About Lyme Adirondack Forest Company

The Lyme Timber Company of Hanover, N.H., owns and manages The Lyme Adirondack Forest Company, comprising 22 tracts totaling 276,000 acres inside Adirondack Park in northern New York. The Adirondack Park includes more that 6 million acres, with 2.7 million acres owned by the state of New York and more than 3 million acres in private ownership. Lyme Adirondack is the largest private landholder in the Park. The company harvests forest products on a sustainable basis while conserving soil, water, and wildlife resources.

The Adirondack region is heavily forested with northern hardwoods, spruce, and fir. The area has many lakes, streams, rivers, and wetlands. The generally rolling and mountainous terrain provides living space for beaver, fisher, marten, snowshoe hare, bobcat, moose, deer, bear, and many other mammals, along with a diversity of birds, reptiles, and amphibians.

Much of the public land in the Adirondack Park is held in a “Forever Wild” state, where no logging can take place, and most of the remainder is managed as wild forest, where almost all logging is prohibited. Private landowners who want to log in the Park must follow stringent regulations set forth and administered by the Adirondack Park Agency and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (NYDEC). Because little heavy logging takes place, and because wildfires have been suppressed, early successional woodland – an important habitat for woodcock and many other wild creatures – is very rare in the Adirondacks.

Improving the Land for Woodcock

The Lyme Adirondack Forest holdings were formerly owned by International Paper, a large timber-products company. When Lyme bought the land in 2006, only 76 of the 276,000 acres were in forest size class 1 (trees less than 10 feet tall). Lyme has developed a management plan that will put 5 percent of the acreage in each of the company’s Adirondack tracts back into early successional forest within the next 10 years.

Patch cuts and clearcuts are creating new woodcock habitat on Lyme Adirondack lands.

Upland Forestry, a forestry consulting firm in Bristol, Vermont, manages the property for Lyme and has worked with the company to find places where logging will yield size class 1 forest in locations where woodcock can use it for mating, feeding, resting, and brood-rearing. By late 2008, commercial logging operations have included patch clear-cuts up to about 8 acres; uniform clearcuts of varying sizes and as large as 25 acres; and shelterwood removal cuts of 5 to more than 90 acres.

The Lyme Adirondack tracts are in the northern, eastern, southern, and western quadrants of the Park. The effort to improve land for woodcock amounts to a “landscape-scale” project in a region where little brushy, early successional habitat currently exists.

Altamont Tract

The Altamont Tract is west of Upper Saranac Lake and north of New York Highway 3 near the village of Tupper Lake. It contains 8,773 acres. Approximately 44 acres will be treated yearly to reach a goal of 439 acres in timber size class 1 within the next decade. By late 2008, 109 acres had been cut.

Iron Ore Tract

The Iron Ore Tract is near the east-central boundary of the Adirondack Park. It contains 23,641 acres, of which 1,182 will be harvested to create timber size class 1 forest. By late 2008, 47 acres had been harvested.

Robinwood Tract

Robinwood consists of 10,333 acres in the west-central part of the Park, south of Lows Lake and north of Lake Lila. Of 517 acres scheduled for conversion to size class 1, 85 had been treated by late 2008.

Sperry-Whitney Tract

Sperry-Whitney is due east of the Robinwood Tract and lies east and west of New York Route 30. Of the 14,061 acres here, 523 will become size class 1 woodland. About 40 acres had been cut by late 2008.

Science

WMI biologists will conduct surveys of singing male woodcock during the spring breeding period. Biologists plan to capture woodcock, fit them with radiotransmitters, and monitor individual birds to see how they use the new habitat areas created on Lyme Adirondack lands.

Not all of the scheduled logging will take place in hardwood areas: some will occur in and near softwood stands along streams. Spruce and other softwood species should reseed these cutover areas and grow in densely. The spruce grouse is an endangered species in New York, with fragmented populations in several parts of the Adirondacks. Spruce grouse nest on the ground in dense undergrowth beneath spruce, fir, and hemlocks. In general, they prefer early to mid-successional coniferous forests, especially where there is an understory of blueberry and other shrubs, with scattered openings of a few hundred square feet. Lyme Adirondack’s efforts to establish young forest should boost the population of spruce grouse by allowing the birds to expand into regrowing conifer stands.

Another bird that shares young-forest habitat with woodcock is the willow flycatcher. Credit: Dave Menke/USFWS

The New York Comprehensive Wildlife Strategy identifies a number of other birds in the Adirondacks that depend on early successional habitat as “species of greatest conservation need.” These birds, which will benefit from the cutting being done to improve woodcock habitat, include the olive-sided flycatcher, willow flycatcher, golden-winged warbler, bay-breasted warbler, Canada warbler, blue-winged warbler, prairie warbler, black-billed cuckoo, brown thrasher, and whip-poor-will.

Funding and Partners

The Lyme Timber Company, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYDEC), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Northeast Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, Wildlife Management Institute (WMI). (NYDEC is funding the habitat restoration work through a state wildlife grant awarded to WMI, aimed at helping “species of greatest conservation need” in the region, as identified in the New York Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategy.)

How to Visit

Most of the Lyme Adirondack lands are leased to private hunting clubs. Recently NYDEC purchased a conservation easement on some of the Lyme lands and will open these areas to the general public for recreation; for instance, in 2009 the Altamont Tract will become accessible to the public. To learn more about the Lyme Timber Company, visit www.lymetimber.com.