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Here we're doing a partial cut in a young hardwood stand where some of the trees will
die in the next 20 years, or are not in good shape ... So we'll do a partial cut to bring
in more sunlight and promote new growth. We do this with a pulpwood harvester.
What the harvester does is it cuts down the tree, saws it into lengths and strips off
the branches. You can see the saw just under here. It comes out to cut off the tree and
then saw it into logs. The drive rollers move the tree trunk. And this is a device to measure
the length, because depending on what we want to do, we can cut the trunk into 8-foot, 12-foot
or 16-foot lengths.
Here you can see the damage done by a porcupine. We're going to cut it down because the stand
is too thick and we have to choose the trees we're going to cut. We'll harvest the
trees that could die off, like this one.
It's also part of the natural cycle that a porcupine will come and eat the bark like
that, it helps make a natural clearing. The tree is marked with paint to show that
it's to be harvested. Once the tree has been cut, we can see the paint here at the
base, which shows that it was marked to be cut.
You can see here how the harvester was able to cut out this tree without harming the one
right beside it. It's really close, look at my fist, we're talking about a few inches
-- and it didn't touch this tree.
After a partial cut like this -- the machine hasn't gone through to pick up all the wood,
you can see the logs on the ground, we've just cut and sawn the trees into logs -- now
more light will come in... a lot more than before... So next year or the year after there
will be new growth. That will start the next group of trees that will eventually replace
the ones that are here now, after we harvest them in about 20 years.