Four Maine Generations Commit to Wildlife-Friendly Forestry

Jul. 10, 2023

Writing by NEFF Western Maine Project Specialist Christine Parrish

Ian Smith, right, and his 26-year-old son Austin in the woods next to a cabin built by a Smith great-uncle in the 1930s when the area was pasture, as depicted in the left side of the photo. The trees are too tall to fit in the right side of the photo's frame now.

The Smith family had owned a Western Maine farm for a century, and turned to New England Forestry (NEFF) when they began to consider how best to care for its wildlife. The family is now using a Forest Management Plan and Exemplary Forestry to help native wildlife and biodiversity thrive.

In 1916, one year before the U.S. entered World War I, college student Edmund Smith left his senior year at Columbia University to visit a gentleman’s farm on the river flats of the Androscoggin near Bethel, Maine.

“We don’t know if he intended to go back and finish his degree,” said Ian Smith, who now oversees 474 acres of the farm and forest his grandfather started tending over a century ago. “We think he was just coming up to rusticate with some city folks.”

Working first as a farm hand, then as owner of a hardscrabble farm during the Depression, Edmund Smith grew crops, tended the dairy, hayed and timbered, married a schoolteacher, raised a family, watched the big house burn from a lightning strike, and kept farming. In the 1930s, Smith planted white pine, red pine, and hemlock in the rolling hills just under the headwall of the mountain, likely with some assistance from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.

Smith was scholarly by nature, but he likely did not know his property would one day be a puzzle piece in one of the largest remaining blocks of temperate forest of its type left in the world.

The Big Picture

At ground level, it is hard to grasp the landscape-scale ecological significance of the sweep of connected forest that runs in a band from New York’s Adirondacks across and through Western Maine to the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec. Known as the Acadian Forest, it is of global importance due to three factors: it is where the northern hardwood forest type overlaps with the spruce-fir forest type and thus is inherently more diverse than either alone; it ranges in elevation from lowland river valleys to mountain peaks with related changes in forest habitat; and it is one of the largest blocks of relatively undeveloped northern mixed forest left on earth.

As such, the Smith property offers a unique opportunity to help grow a complex and well-stocked future forest that provides the widest range of Acadian Forest wildlife habitat for roaming wildlife like Canada Lynx, Black Bear, and Moose, as well as contribute to large tracts of unbroken forest for nesting songbirds to thrive, while also increasing carbon storage and providing a continual supply of quality wood.

Building that forest takes patience, action, and commitment.

Edmund Smith had patience. His grandson is taking action. His great-grandchildren are committing to ethical and active forest management that will continue the stewardship across a century and a half.

The New Deal trees Edmund Smith planted grew in one single-aged stand around the little log cabin an uncle built near a stream on higher ground. White pine and spruce naturally seeded in. Older trees grew on the steepest slopes. Together, the trees shrouded the mountain pond in solitude, covering the foothills and creating a forested buffer between the flats and the White Mountain National Forest beyond. A wild trout stream, cooled by forest shade, connected Pond Brook to the alder-banked stream on the flats leading to the Androscoggin River.

After 53 years of farming and shortly after watching men land on the moon in 1969, Smith sat down in his parlor chair after a big supper and called it a day.

Smith’s son, a doctor, left the Roosevelt-era trees alone, too. At some point, Peregrine Falcons returned to the cliffs above to nest and rare turtles hunkered down in the sandy flats. Deer wintered in the forest at the southeast corner.

Ian Smith, Edmund’s grandson and the current caretaker of the Smith Forest, hired a forester for a basic management plan, cut a little wood for this and that, and worked with his children to clear a walking road to the trout pond. Otherwise, he also left the trees alone.

The forest grew more slowly as trees shaded each other. The canopy closed overhead. A few trees fell. New ones sprouted up in the available light. What had been a field in the 1920s grew into a stand of trees. Still, it would be a long time before the Smith Forest developed the mix of characteristics of an older, complex forest with rich habitat variety—including a mix of big trees, little trees, deep shade, dappled shade, big logs on the ground, open gaps in the forest, and a higher number of snag and woodpecker trees.

Younger Generations Step Up

Ian Smith didn’t know this in 2019 when he saw an ad from the New England Forestry Foundation announcing assistance to landowners to help improve forested wildlife habitat. He just thought he might be able to do more.

A conversation with the Western Maine NEFF team led from a single question to the full engagement of three living generations of Smiths on why and how to grow and shape a complex, resilient forest. Wildlife habitat was at the forefront of their management goals, with climate values and timber income from harvesting as two benefits that would still serve to create that better native habitat.

Using a $1.5 million 2016 Resource Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), NEFF set out to recruit Smith and other Western Maine family landowners whose properties could supply critical pieces of the landscape-habitat puzzle, worked with them and their foresters to develop habitat plans, and then assisted them in putting those plans into active harvesting with reimbursement from the NRCS for most of the cost—an important step for thinning overstocked young stands or doing other practices that cost money but don’t generate timber dollars.

By September 2022, the NEFF Western Maine team had worked with 16 landowners, including Smith, on 8,000 acres across the area to develop habitat-specific plans in line with broader forest management plans. NEFF then helped them secure 10-year NRCS financial contracts to get the work done on the ground.

It takes time to grow a strong forest that in turn grows good habitat and good wood, so all project landowners signed a NEFF forest stewardship pledge that asserts their long-term (30-year) commitment to ecologically-based forestry that is compatible with the NEFF standards for the Acadian Forest.

Looking Forward

In August 2022, NEFF received a new RCPP grant award for $1.5 million to refine and continue this Western Maine habitat work. Over the next five years, NEFF plans to work with family and non-profit landowners on a minimum of 6,000 acres in a 7-million-acre region that runs from Bethel northeasterly to Baxter State Park and west to the New Hampshire and Canadian borders.

Ian Smith said the NEFF process allowed time and guided the family in thinking through what the land means to all of them. The 30-year promise focused their attention on the future and the NRCS helped move the forest forward.

“We want to improve on what my grandfather started,” said Smith. “And if my kids start to get the higher timber value in 30 years while the wildlife benefits, that’s okay by me. It’s going to be theirs to take care of when the time comes.”

Smith family roots run deep. Meddy Smith, 25, uses her other great-grandfather’s draw knife to girdle a 16-inch diameter poplar to create a standing dead tree. The snag will provide wildlife habitat used by woodpeckers, bats, denning mammals and nesting birds, as well as provide an important link in the food supply. Large snags are in short supply in Western Maine.

Farmer Edmund Smith’s legacy lives on through the next three generations, right to left: his son Charles Smith, 90, granddaughter Barbara Smith, 57, great grandson Austin, 26, and grandson Ian Smith, 58, pictured here on a family work day planting sugar maples along the stream.