Written by: Lige Nie, Bruce and Ginny Roberts Forest Management Intern
As the summer draws to a close and my time as the Duke Forest summer intern comes to an end, I want to take this opportunity to reflect on this transformative internship experience. As a Master of Forestry and MBA student at Duke, I came into this internship hoping to translate what I had learned in the classroom into the kind of practical, on-the-ground judgment that only comes from working in the woods. Over the past few months, I got exactly that, and more. I would like to share some of what I did, what I learned, and what it has meant to me.
My first weeks were spent close to the ground, quite literally. I pulled more than a hundred silt fence posts around the newly constructed Concrete Bridge over New Hope Creek, trimmed and blazed 13 miles of public foot trails, cleared culverts and ditches, and cleaned barbed wire out of the open fields at Widener with a bolt cutter and metal snips. I even climbed 150 feet up the hardwood tower in the Blackwood Division to help install antennas for bird migration tracking, my first time standing among and above forest canopy trees. Along the way, I learned to use a pole saw, a hedge trimmer, and a string trimmer (and fixed one, too), and I came to genuinely appreciate the craft of forest road building and maintenance under the patient instruction of Craig Hughes, our Maintenance and Infrastructure Manager, who can run a piece of heavy equipment as elegantly as he can explain how to build a forest road.
I also spent many days in the Forest’s precious natural heritage areas identifying and treating invasive species, including Tree of Heaven, Princess Tree, and Autumn Olive, using hack-and-squirt, foliar spray, and cut-and-stump methods. This work sharpened my species identification and my ability to navigate and orient myself in dense stands, and it gave me an early and welcome dose of confidence: I discovered I am genuinely good at spotting invasives from a distance, which reassured me that my eye for the woods will serve me well no matter where my career leads.
The timber management work might be where I grew the most, both technically and personally. I helped identify stands for pre-commercial thinnings that would leverage the state’s cost-share programs, flagged first- and second-thinning harvest boundaries, and ran basal area sweeps with a prism. Eventually, after learning selection criteria and marking alongside my mentor, Zach Carnegie, all summer, I even marked trees for harvest in a second-thinning on my own. Standing in that stand by myself, deciding which trees would come down and which would stay, I felt the real weight of that responsibility for the first time, and I came away from it with a new kind of confidence in my own judgment.
One conversation from that project stayed with me all summer. My supervisor, Zach Carnegie, and I spent an early morning talking with Wayne Louya, the timber buyer with Triangle Forest Products. Our genuine conversation spanned from his path from a textile factory job to forestry, to the pressures reshaping the logging business today: sawmill closures, ever-changing mill quotas, shrinking logging capacity, a swing from 25 loads per week to about 15 over the past half year, and a pulpwood market increasingly pulled overseas to places like Brazil. Later, when weather and the logging crew’s own management style created real friction on that same job, I watched Zach navigate it with unfailing respect and patience, always trying to understand what mattered to Wayne and his crew before giving direction. That, more than any technical skill, is the lesson I expect to carry furthest into my career: that good land management is, in the end, good people management, and that clear, honest, collaborative communication is what makes a partnership with a logging crew, or with anyone, actually work.
An unexpected and rewarding project I undertook was a geospatial analysis to recover establishment dates for hundreds of uneven-aged stands across the Forest. By definition, an uneven-aged stand contains dominant canopy trees at least twenty years apart in age, and that classification, while accurate, quietly buries the more specific age information the Forest may already have on hand. I spent weeks cross-referencing cover type and management data from different eras, adjusting my approach as I learned what the data could and could not tell me, and I cored trees in a number of uneven-aged stands to check my estimates against the rings, under the guidance of Forest Supervisor Tom Craven. Tom taught me how to be smart about choosing a good tree to core, using the increment borer, and thinking about tree diameter across species and site conditions. It was slow, detective-like work, and it strengthened both my geospatial skills and my understanding of how forest succession, past management, major weather events, and disease outbreaks show up, encoded, in a stand’s cover type today.
Beyond timber management, I helped run a post-bridge stream survey on New Hope Creek, including pebble counts, cross-section visualization, and sediment measurement, and joined N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission staff on a mussel survey upstream of the wooden bridge. Each of these projects reminded me how tightly the forest, the water, and the wildlife in it are woven together, and how careful, patient fieldwork underlies a good understanding of biodiversity changes in the area.
Some of my favorite memories, though, are the quieter ones: eating lunch every day on the tailgate of the student truck during those early weeks of trail work and invasive monitoring, slowly sinking into the rhythm of forester life; the pride of realizing I could spot an invasive plant in the midst of the woods faster than I expected to; and the strange, grounding feeling of standing in the canopy on the Blackwood research tower, closer to those trees than I had ever been from below.
I know it will take me years to fully understand everything this summer gave me. But I already know that the comfort and confidence I gained navigating the woods and making real decisions on my own will serve me for the rest of my career, along with the technical foundation of species identification, measurement tools, and sampling methods that every forester needs. Most of all, I am taking with me a clearer sense of what it actually takes to manage a working forest today, and how much of that work is really about people. I look forward to carrying all of it into my capstone project this coming year, where my teammates and I will help a private landowner in North Carolina write a management plan for ninety-four acres of their land, balancing the economic and environmental benefits their forest can provide for decades to come.
None of this would have been possible without the extraordinary field team at Duke Forest. Zach Carnegie was extremely patient and generous with every question I brought him in the field and as we prepared for the day’s work. Craig Hughes never tired of explaining the machinery and the thinking behind a well-maintained forest road network. Tom Craven, from tree-coring to forest-wide decisions, showed me what it looks like to manage land and people with equal parts expertise and humility. I am grateful to all of them, and to Sara Childs and the rest of the staff, for their sincere care for the forest and all the creatures, big and small, that call it home; for their mentorship; and for a summer I will carry with me for a long time.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you to Bruce and Ginny Roberts, whose generosity established the Duke Forest Internship Fund and made my experience possible!