WFFA Annual Meeting

Managing Your Timberlands for Wildlife

Sunday, April 28-April 30

By Char Easter

My sisters and I attended the 2024 Washington Farm Forestry Association Conference in Tacoma. Grandma was getting over laryngitis and couldn’t join us in the luxury suite stocked with good champagne for my birthday. This year’s theme was Managing Your Timberlands for Wildlife. Farmers shared slideshows with their quantitative data on the birds, shrubs, and wildlife found on their farms as well as new forestry practices to make the habitat even more enticing to pollinators and wild things including the antagonist in this happy woodland story, the mountain beaver (MB). From the talk, dissuading the MB from reducing trees to stumps, has everyone stumped. However, groups like The Beaver Institute are committed to resolving beaver-human conflicts and the wdfa site outlines some solutions.

Morris 'Merc' Boyer shared how he developed a greater appreciation for wildlife and supporting wildlife habitat on their tree farm after Bart Valentine, our cousin, identified a lot (in the 100s) of bird species on the farm. He now uses the Merlin App to identify bird species. His views on beavers shifted after he read a book titled Eager by Ben Goldfarb.

Not only are we providing habitat for wildlife, but we can get paid for doing it through EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program). Those straggly brush piles we make are habitat hotels to critters and a potential revenue stream for us. A nest box = $50. Kirk Hanson, director of forestry for NW Natural Resource Group and co-author of A Forest of Your Own, shared how he maximizes the use of federal and state programs available to small forest landowners to financially subsidize his work. He has agreed to visit TPM on June 5 to give us tips that we will use to inform our new Forest Management Plan. More on that at the All-Family meeting. 

Linda and Cheryle took the field tour of Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM). Its land management team showed off four areas with different management objectives. With over 60,000 acres of land, thousands are natural forests that were self-generated after years of indigenous people managing with prescribed burns. It sounded like a majority of the timber sales income to the U.S. defense budget comes from JBLM land. According to the U.S. Army Military site, "Forty percent of the net revenue is sent to Pierce and Thurston counties to support schools and roads and the balance supports Army forestry programs at other installations."

The conference was a good reminder that all the work we do—planting trees and shrubs, weed control, piling brush and logs, saving snags—extends beyond our family to the many families in the wild that live on TPM.