Northern red oak vs. Scarlet oak

[Phorester]

WDH pretty much covered the problems we have with scarlet oak up here.  The biggest problem is all those dead limbs up and down the entire trunk.  Makes for loose knots if sawn into lumber.   Plus, it just doesn't grow straight here.  Add in the swollen butt......, low to no timber value.

Got a new digital camera for Christmas. My last one got crushed in the thigh pocket in my pants where I carried it during work.  Might try to get some pictures of our scarlet oaks on here after I wade through the 90 page instruction manual.

[WDH]

I found a nice Shumard today on my Dad's property.  I was just walking around looking at the timber when I noticed these big acorns with shallow acorn cups like on Northern Red Oak.  It was a Shumard Oak about 24" in diameter. 

Shumard is like a Scarlet Oak with a Northern Red Oak acorn. 

This one in the pic below was the Georgia State Champion until a micro-burst thunderstorm blew it down this summer.  There is a white one foot engineers scale for perspective.  This one was a little shy of 5 feet in diameter, but it was 141 feet tall.

 

[SwampDonkey]

That's a beaut', wish I had a few acres of'm.  Our northern red oak up here needs to grow in a bit of competition to grow straight. If there is very little competition it gets real big limbs that grow straight out and not so much upward. Then the tree will develop a fast taper and be rather short and squatty with open crown. A sugar maple is a more desirable yard tree. In the forest though, the red oaks grow nice and straight and prune well up here.

[Lanier_Lurker]

Danny, what county was that big Shumard in?

[WDH]

Houston County.  There is another one in the same bottomland that is very close to this one, but it is about 15 points shy of champion status. 

[Gary_C]

Thought I would add some pictures of Northern Red Oaks from Northern MN. I took these pictures while walking a marked sale back in 2002. Location is in the St. Croix State Forest north of state hwy 48 between Hinckley, MN and Danbury, WI.

There are some nice red oaks in this area, but by the time you get 40 miles north of there, the quality drops dramatically and you get a lot of frost cracks.

 


 

Obviously not all red oak.

 

I did not buy this particular sale but the species normally included in these hardwood thinnings in the area are Red Oak, Sugar Maple, Red Maple, and Basswood. There will also be Birch and Aspen.

The forester that marked this sale does an excellent job of marking the sale as he scales it. Obviously the L is for log, V is for veneer, and the line or slash is just pulp logs.

[SwampDonkey]

A fellow has to be pretty confident about the inside of a tree to be marking "L" or "V" on them. They just get dots or lines here (if they are marked). In NB, what looks like a perfect 18" maple tree often is black in the heart or hollow. 

[Gary_C]

A fellow has to be pretty confident about the inside of a tree to be marking "L" or "V" on them.

I've thought that too, but it really is not true, because of other factors. It is true that you do not know what is inside, especially on the Hard Maple. But The DNR always has low base prices and normally will be under the actual scale by about 10-15 percent. But regardless, you need to look at the trees yourself and those markings give you an excellent vision of what the forester was thinking when he appraised the stand and you can bid or not accordingly.

This forester is one of the few that do mark that L or V and I have learned that his judgment is good and I never come up short on his jobs. The trees that he marks as logs that are not are offset by the logs he marks as pulp that have good logs.