The Man Who Knew Trees

Jim Girard was known as “the check cruiser of the universe”, and probably the most famous of all timber cruisers in the 20th century.  His biography was dictated by him during a bout of pneumonia, and eventually edited and published as a short pamphlet by the Forest History Society (as they are now known).  It is a great read.  The Society website has a great many other readable articles on forest history, many having to do with Forest Inventory at : 

     https://foresthistory.org/

We would like to thank Eben Lehman (of the Forest History Society, Durham, NC), who kindly made an effort to dig this out of their files for us when it could not be found on the Internet – and agreed to make it available to our readers. 

We thought you might be interested.  It is only 35 pages long, (7,300KB in size as a pdf, if you want to download it).  You will recognize many of the same types of people that you meet today.  His final personal comments in the last paragraph are particularly lovely.

Forestry Field Reference Book

Jim Kiser (Instructor of Forest Engineering, Resources, and Management at Oregon State University) has just published a handy forestry reference book. The book is distributed by John Bell and Associates. From the preface:

"the text is meant to serve as a reference for practicing foresters and other natural resource professionals who work with field measurements as a part of their job requirements. Although primarily focused on timber and timber stand, the book also serves for typical engineering of forest forad layout with an added section on curve layout formulas and tables. The intent of this book was not to provide an inclusive set of forester's tables, but to pull together the more common tables necessary to the day to day activities..."

Contact Jessica at: forestrybooks@gmail.com to acquire a copy of your own.

• The full text of "The log of a timber cruiser" by William Pinkney Lawson published by Duffield & Company 1915 is available on the web at: http://www.archive.org/stream/logoftimbercruis00lawsrich/logoftimbercruis00lawsrich_djvu.txt
   
• The PNW Research Station has made many of its research publications available online.  Check this link for the full list:
  PNW Research Publications.
   
• USFS article on increment bores on the web: Increment Cores: How to collect, handle, and use them. (pdf).