L is for Listen

Foresters need to listen, sometimes to eat, often to learn and once in awhile just to stay alive.

Managing a forest or woodlot for someone takes listening, understanding, and appreciation of goals, and then ability to create an outcome liked by the owner and others.  Saving the woodlot owner a few steps too is important.

Listening isn’t so much about listening to the words but understanding a woodland owners ideas and adjusting them to what fits with a knowledge of present and possible tree growth and forest characteristics.  It’s like a plane in the air, the air has always been there but to fly in a plane it took an adjustment of attitudes, an understanding of aerodynamics, to lift off.

Listening in the forest means sometimes just staying alive.  A forest really isn’t just one big theme park, there are real big hungry cats (cougars) and big hungry bears.  These animals are looking for food and while humans are not part of the normal diet, partly because of infrequent availability, if you are spotted you are probably being considered for dinner.  Attacks are infrequent but this is one case you do not want to be first or chosen.