Progress on oak woods clearing

The snowless December has been fantastic for work in the woods, and Amanda has been making nice progress. The photo shows an area that has just been opened up. The faint red color is not some Photoshop finagling; it is due to the red dye used with the Garlon 4. Dozens of stems, large and small, were cut with a brush cutter, and treated with herbicide. All the cut branches were turned into a brush pile (just out of view to the left).

This work is in an area at the northeast corner of the north woods. That was one of the few areas in the woods that had been logged. The red rectangle in the 1937 air photo below shows the area where we are now working. This area had been logged previous to 1937 and was starting to brush in again. The trees in this area today are all less than 80 years old and are mostly junk. There is even a small aspen clone here. (For guidance, the large white patch below the red rectangle was an ag field and is now Toby's Prairie. The ridge top and the south-facing slope are savanna or prairie.)

In order to provide more detail of the 1937 air photo, I have posted it at a larger size than usual. Click on it to bring it up to size.

We have a lot of work to do in this area, which is around 10-15 acres.