Logged!

[NorthernMN]

I am sorry for you snapcrackpop. Yeah, I have heard many a logger say "It will be just like a park when we are done" OK. What park is that exactly? It sucks plain and simple. It has happened to me a couple times. You are basically left with nothing. Sure it will start to grow back but it will come back thicker than grass. You can't walk through it. You can't see through it. By next year it will al be 6 feet tall sapplings so close together you can't see 10 feet. Great cover but it sucks to hunt it.

[Outdoors_Junkie]

I hunt on the other side of Red Lake, south of Waskish. They do a lot of logging on the state land over in this area too. It seems like some of the loggers are better to the land then others. A lot of them pile up the brush/logs that they don't use and replant within a year. They even come back and cut down the brush a year or two later to give the pine trees a better chance to grow. There are a few that are NOT very good and leave a lot of trees laying all over the area they clear cut. It is difficult to walk thru those areas and not much for deer sign. They replant years later. So, I think there are a few loggers that abuse the woods. The majority are good.

[83walleye]

Have any of you noticed the dogwood plants in the regrowth? They're the red bushes - no leaves - that kind of grow up in a big bush-shaped formation. Man, do the deer love those dogwoods - next time you're walking through a yearold cutover, take a look at the tips of those dogwoods - each one is nipped right off out at the tip - deer love them!

[Craig_S]

Doesn't look too bad to me. There's always some stuff you can't get on a truck, and redistrubuting the slash on aspen areas helps protect site productivity by returning calcium. Calcium can be in short supply on NW Minnesota sites.

By the way, 250 by 500 yards is 25.8 acres. One square mile is 640 acres. I think your original estimate was 4 or 5 square miles of land? There seems to be some discrepancies...

Craig

[snapcrackpop]

Thanks for your reply.

I was referring to the size of the area we hunt 2mi x 1.5 miles and how they are logging off ALL the mature trees in that area.

These deer don't need more brouse the hunters need more huntable woods.

I don't have a problem with logging, just logging my area . Ha!

[Craig_S]

You know, I think the only thing we disagree about is "what is a huntable woods?"

I talked to an old guy in a hunting party in south Kooch county about 10 years ago. He said he'd been hunting in that same spot for 40 years and the trees were exactly the same (size)as they were when he started. The stand he was hunting was only about 50 years old. I believe he'd been there that long, but didn't realize the changes in the forest because he only saw the spot a couple of times a year. The whole dang thing snuck up on him.

He didn't want the forest he hunted cut either. Really, not many would, but there's more reason to do it than not.

And it's always some sort of ugly. Period. Rarely would I call a harvest area "pretty". Some are better than others.

Watch that stuff over the years and try to adapt to hunting it. Like I said, I hunt in 11 year old aspen woods. Opening day I shot two does and an 8 pointer. And there's hardly been a year I haven't shot something. There have been a few. My average is something like 1.5 deer/year. I've been hunting the very same spot since 1989. So I know what happens with time. The deer are always there, you just have to do something different to get at 'em!

Hey, good luck.

Craig

[katiejeanne]

Those little popals may be more of a benefit than anything else. Deer love that brush like cover. The thing to remember is to cut yourself some shooting lanes otherwise it tends to be so thick you can't get a shot off.