Age a Tree

[Music] i'm kelly stanley and i work for port blakely and when you visit a forest there's lots of different types of trees but have you ever wondered how you can tell the age of a tree so there's a great way to be able to tell the age of a tree on a douglas fir now look way at the top can you guys see up at the top right there that top of the tree i wish i could show it a little bit better on the top of the tree oh thank you bigfoot this top of the tree right here is called the leader and every year a douglas spurs sets a group of buds right at the top and one point straight up tall and that's called the leader which this is grown into the spring and these other buds they grow into branches so that's how a douglas fir grows it goes one liter one layer set group of branches every single year and by knowing that we can count the layer branches group of branches or the official word that we're going to learn today is whirls [Music] let's go find a tree to count the worlds on bigfoot follow me so here's a great treat account bigfoot will you help me count the whirls of this tree so let's start way at the bottom there's a world down there bigfoot so that would be one two three four five six seven eight nine ten and way up there eleven so this tree is eleven years old and i knew that by counting the whirls do you wanna follow me and we'll learn another way to tell the age of a tree [Music] so bigfoot do you know the most common way that you can tell the age of a tree i think that most of us know is you can count the growth rings of the tree so can you see these lines one two three four five and when we count all the way to the edge that would be the age of the tree and then here is the summer wood and then the big lines are the spring wood when the tree goes the the fastest so isn't that a neat way did you know that way oh good so i taught you something so follow me another way that we can tell the age of a tree is by using this special tool that foresters use this tool is called an increment board and believe it or not with this tool we'll be able to tell the age of the tree without cutting it down it consists of three parts so you're looking at the blue handle and then inside is a drill bit right here and then inside the drill bit is a spoon or extractor and what we're going to do with this tool is we're going to be able to tell the age of a tree by counting those growth rings hey bigfoot would you help me to use this tool so i'm going to teach you how to use it okay so go ahead and take it and then you're going to take the drill bit and you're going to put in the tree and then you're going to turn it clockwise to the right and we are going to drill this halfway through so we're going to get to the center of the tree boy bigfoot you are fast i'm so glad you're helping me all right and now we're going to take the spoon or the extractor you're going to slide it under the core sample so you'll probably be able to tell when you hit it and then take the handle and you can flip it backwards the opposite direction so it breaks off the wooden side all right and then he's going to pull it out so look at this all these lines they represent a year so that's how we can tell so we can go from the end all the way to the center of the tree and count the growth rings to tell the age of it so you can tell other things besides the age of the tree by looking at these you can tell if it was a good growing season a bad growing season and you probably noticed that you've counted these before and it has light circles and dark circles and the light circles are the spring wood and the dark ones are summer wood so did you like using that bigfoot you did a great job for your first time boring a tree [Music] today we learned how we could tell the age of a tree three different ways so we learned that we could count the whirls of young douglas fir trees we use the tool foresters usually remember that one i'd like to use an apron for you did a fantastic job doing that and then we looked at tree cookies and counted the growth rings of those so this summer if you're out in the forest which i know you live in the forest if you're out and you see a stump you could count the growth rings of that or if you find a young douglas fir tree out in the forest you can count the whirls and tell the age of it so bigfoot did you have fun today learning that you were a great help thank you you

Channel: Washington's Working Forests

Views: 1,500

Keywords:

Id: U4zOY-jamGQ

Length: 4min 46sec (286 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020