
You just wander around out here and enjoy the peace and quiet.
I come here sometimes three times a week.
I primarily hike, sometimes I snowshoe.
Oh, I like the nature, the solitude.
RIDER: This is Noble, he's a standard bred.
He use to be a racehorse with a sulky behind him,
so he's had a lot of retraining
and now he loves to go out on trails.
We're very fortunate to have trails such as the Audubons
and the Mountain Division Trails.
HOLME: We have three people in our Education Department
and they have a classroom-based program
and work with fifth and sixth graders
and teach them different things about water and fish,
and they even raise trout from eggs
in their classrooms in tanks
and then release them into the rivers.
MAN: There it goes.
I can see it.
MAN: You can see it?
It looks about...
Maybe 6.5.
HOLME: During drinking water week in May,
we offer a number of talks and walks
here at the Sebago Lake Ecology Center.
Kids and people come and get to check out a nearby vernal pool
and take a look at some of the frog and salamander eggs
that are in there.
Oh, I saw it.
Did you see it?
It just went under the leaf there.
HOLME: We monitor the water
in the ten major tributaries around the lake once a month,
12 months out of the year.
We monitor the Crooked River all the way up to Bethel
where it comes out of Songo Pond.
The Crooked River supplies 40% of all the surface water
that comes into Sebago Lake,
so that's the most important tributary.
And we also monitor the insects,
the macro invertebrates or aquatic insects,
and they tell us something about the health of the river,
the water quality.
If we find insects that can only tolerate good water quality,
then we know that the river's doing well.
So we picked these mesh bags full of rocks out of the river
and now we are kind of washing off the rocks
and collecting insects in the bucket.
This is a caddisfly.
Here is a stone fly, which is an indicator of good water quality.
It's good to see the number of stone flies that we saw.
ERIK GROVE: There's a whole lot of different reasons
why someone may want to plant trees,
whether it's for aesthetics,
timber production, wildlife habitat,
or in the case of the Portland Water District where we are,
where those other factors are important,
but the primary concern is right out there.
That's the drinking water for the city of Portland
and many other communities here in southern Maine.
So the whole reason we're planting these trees is
to buffer the lake from runoff.
So that's why the Portland Water District has gone the extra mile
and put mulch down here to reduce the runoff,
and on top of it we're planting trees
to contribute to that buffering capacity
to help keep the water clean.
Before you start, you really want to think about
what is the forest you're creating
and how are you going to manage it
20, 30, 40, 50 years down the road.
And in this situation
we know that we're going to have a truck access through here
and we're going to have machinery set up down there
so we've laid this out with rows that will be accessible
to the way the machinery is going to access it.
The Portland Water District
also does timber harvesting on a regular basis
to maintain the vigor and health and growth of the forest
because a healthy forest is growing better.
It's going to have better nutrient uptake
and protect water.
HOLME: Probably the most important thing
for forest owners to know is
when they're doing any harvesting
to make sure that they leave an undisturbed buffer of trees
between the harvesting and any water bodies.
That will allow for water to infiltrate and be purified
before it reaches the lake or stream.
There's a handbook that the Maine Forest Service puts out
called Best Management Practices for Forestry.
It's a great guide
for making sure that your logging operations
protect any water bodies that you have.