Branching Out Spring 2021 News and Notes

This year’s emergence of the 17-year, or “Brood X” cicada in the US has entomologists and bug aficionados buzzing. Maryland’s woodlands are hosts to several species of cicadas, but Brood X gets a lot of attention. The Woodland Wildlife Wednesday webinar for May featured Lindsay Miller Barranco of the University of Maryland Department of Entomology, who discussed the life cycle and other interesting features of these amazing insects. Go to our Woodland Wildlife Wednesday web page for more information, and to access other videos in the series.

More resources about cicadas in general, and about Brood X specifically, can be found from the University of Maryland Extension here. A Maryland Dept. of Natural Resources web page about Brood X is here.

Two years ago this spring, a devastating fire ripped through Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral. The central wooden spire and iconic timber ceiling supports were almost completely destroyed. The restoration and reconstruction efforts are tapping the resources of the Berce Forest, southwest of Paris, where seventeenth-century managers encouraged oak trees to grow tall and straight to outfit the French navy. Today, descendants of those original trees are being harvested for Notre-Dame.

Aymeric Albert, the forestry commission’s commercial director, called a rod-straight 230-year-old Sessile oak “exceptional.” Sessiles normally grow to between 60 and 120 feet tall; this one, at 54 feet, was just the right size to occupy a particular spot in the spire’s support structure.

Read more about the trees, the harvest, and the restoration in this article from the National Post.

If you’re familiar with our YouTube channel, you have likely noticed that we have organized similarly-themed videos into playlists for easy reference. For example, videos and recordings from a particular workshop or conference will be found together so that a viewer can find them all in one place. Additionally, we have a playlist for our recurring series of Woodland Wildlife Wednesday webinars, dating back several years.

We now have a new playlist called Natural Area Management Services series. This 12-video list consists of presentations during two webinar series, one held in the fall of 2020 and the other held during February-March 2021. These presentations covered many of the topics and practices found in our recent publication, “Woodland Health Practices Handbook.”

The videos from last autumn’s series covered the concepts presented in the handbook; the videos from this year’s series looked at particular woodland health practices in depth. Each video runs approximately 90 minutes.

In response to a number of instances of non-licensed individuals soliciting work on homeowners’ trees, the Maryland DNR Forest Service reminds Marylanders that only Maryland Licensed Tree Experts are permitted by law to trim branches and remove trees.

Licensed Tree Experts are required by law to carry insurance that covers their tree work. A company that fails to do so is not only violating the law, but may not have the proper coverage in case of injury or damage. 

Learn more in this article from the Maryland DNR.