Bob Seymour examines a large emergent old-growth white pine southeast of Little Reed Pond. Large pines such as this are rare in the Preserve, as they were on the presettlement landscape up here according to the early witness-tree records published by Craig Lorimer (1977, Ecology). We did see a few large dead pines, likely from the introduced blister rust fungus that alternates between pine and the Ribes plant. Ribes (gooseberry, currant) - a native plant species - was encountered in several places, all wet lowlands, but it is most lethal on pine seedlings with infections near the ground.

In 1990, when he was installing his MS thesis research plots, Morten Moehs (now Moehswilde) and I noticed several large, very old stumps with no bole nearly on the forest floor, but with large old tops pointing directly at the stump which terminated 33 or 49 feet from the stump (i.e., 2 or 3 sawlogs away). Records in Fogler Library's Special Collections of the Coe family (who owned this town jointly with David Pingree in the mid-1800s) show large harvests of pine in the 1860s, but there are no spatial data so we cannot conclude convincingly that such harvests were on the Preserve. One of Mort's plots had a large pine with an obvious chop mark that had mostly healed over, likely from an early logger who found decay and quit cutting.

This is one of several videos filmed by Jessica Leahy on our bushwhacked trip on August 25, 2022, on a loop south of Little Reed Pond.

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