To Caleb Chaplin, it's clear what sets a patch of old forest on his family's land apart from the woods around it.
"You can tell it's never been plowed or made into fields and came back up, it's really unique with the diversity that it has, it's a lot different of a piece," said Chaplin, one of the owners of Chaplin Logging.
He gazed out on 23 acres of old hemlock, yellow birch, oak and basswood on his family's timberland in Naples. Some of the trees are up to 200 years old.
Foresters call these woods "late successional and old growth." They're also some of the rarest features on Maine's landscape, trap lots of greenhouse gas and provide critical habitat for unique species.
Chaplin said his family was planning to harvest the stand this year.
"We've owned the piece for 10 years plus and haven't really gotten around to cutting it, and it was just time," he said.
Then Chaplin family learned the New England Forestry Foundation would pay them to delay harvesting.
Chaplin said it was a tough decision at a time when these big trees are drawing some of the highest prices in the timber market. Ultimately, the family agreed to leave the stand alone for 10 years, and work with the foundation to develop a permanent conservation plan.
"We made it as a decision as more of a landowner and not on the logging side of things, to keep our land base diversified as far as opportunities we can also have," Chaplin said.
But forgoing a lucrative harvest was also an effort to create a legacy for his family that has worked in these woods for four generations, Chaplin added.
"What's another generation going to be able to do with this land? And as we struggle with timber markets, is this going to be more beneficial to support the land over time?" he said.
Maine is the most forested state in the nation, but after centuries of farming and logging, only pockets of large, old trees remain.
That's especially true in southern Maine, where much of the land was cleared for farming and grazing by the 19th century.
"If northern Maine has 3% or 3.5% of the landscape in this, than I think there is less than 1% of southern Maine that could possibly be in this condition," said Brian Milakovsky, a senior forester with the New England Forestry Foundation.
Milakovsky said old woods are critical for biodiversity. And they serve an outsized role in trapping climate-warming carbon dioxide.
"When you've got a lot of old trees holding it, living and dead, in high volumes out in a natural forest like this one, that's a really good way to store a lot of carbon," said Milakovsky on a visit to the Chaplins' land.
Preserving those trees is a challenge in Maine, where most forests are owned by private timber companies.
The foundation is using a $4.3 million U.S. Forest Service grant to offer some of those landowners partial value of their timber to defer harvesting trees already written into harvesting plans.
Milakovsky said that should give the foundation and other groups time to conserve the parcels through purchase or easement. Or to let carbon credit markets develop that would pay landowners for the carbon storage potential of their living old trees.
"Seven to 10 years, depending on the owner, is a lot of time to find good solutions that work for the landowner financially but also help us keep more of this mixed into our working forest," Milakovsky said.
The deferral program comes at the same time as a statewide effort to hold onto patches of old trees that remain on the landscape.
A state work group made of up conservation, landowner and industry representatives is meant to deliver a report on strategies to conserve late successional and old growth forests by this November.
Jonathan Thompson, a professor at Harvard Forest, a school of Harvard University, said a groundbreaking 2024 study that digitally mapped old forest in northern Maine triggered a race to preserve what remains in the state.
"It's a surprise that there would be these high-volume, ecologically valuable stands on commercial timberlands," Thompson said.
Thompson was co-author of a recent study that laid out strategies to protect old tree stands, including financial incentives to landowners.
But he was initially skeptical of the foundation's deferral payments.
"You know, the best case scenario is we're going to have to buy these twice, you know, when the deferral runs out," he said.
Thompson has since come around to the idea as triage. Landowners are already planning to harvest some of these trees, and when they're gone, there's no bringing them back.
"No one is suggesting this is the end of the discussion, but if something isn't done right now, they will be cut," Thompson said.
