BANGOR DAILY NEWS • February 24, 2024
A new forestry practice is confounding hikers deep in the woods of Orland. It’s ugly. But it’s working. I stumbled upon it while hiking Great Pond Mountain and Oak Hill in Orland, in a swathe of conserved land known as the Wildlands. Throughout the forest, trees were sawed off a few feet above the ground, leaving thousands of hip-high stumps. High-stumping is a forestry method used to get rid of diseased, canker-filled beech trees. “By cutting up high, the root system thinks there’s still a tree up there and doesn’t root sprout,” said Landon Fake, the land trust’s executive director. “It continues to send nutrients up the trunk.” The tree then dies without sending out dozens of sprouts like it normally would if it were cut near the ground. And this allows other tree species to grow.