Will the longleaf make a comeback?

Fifty years ago last summer, my father planted a handful of longleaf pines in the front yard of our home in Athens, Ga. Within a year, however, his job moved us first to Raleigh, N.C., then to Washington, D.C.

He took some seedlings with him to Raleigh, and he planted one in my grandmother’s front yard.

I saw all of those trees last year, for the first time in decades. It took a while to find the house when I visited Athens last February, because the road had been widened and a lot of the front yard was missing, but the pines were enormous, gorgeous trees, better than 12 inches in diameter, cleaned of limbs up to about 25 feet off the ground. Ditto the tree in Raleigh. No other tree in the staid, old Boylan Heights neighborhood could match it.

Sadly, trees like those are pretty much missing in action these days; as sportsmen, we should make sure they return.

Longleaf pines were once the kings of forests in the Southeast, covering more than 90 million acres. They provided fantastic habitat for all sorts of wildlife and gamebirds, and they provided some first-rate saw timber — that might have been their downfall.

Stately longleafs, with their broomstraw understory that hid countless coveys of quail, basically disappeared, largely replaced by slash and loblolly that could be reforested and harvested in half the time it took to raise a mature longleaf. Now, only 3.4 million acres of longleaf exist in the Southeast, three percent of their former status.

Only in the last handful of years have landowners realized that there may be a reason for longleafs to make a comeback.

Here’s the background:

• Longleafs are more resistant than other pine species to climate change, including extreme drought. After the past couple of years, South Carolina residents should easily recognize why that’s important.

• Longleafs can better withstand fire and storms than other pines. In the Myrtle Beach wildfire of last April, longleafs were largely unharmed by fire that burned almost everything else in a 30-square mile area.

• With the timber industry appearing to turn away from pulpwood and more toward producing saw logs and pole timber, longleafs are much better suited to those uses; they are heavier and more dense, which provides landowners with greater return per volume.

• The understory that grows up in a stand of longleafs provides excellent grazing for cattle — not to mention whitetail deer — and fantastic habitat for quail.

• Landowners who don’t plant longleafs because of their relatively long rotation (50 to 70 years), can get some immediate financial return by selling longleaf pine straw. Straw can be harvested as soon as a stand reaches about eight years of age, and an acre will produce between 200 and 300 bales per year for 30 more years. The annual income more than makes up for the shorter rotation of loblolly and slash.

This past November, my father took me on a tour of the area around the family farm in Georgia. We found several stands of relatively young longleaf pines that had replaced slash after harvest. On a recent trip through the Lowountry, I saw several more stands of longleaf. If longleaf became the norm instead of the exception, we’d all be better for it, as stewards of our forests, but also of our wildlife.