The Huron-Manistee National Forests didn’t plant jack pine trees this year, according to a statement from public affairs specialist Debra-Ann Brabazon.
The Forests usually plant about a million jack pine trees annually because they provide habitat for the Kirtland’s Warbler. Michigan has 98 percent of the global population of this songbird, which also used to be endangered for 50 years.
The Huron-Manistee National Forests order young jack pine in dormancy, which means a state when trees stop growing to survive winter conditions. They are then shipped in a refrigerated truck from the J.W. Toumey Nursery in the Upper Peninsula and must be planted before the weather becomes too warm.
The jack pine weren't planted this year because the young trees from the nursery experienced a "dormancy issue," Brabazon wrote.
“It is not favorable to remove all the seedlings and allow them to come out of dormancy before they are planted," she wrote.
Brabazon didn’t reply to WCMU’s questions about the root causes of this issue. WCMU has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about what happened and is still waiting on the response from the U.S. Forest Service.
But even though the Forest Service said they didn’t plant any jack pine trees, there's a partnership program between the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the Forest Service that said that they did plant some jack pine in the Huron-Manistee National Forests this spring.
The program is known as the Good Neighbor Authority (GNA) and it helps support reforestation efforts and timber sale management.
Derek Cross with the GNA said for about three years now, they’ve been planting trees in the Huron-Manistee National Forests. Their total is over 2 million trees.
This year, the GNA planted 424,200 jack pine in the Forests, Cross said.
“Due to some critical timing and when seedlings are ready and when they need to be put in the ground, the Forest Service planting contract wasn't able to be used at this time,” Cross said. “We already had our planters in the same area where the trees need to be planted, and they added them to the work we were already doing.”
According to the U.S. Forest Service’s Silvicultural Practices Handbook, tree planting contracts are a responsibility of a contracting officer with the Forest Service. The contractors must follow the department’s regulations of tree planting and are subject to inspections, according to the handbook.
Jack pine seedlings are planted from April to early May, Cross said.
“Once the tree seedlings are thawed, you don't want them to dry out,” he said. “You want to get them in the ground as fast as possible. And you also need to get them in the ground before the weather gets too hot and dry to increase their survival rate.”
These trees are planted annually to restore up to 1,200 acres annually for Kirtland’s Warbler, Brabazon wrote. Kirtland's Warblers only live in young jack pine forests.
“Jack pine is the dominant tree species, with scattered openings and clumps of oak, cherry and low shrubs,” she wrote. “The habitat is often extremely dense, especially in the lower branches. As the trees grow and these lower branches die and break off, Kirtland’s Warblers gradually abandon the habitat and locate new habitat before the next breeding season.”
According to a survey conducted by the Kirtland's Warbler Conservation Team, the bird's population is declining. The 2025 census showed there are 1,477 breeding pairs of Kirtland’s Warblers in Michigan when a global population is 1,489 pairs. Four years ago, its global population was 2,245 pairs.
Jason Hartman with the DNR said the decline is happening because there is now a reduced area of suitable place for birds to live in.
Historically, he said, Kirtland’s Warbler lived in a habitat created by wildfires, but then conservationists started to manage the bird’s habitat by planting young jack pine trees. Because they were so successful with planting in the past, there now isn’t enough land available for young jack pine trees.
The decline is expected to continue for the next few years, Hartman said.
“What you plant now becomes habitat five years from now,” he said. “So one of the reasons why we see the decline that's ahead of us and we know that it's we can't solve it until five years from now.”
But Hartman said the DNR is working on making the habitat available now and finding solutions so the bird’s population can stabilize in the future.
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