Soon after the government bought or condemned 150,000 acres of east Georgia farmland in the early 1940s to create the mammoth Clark Hill Lake reservoir, foresters began the conversion of dormant cotton plantations to a new cash crop: timber.
Today, officials say, many of those inaugural forests are 60 years old, with huge tracts of timber that provide anywhere from $2 million to $3.4 million a year in revenues that are returned to the lake project.
That's why Ean Jones is busy.
On a recent winter afternoon, Mr. Jones pushed a slender tool into a tall pine and extracted a core sample no larger than a soda straw.
Then he counted the rings.
"I would have guessed 40 or 50," the Army Corps of Engineers forester said. "But this tree is 72 years old."
Loblolly pines like those that thrive along Thurmond Lake's 1,200 miles of shoreline can live 130 years or more, but periodic thinning generates much-needed revenue and improves the health of remaining trees.
"When we do operations like this, we want to keep the beetles from getting in here," he said, gesturing toward a nearby forest, where loggers from White Plains, Ga., were busily cutting and sorting trees.
Pine beetles, and the less invasive but equally destructive ips beetles, are nature's way of thinning timber that becomes too crowded or too old. During drought years, beetles destroy millions of dollars in corps timber that is often cut down and left to rot.
"See this stand? It's prime for the picking if we have beetle problems," Mr. Jones said, pointing to a tightly packed forest of pines near a corps campground. "But if we do our timely thinning, the beetles don't have to."
Logging at Thurmond Lake is tightly controlled, but inevitable, said Billy Birdwell, a public information officer at the corps' Savannah District headquarters.
"How much we cut each year fluctuates, but there's been a lot more cut recently because a lot of our forests, mainly the pine forests, are reaching maturity since they're all about the same age," he said.
"We do reap a financial benefit - to the tune of $2.7 (million) last fiscal year, and probably about that much more this fiscal year," he said. "But that's not the primary reason for managing the forests the way we do."
Besides money, timber cutting makes a less tangible, but equally valuable contribution to the economy and the environment, said Vic VanSant, regional wildlife supervisor for Georgia's Wildlife Resources Division.
"We've asked them to do a lot of thinning as part of their regular cycle," he said. "That has a wonderful impact on a lot of species of wildlife."
Mature pine forests, he said, typically shade out undergrowth, leaving a forest floor of mostly pinestraw. Thinning allows sunlight to penetrate the canopy, which encourages grasses, briars, small fruit and plum trees and scores of other plants that provide food and cover for wildlife - especially deer and turkey.
This season, much of the 600 to 900 acres logged each year along Thurmond Lake is within the 15,000-acre Clarks Hill Wildlife Management Area, which is owned by the corps and leased to Georgia for public hunting and other recreational purposes.
Although some areas are clearcut and replanted, the thinned areas include mature trees that provide seed for regeneration, he said.
Allan Dean, chief ranger for the corps' Thurmond Lake project, said corps holdings include about 150,000 acres, of which 70,000 acres are water and the balance is land.
"Out of all that land, 80,000 acres, a lot is in parks or subdivisions, but about 35,000 to 40,000 acres can still be managed actively for forestry," he said.Augusta Chronicle
