On a recent trip to the mountain north of Mountain Home, I began wondering what kind of pine trees I was seeing. I saw some that I knew were Lodgepole Pines and a few Ponderosa Pines but didn’t know what the other tree I was seeing was. So I did some research and found out these big pine trees are Douglas Fir Trees.
In reality, the Douglas Fir is not really a “fir” tree at all. It was misnamed or misclassified in 1856 and really should be written as a hyphenated word like Douglas-fir. The sub-species we see in the Boise National Forest is likely called the Rocky Mountain Douglas-fir and can it reach heights of over 200 feet tall and 6 feet wide. But for the most part our Douglas Firs are likely much smaller.
How Many Douglas Firs in Elmore County?
Thanks to the US Forest Service I was able to dig up some statistics about the Douglas Fir in Elmore County. I’m not sure how the Forest Service comes up with the numbers but they do. It looks like the numbers of these grand old trees are on the decline.
For more information on the Douglas-fir, click on the links below.
– Department of Agriculture gives some scientific data and places the Douglas Fir grow in the US.
http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=PSME
– Wikipedia has a ton of info on the Douglas-fir
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas-fir
– Washington State University has information on the destructive Douglas Fir Beetle
http://ext.nrs.wsu.edu/forestryext/foresthealth/notes/doublasbeetle.htm