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So this is a Douglas Fir. It's actually a pretty old Douglas Fir, I would guess it's probably 15 years old,
and you can see it's got some pretty luxuriant green foliage at its tips, and it's starting to grow wide.
But what's really striking is how the top, the leader of it has been killed. And, what's going on here, if
you look closely, you can see, it's pretty obvious, the bark has been stripped off right here. What's
going on is that in the fall every year, when the elk are rutting, the mating season of the elk, the bulls
come out here and they start rubbing their antlers on everything they can find that's tall enough.
Two years ago, two winters ago, we had an extremely severe winter, and the elk herd collapsed
basically. And as a result, we went through two summers up here with very few elk. And in the fall as
well there were really not that many elk up here. And as a result of that and perhaps also the number
of trees that we're starting to get, not all of the trees had their leaders killed. So there are some trees
you'll see around here now, that they've escaped the elk and they've put up a leader that is quite a bit
taller. And so they may have had a window of opportunity there that let's them, you know escape that
chronic damage and form a tree that's, that's really going to get some height on it.