Forestry for the birds

Sometimes cutting down a tree is the best prescription for saving a fast-disappearing bird.

In New York, at least, where two-thirds of the state is forested and most trees are what ecologists would call middle-aged, there’s precious little young forest for songbirds that need it for nesting or foraging. Some of these birds—especially the golden-winged warbler, a 4 ½-inch summer visitor—are in steep decline. The warbler’s Appalachian population, stretching as far north as the Champlain Valley, has lost 66 percent of its members in 50 years. It is projected to lose more than half of the remaining birds in the next decade.

With that in the back of his mind, Bruce Cushing bent over a downed beech in September, revving his chainsaw to trim the limbs for stacking to the side of his access path—an old skid road from the logging that preceded his purchase of the land. Later he would paint the stump with an herbicide, hoping to kill the spindly beech shoots that radiated from the parent tree and threatened to close the forest canopy around it.

His plan is to create a patchy mix of hardwoods, evergreens and shrubs on his hundred-acre woodlot on the Adirondack Park’s southeast fringe, east