Rooted in the Catskills: Tree Advice from the CFA

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Ryan Trapani: Now, you gotta take that down. Okay, that's along with the ash tree. You gotta definitely take that down. I can't believe this isn't on the ground.

[00:00:09] Brett Barry: Really?

[00:00:10] Ryan Trapani: Look at that fracture.

[00:00:11] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:00:12] Ryan Trapani: That thing is getting ready to swizzle stick apart.

[00:00:14] Brett Barry: On today's Kaatscast, I'm visited by Ryan Trapani of the Catskill Forest Association, which offers members a $65 forest consultation, but be warned, if your consultation is anything like mine, you may be in for another few thousand dollars when all is said and done, but as you'll soon hear, it's money well spent. I'm Brett Barry, and this is Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast. The Catskill Forest Association is a membership-based nonprofit organization that provides forestry education and services to private Catskill landowners in Delaware, Greene, Otsego, Schoharie, Sullivan, and Ulster counties. Member properties comprise about 86,000 acres, but the average individual property size is less than 30 acres. My own property is just three acres, about half of which is mixed forest. CFA Director of Forest Services Ryan Trapani joined me for a private consultation and some best practices for stewarding the land.

[00:01:25] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, we do about 300 of these consultations throughout the six counties of the Catskills, mainly in the northern end of Ulster County, the northern end of Sullivan, and the eastern end of Delaware County, and it's mainly for people on less than 30 acres. A lot of them are from the city and just moved here maybe in the last 10 years, but not all, but yeah, I'd say from 0 to 30 acres, and it's nice because we get to go on their property instead of, you know, reading about it or looking at YouTube or something.

[00:01:56] Brett Barry: The average parcel size in the Catskills is what?

[00:01:59] Ryan Trapani: About 17 to 18 acres.

[00:02:01] Brett Barry: So the mix of private and public land here in the Catskills is kind of unique. What can homeowners do, or what should homeowners do, who have the opportunity to live in a place where they have this kind of stewardship?

[00:02:13] Ryan Trapani: Just by planting certain trees and doing the right cutting here and there in the woods, it could be opening up one fruit tree or a nut tree like an oak tree. Otherwise, if you do nothing, really, that's our whole thing, right? Our whole shtick is the cost of doing nothing. If you do nothing, it's not that we won't have forests. It just won't be the quality. We will have quantity. We have a quantity of forest today. We just don't have the quality.

[00:02:35] Brett Barry: Yeah, that's something that I've often thought about: you know, just let it go, let it be wild, but there's no wild anymore, right? Because humans impacted the environment many years ago, now there's a give and take?

[00:02:46] Ryan Trapani: Well, some might argue, like myself, maybe wild is just an urban construct. Maybe there never was wild, right? I mean, because there were Native Americans here, and they were messing around, and Europeans were doing the same thing, and they were living off of the land in a way that we think of Native Americans. Whatever the case is, I don't know what wild really means anymore. I used to think I did, but humans have always managed things in, you know, like an apple tree's wild, right? You can find an apple tree that's wild, but can it be better if you prune it? You know what happens if you leave it alone: the woods around the apple tree? Well, maple trees grow around, and they shade it out, so is that better? I don't know.

[00:03:24] Brett Barry: Tell me a little bit about these consultations, what the benefit is for members of the Catskill Forest Association to take advantage of that, and how often should that occur for the most benefit.

[00:03:35] Ryan Trapani: People usually have a consultation once a year. It can be as simple as, you know, they just want us to look at hazardous trees near the house, and they don't really trust anyone else to look at it, or they want, like, what they perceive to be an objective opinion, or it can be more complicated, and you're going out in the woods, and it's the back 10 or 20 acres. Not sure what to do with it. I have been told letting it go is fine, and you could forgive people for thinking that because that's really what we've been taught. I mean, you have the forest preserve surrounding us. That's what the biggest landowner's doing. The state of New York—why wouldn't you, right? Who are you? Are you better than the state of New York? A lot of people are like, "Well, they're doing it. I'll let it go too, and there's ramifications. There's consequences to that as well, but yeah, it can be as simple as just looking at a hazardous tree or assessing it to know what to do with the rest of the property."

[00:04:27] Brett Barry: Hazard trees weren't even on my radar as we began walking the property, and you already know where that's leading, but I was curious about dead wood and whether I should be tidying it up, so one thing I'd ask you about specifically is, you know, there's lots of dead wood stuff that comes down right here, for example, and also it's just some standing timber, you know, some of it I see woodpeckers using, and I don't wanna touch it. How do you determine what to leave and what to pull away to let the other trees have their time?

[00:05:01] Ryan Trapani: So most of my job is just talking to people about good old-fashioned sunshine sunlight. For some reason, when we're out, out in our gardens or whatever, we understand that our tomatoes need sunshine stuff. As soon as we go in the woods, I call it amnesia. People forget that trees need sunlight, so certain trees need more light than others, like fruit and nut trees [your oak, hickory, apple, cherry, and black cherry]. They're shade-intolerant. They need a lot of light, so it's important to get sunlight on those trees. Trees like maple, yellow birch, American beech, and hemlock are very shade-tolerant. They don't need as much. If something's dead, it's not competing for sunlight. You can leave it. It's good for wildlife. A pileated woodpecker might excavate a hole in it, which other animals use from then on. There's programs actually out there. We do it for people, create snags in the woods, and create dead standing trees because they're good for flying squirrels and everything else, so dead wood's fine. The more the better, really, you know, people are scared of fire, but like that dead tree on the ground that's six inches in diameter, that takes a long time to dry out. You need excessive drought for a very long time to dry out material that big.

[00:06:09] Brett Barry: I also wanted to know about competition between fledgling saplings and how to execute a difficult choice in this case between an apple and an oak sharing the same few inches of ground, so this little tree here is an apple?

[00:06:26] Ryan Trapani: Yeah.

[00:06:26] Brett Barry: It came up from an old apple that came down about three years ago, and then this started to come up, so I just left it because I want an apple there.

[00:06:33] Ryan Trapani: Do you know if it was planted or if it was part of an old farm? Was there an old farm?

[00:06:38] Brett Barry: Probably an old farm, yeah.

[00:06:39] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, so it might be coming from the rootstock of it too because even back then they ordered from catalogs in the 1800s.

[00:06:45] Brett Barry: So one of them's gotta go.

[00:06:47] Ryan Trapani: So that's a—that's a tough choice. That's a personal preference. I don't know. Probably, I don't know. I might keep the apple right now because it looks like a good-looking tree.

[00:06:54] Brett Barry: Yeah, advice taken. I clipped the oak much to the young apple's relief. These have taken root here. These are, I think, quaking aspen?

[00:07:04] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, yeah, a pioneer tree, the first tree to come in, so we also do, like, talks on forest forensics—how to tell what happened in your woods by just looking at the trees. Remember I talked about shade tolerances? Well, if you know what trees are the least tolerant of shade, then you can kind of tell when abandonment happened or there was a lot of light, so if you see a lot of aspen in your woods, you know it was a farm or a clearing, however old that tree is—that's it, however old, so there's an aspen right there. That's when it was definitely cleared. She got an apple tree over here just for wildlife. If you just clear it around it to get a little more light on that, that would help.

[00:07:42] Brett Barry: We've got this ash here. That's definitely gonna come down on its own. Just let it?

[00:07:49] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, just let it. Yep, I wouldn't touch that. No reason to. I've learned to just walk away from trees like that once in a while, you know, plus it's good for wildlife. That thing is probably full of things, small mammals and everything else, and it's by the power lines anyway. I wouldn't mess around with it.

[00:08:08] Brett Barry: Years ago we planted these. I guess they're spruces. They don't seem to do much around here.

[00:08:14] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, people plant them for visual screens. I highly recommend Norway spruce or white fir, but not blue spruce. Blue spruce don't—don't even bother planting. At about 20 years, they start dying from the bottom up.

[00:08:26] Brett Barry: And that's exactly what ours have been doing. Every year or so, I trim up those dead branches, but the result is a strange parasol-shaped spruce, and I know in my heart it's a lost cause. I walked with Ryan over to another cluster of young trees—aspen, birch, and oak sharing too little space with each other. Again, I wondered whether to intervene.

[00:08:52] Ryan Trapani: The birch might be your thing, or the aspen. You know, a lot of people are grouse hunters, or they just like grouse to look at them. Aspen and grouse go together hand in hand. They love each other, right? They grouse feed on the aspen buds, so that's my thing, but that doesn't mean you have to preserve this oak, and you could be a flake right now and leave all of them for now. It wouldn't hurt for another 10 years, by the way.

[00:09:16] Brett Barry: Okay.

[00:09:16] Ryan Trapani: You have time. Nothing in the tree world is usually that dire, you know, unless there's, like, an invasive blight or something.

[00:09:23] Brett Barry: All three are still safe for now, and then Ryan spotted a tree I didn't know we had and gave some reasoning for weeding out a few others.

[00:09:33] Ryan Trapani: Yep, there's a hickory.

[00:09:34] Brett Barry: Wow!

[00:09:35] Ryan Trapani: That's kind of unexpected. That's kind of a rare tree, I would imagine, on your property. I didn't see any others.

[00:09:42] Brett Barry: For the benefit of this hickory, would you take these aspens out?

[00:09:45] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, yeah, yep, it's just glorified weeding on the ultra-perennial scale. That's all cutting is so you can either girdle or you can cut down. If it's in your yardscape here, you probably want to cut it down and use it or get rid of it, but if it was in the woods, you can either cut it and leave it on the ground as coarse woody debris for wildlife, you know, or use it for firewood, or you can just girdle it, which is two rings around it if we were in the woods, you know, and that way you get sunlight onto your tree or crop tree. We call that the tree you wanna keep. That's a lot of what we do is just crop tree management because landowners get that—oh, the tree I want to keep. Instead of having them look at all the trees to cut, we just get them to look at the trees to keep because there's usually far fewer trees that are really nice in quality they want to keep, so here's multi-floor rows. You know, some people, most people, don't like it.

[00:10:38] Brett Barry: I love it, but I know it's invasive.

[00:10:40] Ryan Trapani: That's why I said most. I think it has a place. It does have a cover, and it's really good for grouse and stuff like that. You know, some people, if it's not native, they just wanna get rid of it, but you should have a reason. You know, I like to call it interfering species. If it's interfering with a goal of yours, then get rid of it. If it's not, I don't know.

[00:10:59] Brett Barry: And it's tricky because it's called wild rose, right, but not wild to here?

[00:11:04] Ryan Trapani: It's not native to here, but it definitely seems wild, doesn't it? Oh my God. I mean, you can't walk through it. It's impenetrable.

[00:11:12] Brett Barry: This is where most of our trees are, right here in this buffer between the field and the stream.

[00:11:18] Ryan Trapani: This is musclewood.

[00:11:19] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:11:20] Ryan Trapani: People might call it ironwood.

[00:11:21] Brett Barry: Yep.

[00:11:22] Ryan Trapani: Alright, Carpinus caroliniana always grows on these field edges or near the stream—a good tree to have, and this is actually hop-hornbeam, or ironwood, as well. This one with a really flaky bark—the same thing comes in old fields all the time.

[00:11:39] Brett Barry: And these evergreens?

[00:11:40] Ryan Trapani: Norway spruce.

[00:11:41] Brett Barry: Wow!

[00:11:42] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, Norway spruce. They're kind of deer-resistant because they're prickly like most spruces.

[00:11:48] Brett Barry: I've taken a couple of these at this stage and planted them over there, and they've done really well.

[00:11:52] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, easy to transplant. You can plant them almost any which way, and they'll sometimes grow too. It's just nice, you know.

[00:11:59] Brett Barry: Little beech here with the leaves that stay on throughout the year. Beech are in danger, right, from a wilt?

[00:12:06] Ryan Trapani: There's beech leaf disease now coming in from the western part of the Catskills, and yeah, that's—I've seen it on family members' properties. A lot of people are kind of happy about it, though I hate to say this because in the forest preserve, there's so much. If you bushwhack around here, you know, seal those buds. They hit you right in the eye, and you can't see through the woods anymore, like Michael Kudish says. Dr. Michael Kudish, you know, in the eighties and seventies you could see through the forest understory, but as the beech bark disease swept through, they sprouted from the roots, right, and created this really this mess of beech saplings like that, but now the beech leaf disease is coming through and killing even the small beech. I had one guy call from Denning up in the forest preserve, and he is like, "Yeah, that disease is coming through." I'm like, "Yeah," and I knew what he was gonna say. He is like, "I'm really glad it's killing them all." I'm like, "Jesus Christ," but it's too bad about beech because it is a good wood. It's just been through a lot, so...

[00:13:04] Brett Barry: Walking through a stand of hemlocks between the house and the creek, Ryan spotted a different species that would turn out to be the first of our hazard trees.

[00:13:14] Ryan Trapani: You know, consultations will go in the woods, but a lot of times people will have me go start right at the house and look at trees that might be potentially hazardous.

[00:13:23] Brett Barry: Do you see any?

[00:13:25] Ryan Trapani: Are you interested, or do you wanna take chances and roll the dice?

[00:13:28] Brett Barry: It seems like you're spotting a hazardous tree right now that I don't know about.

[00:13:32] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, there's always problems, so it doesn't matter where the sunlight is. A lot of people say, "Well, the sun's in the south, right?" Mostly, even if your house faces north, which it might.

[00:13:41] Brett Barry: That's north.

[00:13:42] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, so it does face north, the opening, so the trees will go towards the north if that's the opening. They're phototropic, so you have a birch over there that's starting to squirrel its way over your roof, so over time that's gonna become more and more of an issue over time, so you've got this black birch and a yellow birch, and yeah, over time they will lean over the house. Not too concerned about it. I can see you've done pruning in the past on it. I wouldn't raise it up anymore because if you keep raising it up, you're creating a lever. You know, when the wind blows, where's the wind? It blows the top and the tree. Those lower branches dampen the tree from moving too much, so I wouldn't take off any more lower branches on it.

[00:14:24] Brett Barry: When you identify a hazard tree, do you recommend tree guys, or do you do that?

[00:14:30] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, so if it's away from the house, we do stuff, but if it's right next to the house, you know, I recommend a tree guy. There's one guy in particular I usually recommend, so yeah.

[00:14:39] Brett Barry: It's never a cheap proposition.

[00:14:42] Ryan Trapani: It's a dangerous job. I mean, there's jobs, and then there's tree jobs, and tree is... it's very dangerous. You know, you're swinging around with a chainsaw in your hand, and it's brutal on your body. You know, there's not many old tree climbers. I work with a guy who's... he's a tree climber since he's 20 years old. You know, he is 67 years old. He gets outta the truck. He's gotta get going, you know. It takes him a while because every part hurts from doing it for 40 years, but someone's gotta do it. Yeah, there's this yellow birch right there. That one's kind of snaking its way over the house. I mean, I wouldn't have it over my house because it's only gonna get a lot worse, and I don't like that. It's so top-heavy.

[00:15:30] Brett Barry: So this one right in the middle here?

[00:15:31] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, the one right in the middle, the little guy, yep.

[00:15:33] Brett Barry: And it might also give us a little more light, right?

[00:15:36] Ryan Trapani: A little more sunlight. You're gonna—these hemlocks are a lost cause, I hate to say it. They look like they're really struggling, and they're going downhill, so fortunately none of them are that big.

[00:15:50] Brett Barry: So it's not gonna look very nice in another decade or so.

[00:15:55] Ryan Trapani: Well, I—I mean, that's a personal thing. I don't know.

[00:15:58] Brett Barry: A lot of dead standing hemlock?

[00:16:00] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, you got other trees. You got sugar maple here, and you got the birch. The birch will do better. There's another maple right here, so, you know, you got other things going on. You could plant some dogwoods. Maybe they like shade. They like a little shade. They don't like full sunlight. They're a weirdo, you know, so...

[00:16:20] Brett Barry: Hemlocks in the Catskills are under several threats, including the woolly adelgid, an invasive insect that feeds on sap and starves the tree of essential nutrients.

[00:16:31] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, alright, so these hemlocks right here, they have been infected. They're on the cusp of where you could treat those trees, so that's a basal bark spray.

[00:16:41] Brett Barry: Uh-huh.

[00:16:41] Ryan Trapani: So chemicals are the only way to go for saving these trees at this point. I mean, it's the only way to treat hemlock as it is, but the reason why I point them out is because you probably don't wanna lose them because they're big and maybe you like them. I don't know. Do you like them?

[00:16:56] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:16:57] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, so these other ones I'm not like ecstatic about because they're kind of being, you know, they're pole-sized, and to be honest with you, there's too many of them.

[00:17:05] Brett Barry: This is probably an old hemlock. I mean, they don't—they don't grow that fast.

[00:17:08] Ryan Trapani: They don't grow very fast, yeah, so those two, and maybe three, you know, are ones that you might wanna think about taking a chance and treating. At this point, I can't guarantee they would survive, but they're not too bad, so they should have at least 80% of their crown be healthy, and they're like right around there.

[00:17:29] Brett Barry: And so this treatment treats both the adelgid and this other thing?

[00:17:34] Ryan Trapani: Scale, yeah, both. You do two chemicals. One of them that treats the hemlock woolly adelgid lasts for up to seven years. Dinotefuran lasts like a year, but that treats scale. The scale's not as abundant. Usually it's the woolly adelgid that really does, you know, is the initial, you know, killer of them. Sunlight too would matter. There's some research on that, and again, my job's mostly about sunlight. These hemlocks would do better if they had a little more sun. This has to be taken down [this ash tree]. That's your priority right here. This should be removed.

[00:18:05] Brett Barry: That's gonna fall in the house.

[00:18:06] Ryan Trapani: No, that's really bad.

[00:18:07] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:18:07] Ryan Trapani: Actually, you should. I'm gonna recommend a guy to take that down.

[00:18:11] Brett Barry: Okay, like today?

[00:18:13] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, you should get that one down. I don't like the way that's moving. It's really dead, and they become—I've cut a lot of them down. They get very brittle over time, and the problem with that is, yeah, it's rare that they break at the bottom, but that tree's so close to your house that if the top broke out, it might not be good.

[00:18:31] Brett Barry: Okay.

[00:18:32] Ryan Trapani: There's one behind there, but I don't think it can get through the trees, so...

[00:18:35] Brett Barry: Oh man, let me show you that one because I hear it creaking all the time, and it's got this, I don't know, divot.

[00:18:43] Ryan Trapani: It's also touching. It's, oh wow! I was looking at it, yeah. Well, that's not good. Now, you gotta take that down. Okay, that's along with the ash tree. You gotta definitely take that down.

[00:18:56] Brett Barry: It'll take out the shed.

[00:18:57] Ryan Trapani: That is freaking crazy!

[00:18:58] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:18:59] Ryan Trapani: No, this is—this is really—I can't believe this isn't on the ground.

[00:19:01] Brett Barry: Really?

[00:19:02] Ryan Trapani: Look at this. Look at that fracture.

[00:19:04] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:19:05] Ryan Trapani: That thing is getting ready to swizzle stick apart. This is more important than the ash. A lot of trees get stuff like this where you get multiple crotches, and this has been decaying for years. This is what we call structural defects, and that is the reason why having multiple leaders can be bad right there.

[00:19:23] Brett Barry: This consultation's getting more and more expensive.

[00:19:25] Ryan Trapani: I know it is tree work, man, and that is pretty bad, though seriously, you got good insurance.

[00:19:35] Brett Barry: Insurance aside, Ryan's reaction to this particular maple and a number of ash trees within falling distance of our house motivated a phone call to his recommended tree guy. Just a few days later, the crew arrived and removed those hazard trees, which left us with about two cords of firewood. In a moment, Ryan joins me in the studio, where we discuss CFA programs and services and why you might consider becoming a member. All that and more right after this...

[00:20:08] Campbell Brown: This episode is supported by Hanford Mills Museum. Explore the power of the past as knowledgeable staff guide you through the mill with demonstrations of the waterwheel, sawmill, and woodworking machines. For more information about scheduling a tour or about their 2025 events, visit hanfordmills.org. Kaatscast is sponsored by The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for local regions like The Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, and The Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email mountaineaglenews@gmail.com.

[00:20:46] Brett Barry: Back in the studio, I asked Ryan Trapani about the wide range of programs and events offered through the Catskill Forest Association.

[00:20:57] Ryan Trapani: So events would be like educational, you know, presentations, workshops, and demonstrations. So, for example, we're doing a firewood workshop where we're just showing people how to split wood and stack it and how to choose select trees for firewood. Then we do programs, and programs are things in field services that we actually do for members, and those include our invasive species program and our wildlife habitat management program, where we actually do the work for people: apple tree pruning, apple tree grafting, the portable sawmill program, forest bird, which is what installs owl boxes, kestrel boxes, and pileated woodpecker boxes. The forest farming program is where you, you know, do shiitake cultivation, inoculation for people right on their site, right at their house. Also, do ginseng. Plant ginseng in their forest if they have the right site. We have a tree-planting program. We'll plant two trees, and it's real. All these programs are really meant to demonstrate on someone's property how to do it. If they wanna do it themselves—some people do wanna do it themselves, some people don't, but wherever the case is, we'll do it, so...

[00:22:06] Brett Barry: You've been doing a radio show much longer than I have. From the forest has been going for, what, 15 years now?

[00:22:13] Ryan Trapani: Okay, you are listening to From the Forest on WIOX Community Radio. In 2010, we started From the Forest every Wednesday [6:00 PM to 7:00 PM] on WIOX Roxbury. Yeah, it's fun. You know, I get to interview someone different every week, and I've learned a lot. Now, it's kind of like our archive and what to refer to.

[00:22:37] Brett Barry: Did it start as just a radio show and then turn into something that you were able to archive as a podcast, or were you able to podcast from the beginning?

[00:22:44] Ryan Trapani: No, it started out as a radio show, and then we archived it later on, so I don't know how many shows were archived there. Maybe over 400, but we're on show 710 or so.

[00:22:56] Brett Barry: If you could give landowners in the Catskills one or two pieces of advice, what would they be?

[00:23:03] Ryan Trapani: I guess to keep an open mind about their forest, there is a cost of doing nothing. You know, just leaving your forest. Be there. There is a cost to that, and you're always managing for something, even if you're doing nothing, and if you're doing nothing, usually it means that you're managing for only shade-tolerant kinds of plants. Also, if you are gonna do something like, say, plant trees, just get the advice of someone. It doesn't have to be the Catskill Forest Association, but man, I mean, I've made a lot of mistakes planting trees. They plant too deeply. They plant too many, and they plant too close. They plant too close to their house, and all that work and effort, and a lot of times it's like, "Man, if you had just done a simple thing, like keeping it away from the house, or less of them would've been better.

[00:23:50] Brett Barry: Who is the Catskill Forest Association for? Who would you recommend become a member, and why?

[00:23:56] Ryan Trapani: I would say anyone who lives in the Catskills, really. I mean, you don't even have to own land. You don't really have to own anything, but I would say our main demographic is from 1 acre to about 30 acres. If you have more than 50 acres, there's programs for you. It's not to say you shouldn't join the CFA, but for those smaller forest owners, they're more underserved, so that's who we really target.

[00:24:22] Brett Barry: Plus the programming. There's educational programming and stuff like that throughout the year, right, for members?

[00:24:27] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, a lot of that's free. A lot of those things, like TreeID, are free to members, and those are events that are either discounted to members or totally free. We also have a quarterly newsletter, so just for that alone, you know, I like to think it's a good newsletter with little different ideas that you might not come across from other people or organizations.

[00:24:50] Brett Barry: With famous columnists like Dr. Michael Kudish.

[00:24:52] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, Michael Kudish and Paul Misko. He writes for it once in a while. We have Four Field staff, and we just hired two brand-new field staff in the last two months, and we have a board of directors, and, you know, unlike other organizations, our board is very local, and, you know, they're born—a lot of them are born and raised in Margaretville and Roxbury and Halcottsville. We're also funded by a local foundation. It's not from the city. We're not—we also don't receive any government funding, which is extremely rare. I've worked for the state of New York in the past. The DEC—I worked for the Forest Service. You know, I was in the military, and we're not—we're not funded by a sawmill. We're not funded by the state of New York, so yeah, I think it's a unique perspective. I like to always try to question everything. You know, that's, to me, being skeptical, and remaining skeptical is what science is all about, so yeah, you come outta school, you think, "Oh, an invasive species is non-native. It's bad. Well, now, it's like, well, why is it bad?" I have to be able to say why it's bad. Why is a plant bad? I feel like CFA enables me to kind of do that.

[00:26:05] Brett Barry: To see a full list of services and events or to sign on as a member and book your own forest consultation, head over to catskillforest.org. Ryan's From the Forest Radio Show can be accessed at fromtheforest.podbean.com. Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast is a production of Silver Hollow Audio. Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas. Announcements by Campbell Brown. Please be sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you get your podcasts, rate and review so more listeners can find us, and keep in touch at kaatscast.com and on Instagram [@kaatscast]. Tune in next time for the art of Emily Cole and the tattoos she's inspiring 150 years later. Until then, I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening.

[00:27:02] Campbell Brown: Many thanks to our local sponsors. Join us as a monthly member listener or make a one-time contribution at kaatscast.com/support. Thank you!