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It’s funny how we turn the world upside down. What were once the most common trees in Alabama are now hard to find, increasingly close to functional extinction. And trees that were once relatively rare, restricted only to a few sites, are now the most widespread and abundant.

Loblolly pines, water oaks and live oaks belong to the latter group. A century ago, these trees largely hid out in moist coves, or along narrow strips of shellbanks, or in river bottoms. They were interesting and beautiful trees in their original environment in part because of their rarity. Now, because of the way we’ve altered forest processes, they’ve become so abundant they are as dangerous to native flora as many of our most serious exotics.

Just as strange, the trees that built Alabama, that dominated most forests and ecosystems– like shortleaf pines and longleaf pines — now remain in only a tiny fraction of their former range.

The consequences of this reversal are enormous, and we’re only just beginning to see the fall out. Loblolly was a fast-growing, fast-reproducing, shallow-rooted tree that looked good in a nursery pot and fed the South’s pulp mills and cheap wood mills. Unfortunately, it had never developed the disease, pest and weather resistance that kept shortleaf and longleaf at the top of the forest canopy for so long. Its days as a major plantation tree are numbered.

Increasingly, even the forest industry is looking to explore the restoration of longleaf and shortleaf pine – not because they care about the unusually rich ecosystems these two pines once presided over, not even because these pines produce wood products that are far superior to those produced by loblolly. They want these trees because they recognize they are survivors, and will hold down the forest after their in-bred plantation loblollies crumble under pests, disease, wind-storms and drought.

So how do you tell a shortleaf from a loblolly and longleaf?

From the Tennessee Valley northward, there are no native longleaf. Longleaf gets as far north as Cherokee County, but the conditions in the Tennessee Valley were not suitable, and though some people have tried to force it to survive here, there’s no real benefit to Cumberland forests or wildlife. Where it occurs in North Alabama, its gigantic cones, distinctly long needles, and almost complete lack of twigs make it unmistakable.

Modern in-bred loblolly pines are, for better or worse, planted everywhere. But loblolly pine has long been native in the southernmost Cumberlands, and it’s always a pleasure to see naturally regenerating loblolly stock shooting sky high in the deep ravines and bottoms it evolved to grow in. Loblolly cones and needles are typically only half the size of longleaf’s. It’s a live-fast, die-young tree, so while it’s not unusual to see 200-year-old shortleaf or 400-year-old longleaf, a loblolly much older than 100 years is on its last legs.

You see shortleaf only rarely now, but before the laboratory loblolly takeover of our forests, shortleaf was deemed the original “old field” pine for its tendency to re-possess abandoned pastures and fields.

Shortleaf, as the name suggests, has needles and cones that are often half the size of loblolly’s. This gives the canopy of the tree an unusually dark and dense appearance, as if the needles had been carefully trimmed and groomed. The trunk of shortleaf was once famous among lumber marketers for having very little taper, so a mature trunk is a massive column from bottom to top. Unlike loblolly, which almost always has needles in clusters of three, shortleaf most often has needles in clusters of two, with clusters of three only rarely.

Suspended fifty feet up in the air, all of those features can seem a bit ambiguous. But there’s one certain way to identify a shortleaf: Look for the pits. The bark of shortleaf has tiny, distinctive craters called pitch pockets. They aren’t large, sort of like craters created by a pin-head size volcano. Some of our younger researchers have unfortunately described them as “zits” – you’ll see the size resemblance, at least. There may be dozens in a square foot of trunk.

There’s one other feature that’s important for understanding how distinctive shortleaf is: The hook in the root system. Young shortleaf have a very distinctive double-bend – a kind of hump-back — just before the root reaches the surface of the soil. This crook is one of the reasons shortleaf once dominated so many Cumberland forests. At the top of the root hump are numerous latent buds that sprout vigorously whenever shortleaf younger than 15 or 20 years old are mowed down by fire, grazing or, for that matter, mowers. No other pine in north Alabama has that ability to resprout, so if you want to separate the shortleaf sheep from the loblolly goats, you simply need to run fire through a group of pine seedlings before they reach 5 years of age. The loblolly will be lost, never to return. The shortleaf will resprout immediately. Seedlings with two or three small stems emerging from the root are inevitably shortleaf.

Ah, and one more north Alabama pine you may try to confuse with shortleaf. Virginia pine has needles just as short, and cones even shorter. But it’s always a disheveled looking pine, with abundant twiggy limbs. The needles are always twisted, whereas shortleaf needles are always straight. The cone is annoyingly prickly, with longer and sharper spines than loblolly or shortleaf. And Virginia has what I’d describe as “corn flakes” bark – small, thin pieces of bark that sometimes flake off to the point that the mature trunk looks smooth.

Virginia is as noble as any other pine in its place, but its structure and life strategy don’t promote the kind of rich ecosystem shortleaf does. Virginia was originally common only along cliff edges that were so dry or rocky that fire rarely penetrated there. When it did, the Virginia pines had little resistance, and were usually consumed.

But shortleaf, like longleaf, mastered the fires that toasted loblolly and Virginia. As a result, they promoted savanna-like habitats that brought light and life to the forest understory, producing rich grasslands and savanna wildlife and wildflowers that are the great lost jewels of the Southern forest.

We all should look for their return.

There are something like 35,000 green but mature shortleaf pine cones from the Alabama Cumberlands drying in burlap bags hanging in our barn.

Don’t believe me? We are happy for you to do the recount, so we don’t have to.

Thanks to a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant we are negotiating, this is the first time in — I’d say — 80 years or more that this many Alabama shortleaf pine cones have been assembled in one place.

And that’s really important. Because these shortleaf cones can kick-start the restoration of shortleaf pine savannas, perhaps the most important missing ingredient in the Southern Cumberlands landscape. If we’re lucky, we may have enough seeds to restore a couple of thousand acres of shortleaf pine from this year’s collection alone, much of which was centered in or near state parks and wildlife areas south of the Tennessee River. Next year, if the weather and shortleaf cooperate, we’ll increase the diversity of our cache, and collect enough seed to restore 10,000 or more acres of shortleaf.

One collects 35,000 cones only with lots of help. Our important collection partners included Alabama A&M’s forestry club, along with A&M projects forester and Fire Dawgs coordinator Jeremy Whigham and wildlife specialist Patience Knight. The Student Conservation Association research interns – who’ve been tirelessly working on the census all summer – worked just as tirelessly on the shortleaf project. And we had big help from the aerial acrobatics chief at Arrow North Tree Service, Bob Mitcham.

In case you’re underestimating what a spectacular feat it is to collect this many seed-filled cones, let me tell you how it’s done.

We didn’t run around picking up fallen cones. Cones on the ground have long since lost their seeds, and are only useful for holiday decoration. And shortleaf pines, more than most pines, are reluctant to shed even old cones, so trees that from a distance look like they’re loaded with cones are simply hanging on to old, dried, seedless cones from years past. 

Just so you understand, we collected each cone from its branch, and most cones were collected from high up in the trees, where cone set is most abundant. Yes, it might have been nice if we had a trained squirrel, or a drone with a laser saw. We at least half seriously considered both.

But we have to remove those cones by hand, sometimes 75 feet above our heads. Wouldn’t be any use to climb, since the cones are at the very ends of very long and very flimsy branches. Instead, we purchased specially designed poles that can be extended 30 feet up in the air, and orchard ladders that gave us a little extra elevation. Bucket trucks can obviously be a big bonus when they’re available and can maneuver, and we were fortunate to have the services of a couple of local companies — which is where Bob Mitcham’s aerial bucket dancing came in real handy.

Getting the cones off the tree was a major enterprise, but getting them off the twigs and into 5-gallon buckets (which filled painfully slow with about 1000 cones per bucket) took far longer than anyone anticipated.

And then we had to do it all within the three week period when the cones are fully ripe but still partially green and unopened. Once they open, the seeds fly far, far away.

But amazingly, we did it. And we’re in an even better position to do it next year.

I must add that a few other folks were instrumental in making this happen. Robert Gandy, Alabama’s wisest and most wise-cracking tree seed collector, pulled us out of the ditch on this one, and set us on the road to success. And my old comrades, Chris Blakenship, Director of Conservation with the state of Alabama, Greg Lein, director of State Parks, and Jo Lewis with the Forever Wild program, put me in touch with all the right folks. I am so thankful for their help, and for the special efforts of Parks Natural Resource Supervisor Tasha Simon and Park Naturalist Indya Guthrie, who were as excited as we are to kick off this groundbreaking shortleaf pine restoration project!