Forests in Kitsap County have been shaped by timber harvesting.

Even the oldest stands are typically monocultures: trees of the same species (e.g., the commercially popular Douglas fir) and same age. Most older forests were thinned after replanting so the remaining trees could grow larger for harvest.

That provided light and space for understory plants like vine maple and huckleberry, restoring at least some wildlife habitat. However, many of the younger forests recently acquired for conservation by the county and others have never been thinned. The resulting dense, dark, second-growth forests are inhospitable to other native flora and fauna, and to the spindly young Douglas firs themselves.

Ecological forestry is a management strategy for generating healthier, more-resilient forests for native species, including people, which the county, private landowners and land trusts throughout Kitsap are adopting.

In 2022 local land trust Great Peninsula Conservancy received a grant from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to study how ecological forestry practices in the Grovers Creek Preserve can support native birds. GPC has been using a series of conservation practices to improve wildlife habitat throughout the preserve, which has large swaths of dense, monoculture forestlands. These practices include stand thinning, building habitat piles and girdling trees to create wildlife snags.

Cornell’s support, through the Land Trust Bird Conservation Initiative, has allowed GPC to continue monitoring the results of those practices and to partner with nearby Jefferson Land Trust in evaluating its conservation lands in 2023. Through that collaboration, both land trusts are using remote acoustic monitoring devices (essentially weather-sealed audio recorders) to study how these practices influence bird diversity.

GPC has also adopted several best management practices to minimize impacts to breeding birds on all their preserves. One is rather easy: GPC times its restoration and forestry actions during the non-breeding season. For Pacific Northwest songbirds, the breeding season generally extends from mid-April through mid-July, when birds are building nests, incubating eggs, and tending vulnerable nestlings and fledglings. Just last week, while GPC stewardship staff were hiking back to their work truck at Grovers Creek Preserve, they flushed a dark-eyed junco. Upon closer inspection, they discovered a nest hidden in a road slash that had been laid down over the road following an early March thinning at the preserve.

That type of discovery affirms GPC’s decision to schedule restoration actions outside of the breeding season. Trucks and tractors running along that skid road now would have surely destroyed that vulnerable nest and its contents. Luckily for the clutch of nestlings, their parents selected a GPC preserve, which is a safe location for raising kids.

For details on this project, visit GPC’s website at greatpeninsula.org/property/grovers-creek-preserve/

Guest columnist Adrian Wolf is stewardship manager at Great Peninsula Conservancy.