Sustainable forestry benefiting Great Cypress Swamp
That was before they sent crews into the Great Cypress Swamp, in south-central Sussex County.
“The first load we brought out of here amounted to 13 trees and that put us into an over-weight position,” said Sampson. “I’ve worked a lot out in the Pacific northwest. That’s what we expect to see out there, not here.”
Loads of timber like those are at the heart of a sustainable forestry plan for the Great Cypress Swamp, as well as economic sustainability for swamp owner Delaware Wildlands and management of its holdings. “Trees that we’re harvesting are yielding boards as much as 18-inches wide and 40-feet long,” said Gene Bayard, a board member of the private conservation organization. “They’re incredible.”
Peter Martin, field ecologist for Delaware Wildlands, oversees all of the activities at the swamp. In 2003, Delaware Wildlands added the Roman Fisher Farm near Gumboro, on the western edge of the swamp, to its extensive swamp holdings. Martin now points proudly to buildings constructed with swamp timber and added to the Fisher spread. Stout beams, studs and planks form the skeleton for the metal-clad buildings.
Tightly grained boards of platinum-colored, furniture-grade maple also play into Martin’s vision for the swamp’s sustainable future. He sees boards coming out of the swamp marketed as Great Cypress Swamp lumber and valued not only for their size and quality, but also for the fact that they come from a forest being managed for sustainability.
“We have nearly 11,000 acres here,” said Martin. “Our plans for harvesting and managing for timber involve about 3,500 acres. That sounds like a lot, but we’re really only looking at harvesting trees from 60 to 100 acres per year. That’s all the market will bear.” In fact, over the first three years of the program, only 100 acres of timber, total, have been cut.
Sustainable forestry plans, according to Sampson, “are set up around what you leave, not what you take. You’re always thinking about 50-60 years out.”
The southern yellow pine being harvested under Vision Forestry’s oversight involves trees that have been growing much longer than that. A great fire swept through the swamp in the 1930s and burned for many years. That fire gave rise to the name Burnt Swamp for much of the area, but it also gave rise to great tracts of yellow pine which have been growing straight and tight-grained ever since then. Rather than losing the trees eventually to pine beetle and other problems, the decision was made to go with Vision Forestry’s program.
Once a tract is harvested, it is immediately replanted either with trees for future harvest or with restoration water trees such as bald cypress or Atlantic whiter cedar. Those cypress and cedars were the historic residents of this unique natural area that gives rise to the headwaters of the Indian River, flowing to the Atlantic, and the Pocomoke River flowing to the Chesapeake Bay. Certain parts of the swamp lend themselves better to yellow pine growth than to the swampier conditions where bald cypresses thrive. Those are the areas identified for the 50-60-year cycle timber management.
Once the bald cypresses get going, management can stand back for a while. Relatives of the great redwoods of the west, the bald cypresses have life spans in the 1,500-year magnitude.
Delaware Wildlands has been acquiring its Great Cypress Swamp holdings since 1961 when it began identifying unique natural lands throughout Delaware for conservation. Up until now though, managing the Great Cypress Swamp and its 20 miles of criss-crossing roads, eight water control structures and the Roman Fisher Farm improvements has registered almost exclusively on the expense side of the organization’s ledger sheets.
With the sustainable forestry plan in place, Delaware Wildlands now has a sustainable revenue stream to fund preservation and enhancement of one of the state’s richest, most unique and biologically diverse natural areas.
What happens to swamp timber?
Although the economy has closed nearly half of all the sawmills on the Delmarva Peninsula, the eighth generation Paul Jones Mill in Snow Hill, Md. continues to saw logs from timber the size of what’s coming from the Great Cypress Swamp.
Because of the mill’s age, operator Kenny Pusey has the older and larger carriages necessary to handle the 22- to 30-inch diameter yellow pine logs that have been growing since the 1930s.
The domestic market for such specialty lumber has gone very soft due to the housing slump; however, Pusey – according to Vision Forestry’s Neil Sampson - has developed overseas markets that allow him to buy regularly from Vision and Delaware Wildlands.
Yellow pine is used either for pulpwood to make paper or for construction timbers. Sampson said saw logs can bring as much as 10 times the price as logs going for pulpwood.
Vision Forestry, headquartered in Salisbury, Md, and Alexandria, Va., started out in 2000 as a sustainable forest management company.
The firm began operations with 29,000 acres of land under management. That acreage – all on the Delmarva Peninsula – has grown to more than 100,000 in 2009.
For more information: visionforestry.com
Great Cypress Swamp once spread across 85,000 acres
The Great Cypress Swamp, along the south-central edge of Sussex County, represents the single-largest piece of privately owned contiguous, natural and preserved land on the Delmarva Peninsula. At 10,700 acres, this wet, wild and mostly inaccessible forest teems with deer, turkeys, bald eagles, songbirds of almost infinite variety, great summering populations of wood ducks and dozens of notable species of trees and plants.
Prior to colonial settlement in the area in the 1700s and 1800s, which involved extensive ditching and drainage projects, the freshwater swamp comprised an estimated 85,000 acres. For centuries, towering bald cypresses dominated the swamp. When they eventually died and fell over, they sunk into the mire and were preserved. For decades, people who lived on the edges of the swamps would use long metal rods to locate downed trees in the mire. With teams of mules and oxen, they would excavate the preserved behemoths, cut them into 30-inch lengths and then hew them into the decay- and rot-resistant cypress shingles that still clad many of Sussex County’s most historic structures.
Through a relationship that has evolved from adversarial to mutually supportive, Delaware Wildlands Inc. and the Lower Sussex Sportsman’s Association operate a quality deer and turkey hunting management program. The relationship has helped transform the swamp from an outlaw area filled with litter and poachers to an increasingly pristine and abundant natural area.
