Roy Pilgrim has been on our list to interview ever since we met him at a sorghum pressing event (that’s a whole story in itself).

He’s a first-generation, full-time logger.

Started Pilgrim Logging in 2019 with a pair of mules, a 50-year-old log truck, and a secondhand chainsaw. Since then, his team’s grown, but they’re still hand-cutting timber the way he believes it should be done.

His line of work has brought him into close relationship with the forests of the Ozarks, and a deep understanding of the trees therein… and the threat they’re facing.

In this week's edition:

Let's get to it.

— Kyle Veit

00:00 — Roy getting into logging
7:00 — Are the Ozark woods healthy?
16:00 — Fire on the landscape
25:00 — Managing for how it "was"
29:00 — The importance of oak trees
40:00 — What will losing Oak trees do to the woods?

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If you’re like me, you probably assume a closed canopy of hardwoods with a thick, tangled understory is normal.

That's the kind of woods I grew up in, and when you're out there, something about it feels ancient. So you sort of assume that’s what it's always looked like and what it even ought to look like.

But after talking with Roy, I’ve got a whole new understanding.

When early European settlers entered the Ozarks, they would have seen a much more open understory with a grassy floor. What’s called an oak savannah habitat—think open, park-like grassland with scattered oaks. Our ancestors could’ve ridden a horse through the woods without getting their hats knocked off.

And the reason for that is fire.

The forest the first settlers rode into was the direct product of thousands of years of human stewardship involving fire, management, and intentional land use going back 12,000 years.

Native Americans used managed burns to clear the landscape for travel, visibility, and game management. American geographer Henry Schoolcraft was writing about smoke-filled Ozarks skies in the early 1800s. Tree ring data from Missouri confirms recurring fire scars going back hundreds of years.

Neighbors helping neighbors burn their land was as common as helping one another cut hay.

But then the fires stopped.

In the 1920s, the Forest Service decided fire was bad for timber. They pushed hard to end controlled burning, and within a generation or two, the cultural practice of burning your woods just disappeared.

Without fires keeping them in check, the kind of trees that normally live in moist creek bottoms begin to creep up slope.

That slow process is called “mesophication.”

Essentially, the oak trees are being replaced by shade-tolerant mesophilic species like maple, gum, elm, and dogwood. The canopy in most Ozark forests is still mostly oak right now. But walk through the understory and you’ll find dense, scrubby, hard-to-see-through growth that isn't oak.

And as those canopy oaks age out and die, there aren’t new oaks waiting to replace them because there’s been no fire.

A single oak can support upward of 2,300 species.

Oak trees host 70% more ecological activity than any other tree species in North America. They feed insects, pollinators, songbirds, woodpeckers, turkey and then all the mammals that depend on the mast crop like deer, bear, and squirrel, too.

The oak is the foundation the whole food web is built on.

Oak trees didn't just survive fire. They evolved alongside it. Their thick bark resists low-intensity burns. Their crispy leaf litter ignites fast and burns clean.

But as fire disappeared from the landscape, the balance tipped toward the species competing with them like maple, gum, and elm that didn't evolve that way. Maple leaves lie flat, hold moisture, and don't want to burn.

The rise in tick-borne illness may be closely tied to this.

Denser, darker understory means more damp leaf litter. More damp leaf litter means more tick habitat.

A theme across a lot of our conservation related episodes lately it’s that good intentions have led to endangering the very things they set out to protect. They thought they were doing what was best, but it hasn’t worked.

Trying to protect a forest without ever touching it (no logging, no management, hands completely off) can still lose what you were trying to protect.

Human involvement is actually an essential part of preserving wildlife.

But what kind of human involvement?

Next week Roy comes back and we get into what landowners and managers are starting to figure out and practical ways we can save our forests.

We covered a lot more in our conversation! So if you haven’t yet, give it a listen.

P.S. Roy’s also one heck of a fiddler. Check this out.

We’ve got a couple new hats in the shop just in time for turkey season. Grab ya one!

Keep an eye out for our next episode with Roy Pilgrim, dropping next Wednesday. We’ll be back in your inbox with a reminder and show notes like this next Thursday.

Till then, get outside.

— Kyle Veit