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Chaparral modification is undertaken for a variety of land-management purposes. To help land managers in selecting equipment and methods for such work, practitioners in county, State, and Federal modification projects were asked for evaluations of equipment and techniques they had used. This handbook describes the alternative techniques and equipment, provides information on operations, reports production rates and on-site costs, and explains the advantages and limitations of equipment used for brush crushing, compacting, chopping, and shredding and for grass seeding. Tools for hand...

Fuel moisture estimates generated by the National Fire-Danger Rating System procedure were compared with actual fuel moisture measurements determined from laboratory analysis. Meteorological data required for the NFDRS procedure were collected at two heights to assess the effect of temperature and humidity lapse rates. Standard measurements gave the best results, but use of a xeric hygrometer showed promise of giving reliable fuel moisture estimates by a simple linear regression.

The ability to determine wind speeds and directions in the first few thousand meters of the atmosphere is important in many forestry operations such as smolce management, aircraft seeding and spraying, prescribed burning, and wildfire suppression. A hand-held electronic calculator can be used to compute winds aloft as balloon observations are taken. Calculations can be made in the field with any calculator with trigonometric functions, programmable or nonprogrammable, by the method described.

Mountain pine beetles were induced to attack lodgepole pine sprayed with 0.2 percent or 0.3 percent lindane emulsion. Large numbers of beetles were killed and fell into traps at the base of the tree. The few successfully attacking beetles caused the sprayed trees to remain attractive to beetles for about two months. The incidence of attacked trees in the immediate area of the sprayed trees was apparently reduced.

The ability of birds to return "home" after displacement is generallywell known but poorly understood because of the multiplicity of variablesthat affect homing performance. These variables can include age andprevious experience of the bird, as well as the timing and distance of thedisplacement. The phenomenon of homing is also difficult to interpretbecause, like other behaviors, its performance depends upon both motivationand ability. A deficiency in either component will preclude expressionof the behavior.

In recent years many studies have used mist net capture data to quantify avian populations, especially during migration. Such studies have compared the species, age, and sex composition as well as the intensity and timing of migration through the seasons and at different locations (e.g. Preston, 1966; Lebermen and Clench, 1971; Stewart et al., 1973).

On small plots in a greenleaf manzanita brushfield, herbicides applied as a foliar spray in May killed the small-fuel fractions of the shrubs (leaves, twigs, and small stems up to ½-inch diameter) by October, in tests near Mount Shasta, California. Late summer spraying did not kill most of the small fields until the next spring, and September sprays required 1 year to produce equal kill. On those shrub branches having dead small fuels by October, the stems, up to 2-inch diameter, dried during cold winter weather; most stems were ready for burning by early spring. Picloram, not effective as...

When the effectiveness of herbicide desiccants for killing and drying woody vegetation on many small test plots is rated, the standard procedures for collecting fuel moisture samples are time consuming and costly. Also, the field data often must be recorded when weather is not suitable for collecting moisture content samples. To overcome these limitations, a new procedure was devised for systematically evaluating appearance of leaves, twigs, and small stems and estimating quantitatively the percent of total small-fuel mass that was dead or dying and would eventually dry to low moisture...

Bare-root Douglas-fir seedlings were planted by four methods in late February and late March on a hot, south-facing slope in northwestern California. The four techniques were: standard planting, deep planting at two different depths, and shading of the lower stem. After 10 growing seasons, there were no significant differences in survival attributable to planting technique or planting date. Height growth showed no response to planting method, but did show response to planting date. Trees planted in February averaged a foot taller than those planted in March, but the precise reason for this...

The parasite Clinostomum marginatum, commonly called the "yellow grub" infection of fishes infested 45.3 percent of 2293 fish collected from six out of eight foothill ranch ponds in central California, Madera County. By species of fish, the occurrence of the parasite was as follows: Green sunfish (Lepomus cyanellus), 76.5 percent; largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides) 50.7 percent; bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus), 33.9 percent; and redear sunfish (Lepomis microlophus), 0 percent. Thus, tile parasite is common in central California as well as previously reported in northern and southern...