Freya Logging Inc

09/01/2026

08/27/2026

A spruce stand in the spring after burning the previous year. The moss is almost intact meaning the moss was pretty wet on this north slope. It also means this fire was completely carried as a crown fire meaning the amount of energy on the ground was irrelevant to it being a roaring, wind producing, inferno.

08/27/2026

Hard working fire fighters getting the fire close to Summerland under control. A picture from the fireline on the Bald Range fire out of Summerland. Here is a natural fire generated lodgepole pine stand. Never planted or sprayed. It has a dead understorey, teeny trees that don't make good cavity nester habitat, limited self thinning, and very little dead wood over 20cm. This stand is likely 80 to 110 years old.

08/26/2026

Why take small conifer and hardwood? This harvesting allows a new crop to come up in a multi aged and complex forest that’s is ready to use commercially earlier than clear cutting.

08/25/2026

A Lakeland mills regeneration cut. We are removing beetle killed spruce while leaving young conifer and hardwood. Looks great and the average moose is giving this cut a big old thumbs up! This kind of harvest opens the stand up again to allow spruce and pine to grow on while creating a multi aged forest with lots of perches and perks.

08/25/2026

The Dolly Parton Lichen! Because we like to talk about species, and how scientists have varying definitions of what a species is, and because we like to talk about lichens, and because we love Dolly, Here is something we learned today.
There is a species of Lichen that grows from Ontario to Tennessee called the Dolly Parton lichen. Japewiella dollypartonia, and it kind of looks like red lips puckered up to kiss a person. It likes high elevation areas in the Smoky mountains. It was first described to science in 2015.
"Japewiella dollypartoniana is described as new to science based on material from the Appalachian Mountains and adjacent regions of the Atlantic Coastal Plain. It is distinguished from other species of Japewia and Japewiella by its sorediate thallus and production of norstictic acid. Placement in Japewiella is supported by characters from fertile populations discovered in the Unicoi Mountains of western North Carolina which have apothecia that resemble those of Japewia tornoënsis (Nyl.) Tønsberg but differ in having a well-developed proper exciple and ascospores without a thick, gelatinous sheath.

08/25/2026

RIP Dolly Parton. She was one of those beauties that gave her heart and soul to making the world a better place for everyone.

08/25/2026

Cut to length works in hardwood too. Nice shot from Ponsse.

🌲🇸🇰 Rolling in the Steep 🎶

📸 VOMA Forest

08/24/2026

Fresh off the press a peer reviewed paper looking at the percentage of trees damaged by elephants and the deficit in places where elephants have been extirpated(hint all of Canada and the Americas as well as most of Eurasia).

Abstract

Elephants were a major driver of tree stem mortality in Africa, but their impacts are now spatially constrained and they no longer topple trees across the continent. Thus, most African landscapes lack a key ecological agent that helped maintain diversity and functioning. Even ecologists living in Africa fail to anticipate the rampant destruction of trees that can occur when elephants live in and move through landscapes. If we can build in a consensus on the degree of above-ground tree turnover that is inherent in different contexts, it would inform restoration projects and ecological definitions of degradation. We collated empirical data on treefall in ecosystems with and without elephants and predicted past tree loss spatially. The metrics used (%trees or ha−1) reveal assumptions about the processes controlling elephant damage. On average elephants knock down 5.4 [IQR 3.0–8.3] % of the trees in an ecosystem per annum. Mapping this into places that no longer contain elephants reveals the above-ground biomass turnover that would have been the norm for millennia before elephants were widely exterminated. On average, this is ~ 1/3 of woody biomass production but at a local scale it can often exceed production. There is an urgent need for better theory on elephant tree interactions, and restoration projects should embrace the rapid turnover dynamics these ecosystems evolved with.