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digg ittell me about timber thiefs. my family has land(handed down threw heirship) and to make a long story short stole the timber off of it. my father, his brothers ect. were getting up in age (88-65 at the time) and even after being told to stay off of the property--registered letters sent to him--and he knew not to touch it, went ahead and cut trees that my father said weren’t ever cut even during the ritter lumber days. went to court over it, the logger had somehow managed to go out of busines, equipment and all, the judge said there wasn’t anything he could do, no compensation--nothing for us. what burns me up is that this guy stole something not only from my father and aunts,uncles and cousins, but from my daughter and my granddaughter--see will never see the trees that my dad climbed or played around. they stole something precious from my granddaughter all for money--they pass laws for strip mining,gas drilling,underground mining, but own a piece of property with a tree on it and u are fair game with no legal legs toj stand on. my father always said(and he was a tree hugger, and proud of it) that this country will wait till only one or two trees are left--then go into a poor us routine and pass laws to regulate the tree industry---way to late for me, my daughter and grand daughter. the guy that cut the trees in his defense said he went by what others told him about the property line--really believe that one. he knew the family was getting older and he basically took advantage of older people. for me he should have been made to plant 5 hard wood trees for everyone he cut and been made to maintain them for 15 years to see that they grew and matured--if they didn’t plant more.
need to start now or there will be no later. just thaught the story needed to be told, and don’t count on the courts to help either they are a joke,especilly in dickenson county.
Forest owners losing to timber thefts
Wytheville Enterprise: News > Smyth County News: News > Washington County News: News > Bland County Messenger: News >
Tue Mar 04, 2008 - 07:13 PM
By DAN KEGLEY/Staff
If you have a tract of forest on your property, it might be a good idea to go have a look at it. And make a habit of it, the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation advises.
Regular inspection of private forests is one of the ways the Virginia Department of Forestry said landowners can prevent timber theft. Thieves annually steal $2 million in trees in the 13-counties of Southwest Virginia that form VDF forester Ed Stoots’ service region.
“I easily get at least one call every three weeks from a landowner who has had timber stolen,” Stoots said in a VFBF release. Stoots’ area includes Bland, Buchanan, Carroll, Dickenson, Grayson, Lee, Scott, Smyth, Tazewell, Washington, Wise and Wythe counties.
“If you have a large tract of forestland, it’s likely that you won’t walk all of that property every day,” VFBF public information director John Campbell said. That makes it easier for thieves to come onto the property, cut down trees and take them without the landowner ever knowing, VFBF said.
Prime targets for timber thieves are the trees of older landowners who do not see all of their property on a regular basis and absentee owners who may not live in the same state as their trees.
“Thieves research that,” Stoots said Thursday, and have been known to remove most of the trees on a piece of property.
Tree theft happens in several forms. Individuals can enter property to take one or a limited number of trees. They often target “high-value” trees like “large cherry or black walnut” trees. A good log can bring several thousand dollars.
Another kind of theft is inadvertent and happens when loggers cross property lines without knowing it and cut the wrong trees.
“When property lines are not marked well on the ground, loggers can inadvertently cross lines,” Stoots said.
Unscrupulous loggers may change information on freight tickets, showing less weight for loads of logs bound for market than will actually be sold, and pocket the difference, according to Stoots.
There is no single collection point of data about tree theft cases or prosecutions in the region, and much of what is known about the incidence of theft is found in Shawn Baker’s May 2003 thesis for his master’s degree in forestry at Virginia Tech.
Baker’s study relied on surveys of police officer and attorneys in some two dozen counties along the Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee state lines.
“Based on these data, the impact of timber theft was conservatively estimated at 120 incidents per year, resulting in a loss of approximately $300,000 per year within the study area,” Baker wrote. “An extrapolation of this to the entire southern Appalachian region would mean over $4 million per year.
Baker also found a tendency in the region’s legal community to regard timber theft as a civil matter rather than criminal.
Stoots, a member of a timber security taskforce operating from Ohio to South Carolina, said timber theft often is not prosecuted because of the difficulty in proving criminal intent and in some cases, proof of ownership.
Good fences make good neighbors, the poet Robert Frost said, and they can make the case for land ownership. But property lines in forests are not always marked by fences.
Additionally, law enforcement officials “don’t always understand the value of timber,” Stoots said.
Smyth County Commonwealth’s Attorney Roy Evans owns forested land and knows a tree’s value, but he’s prosecuted only one timber theft case in years, he said.
“I get regular calls on this,” maybe one a year, Evans said. “When I get a call, it’s not something criminal. It’s a dispute with a logger over residual damages.”
Stoots said civil recourse often is not sought when the landowner learns how long and how much money it will take to pursue a lawsuit that may or may not be successful.
“You could get damages,” Evans said, “but you have to balance it. Is it worth the time and money?”
Prevention can also involve neighbors watching out for neighbors and reporting suspicious activity in a kind of woodlands crime watch. CBS News posted a timber theft story online where an anonymous reader submitted this commentary: “In the 1980’s, 50 black walnut trees were stolen from my aunt’s farm in PA. My aunt was in the hospital and trucks pulled up, took down her prized walnut trees that were over 100 years old, drove away and were never seen again. She didn’t discover the theft for weeks, but neighbors witnessed the theft, they just didn’t realize it was a theft. They thought she had sold the trees to the loggers. If any of them had called the sheriff, the thieves might have been caught. Moral of the story is: if you see anything funny going on, call the cops and let them sort it out.”