Northwestern conifer cone

[Clark]

I found this guy yesterday so I thought the Forestry Forum could use a little quiz on conifer cone ID.  I'll give one hint and two pictures:

1.  This species is not favored by the timber companies.



I never realized that they had this much color inside.



This is the condition I found it in, I would guess about 1/2 - 2/3 of total length is present.

Clark

[Riles]

Way outta my league here, but about the right size for blue spruce.

[SwampDonkey]

Looks like noble fir A. procera with the bract tips pointing to the cone base. Although I don't agree that it is not favored because timber quality is considered the best of the true firs. But it grows slow when young, not as shade tolerant as other firs and seed has low germination success. It has a small range relative to other true firs. Maybe that makes it unfavorable by some, just a guess.

USDA Assessment of noble fir - PDF document requires Adobe Reader

[Dodgy Loner]

I agree with SD - noble fir.

[Riles]

I like that quote from Swampdonkey's attachement:

"It is highly probable that the cut of noble fir will drop considerably when the demand
for aircraft lessens."

(The report was written in 1945, wonder who won the war?).

[SwampDonkey]

  Yup, but aside from that I have read about the same info in the dendrology text book. After all, why would it change? A noble fir is the same now as it was then.

Up here they wanted yellow birch, but I think that was WWI. The mature ones started dying off in the middle of WWII. It's true, it was the birch die off, look it up.

[WDH]

If it is a native, I am in the noble fir camp.  However, my company considers it a valuable timber tree.  We have planted some and it is a desirable tree in our export business.

[Clark]

I guess I can't slide anything past you guys.  Noble fir indeed.

My comment about the timber companies not favoring it comes not from inside information (I don't work directly for any timber company) but from my experience in the field.  First, let me clarify my position.  All the timber companies like to have stands of trees that are 120' tall and averaging 20" DBH no matter what the species. 

Where the timber companies show their true colors is after they harvest the stand and plant it.  If that stands happens to be a noble fir/hemlock mix, they won't make much of an effort to regenerate it back to noble fir.  Instead, they plant douglas fir and fifty years later they have a mixed stand of doug fir and hemlock.

There is , of course, nothing necessarily wrong with doing that except that as a forester one must look at the original stand and wonder why noble fir was growing there and very little douglas fir?  When one sees the quality of the douglas fir grown on these sites it is quite evident that the timber companies have succumbed to the "chauvinism of douglas fir" (not my words!).

In the field I don't see the actions backing up any company literature saying that they value noble fir.

Clark

[SwampDonkey]

In BC, they developed forest practices codes back in the 1990's and one approach was to ensure what was harvested on any stand of woods was to be replaced with the same species if tree planting was required. One exception might be cypress stands where seedlings are difficult to get. They went to great expense to try and replace cedar on some sites on the Charlottes, but the sitka deer that were introduced on the Islands just hammer the dang things.