More than two dozen species of oak are native to North Carolina. But with a quick glance and some context clues, Luke Ferreira and Spencer Cain can identify pretty much all of them. Not to mention most trees in every other native genus as well.
On a johnboat cutting up Turkey Quarter Creek in the eastern part of the state, Ferreira has been instructing me about the differences between water oaks and laurel oaks.
“Water oaks have a leaf shaped like a teardrop, and laurel oaks have an almost diamond-shaped leaf,” he says. “And believe it or not, laurel oaks like water more than water oaks do.”
Ferreira takes his trees seriously, but he also allows himself a moment of amusement at the water oak’s ironic name. Then it’s right back to swamp ecology. “Water oaks still like water,” he tells me. “They just don’t necessarily like standing water.”
Turkey Quarter Island, which lies between the creek on one side and the Neuse River on the other, is flooded from a nor’easter that recently passed over Craven County, home to nearby Vanceboro. There’s water almost everywhere.
That’s okay, though. The specific tree we’re looking for right now doesn’t mind getting its roots wet. It thrives in the swamp. It’s grown so big out here, it has earned itself a title.
“When we found this one, it was in the most perfect health we’ve seen,” Cain says.
He and Ferreira are hoping the tree’s good health helped it through the storm. Big trees are generally big because they’ve been growing a long time. In other words, because they’re old. And like many older things, old trees are liable to blow over in a nor’easter. It’s not guaranteed we’ll find this one upright.
But as Ferreira throttles the motor and we glide around a bend in the creek, an enormous mass emerges from the subtropical thicket and immediately commands our view. There it is, the largest known water hickory in North Carolina.
“I’ll be danged,” Cain says with relief. “Look at that.”
“Still standing,” Ferreira confirms.
Deep Into the Woods
Ferreira and Cain began hunting for champion trees five years ago. This uncommon hobby takes them deep into the woods to look for the biggest trees they can find in any given species—both the biggest of the big and the biggest of the small.
Though they keep their eyes open for superlative trees everywhere they go, they hunt for them predominantly in central and eastern North Carolina. Their big finds reflect the tree species native to those regions.
The North Carolina Forest Service, which is part of the state Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services, maintains a list of the largest known tree for each species in the state, and the University of Tennessee maintains the National Register of Champion Trees for the biggest ones in the country. Ferreira and Cain seek out giant trees mostly for fun, but if they discover a clear contender, they’ll nominate it to the relevant organization to see if they’ve found a new state or national champion.
Such was the case two years ago, when they first came across this particular water hickory. They thought it must be bigger than the current state champion, so they measured it and sent their numbers to the N.C. Forest Service, along with the tree’s coordinates.
In keeping with its protocols, the agency sent out a county ranger, who checked their measurements and confirmed that their tree was indeed larger than the previous champion. Ferreira and Cain haven’t seen the hickory since it was crowned champ and added to the state list, so they wanted to drop in for a wellness check.
“We’ll throw a tape measure on it, see if it’s grown any,” Ferreira says.
While they work, they talk me through the mechanics of measuring trees. Even within the same species, trees can vary so widely in their dimensions that it’s not always clear how to evaluate differences in size. Over the years, foresters and tree hunters have developed a more or less standardized approach for these comparisons, which is used today by both the National Champion Tree Program and the N.C. Forest Service.
Trees are given scores on three criteria: one point for each inch of trunk circumference and a quarter-point for each foot of average crown spread (both measured with a simple tape measure), as well as one point for each foot of height (measured with a laser rangefinder or a clinometer). When tallied, these points allow for comparisons between different tree shapes.
It takes Ferreira and Cain working together to string the tape measure around the behemoth water hickory. When they reconnect the ends of the tape, it reads 216 inches, or 18 feet on the dot.
“It gained six inches in circumference, so it’s still growing pretty vigorously,” Ferreira says. “When something reaches the end of its life, its growth slows way down, almost to the point of not growing at all. Six inches in two years is promising.”
Standing at the hickory’s base and looking up, I’m awestruck by its presence. Its topmost twigs and leaves reach out high above the forest canopy, and its larger branches don’t even begin emerging from the trunk until 40 or 50 feet above the ground. To think that this tree is still growing vigorously is inspiring, and almost unbelievable.
What Others Miss
“We keep this as a hobby,” Ferreira tells me as we trudge through the semi-aquatic underbrush at our next stop. “We don’t want it to feel like a job.”
We’re searching now for an overcup oak, a particularly stout one that Ferreira and Cain know they’ve seen out here somewhere. They haven’t had a chance to measure it before, but they think it might give the current state champion overcup oak a run for its acorns.
I know what Ferreira means about hobbies and jobs, but I still find his statement a little curious. Both men work in the Raleigh office of Bartlett Tree Experts, one of America’s largest tree care companies. Ferreira is a safety coordinator, Cain a sales representative. Both are certified arborists. Working with trees is their job.
The two became fast friends at Bartlett. After Cain discovered the North Carolina big tree list online, he and Ferreira realized that their specialized knowledge would give them an advantage when looking for champions.
In the woods, Cain and Ferreira are literally hugging trees to get the tape measure around massive trunks, but neither is anything like popular ideas of the metaphorical tree hugger.
A country boy who grew up in New Bern, Ferreira, 26, tells me with his easy Southern drawl about all the different hunting seasons—actual animal hunting, not tree hunting—he enjoys. “Deer, bear, rabbits, squirrels, ducks, doves,” he says. “Pretty much everything.”
His favorite place to get barbecue is Skylight Inn in Ayden, the mark of a true eastern North Carolinian.
Cain, 29, is an Army veteran from Apex. He joined Bartlett after spending four years as a paratrooper and 50-caliber machine gunner with the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg. He’s more reserved than Ferreira, but he opens up to direct questions.
“Feels like five decades ago,” he says when I ask him about his Army service. “I forget I was in a lot. Just like, ‘Oh, yeah, I did that, right.’”
Though they still get out on tree hunting excursions when they can, the frequency dropped about three years ago, when both became fathers within six months of each other. Ferreira and his girlfriend had their daughter first; Cain and his fiancée welcomed a baby girl shortly thereafter
“We keep this as a hobby. We don’t want it to feel like a job.”
Luke Ferreira
Before I can ask them more about fatherhood, something interesting catches Ferreira’s eye.
“Oh, I thought that was a Carolina ash,” he says, inspecting the leaves and bark on a slender tree more closely. “That would have been a huge one.”
It turns out it’s just a relatively small green ash, but the mix-up reveals one of the quirks of champion tree hunting. Two trees of the same size that look identical to the untrained eye might actually be different species, making one a runaway champion and the other a middling wannabe.
Ferreira and Cain’s dendrological expertise gives them a leg up, both in tree hunting and in the outdoors more generally. They see and appreciate things in the woods that most people take for granted, or miss entirely.
The mere presence of the green ash here also transmits some meaningful information.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard of the emerald ash borer,” Ferreira says, referring to an invasive beetle from Asia that has been ravaging North American ash species for the last two decades. “As far as I’ve seen, this island hasn’t been affected by the borer yet at all.”
This feels like good tidings, or at least like temporary relief in an era where each day seems to bear worse environmental news than the one before. Mature ash trees are particularly beautiful inhabitants of our forests, with branches that sweep elegantly away from their trunks and furrowed bark that looks like something out of a storybook. They are old inhabitants as well—ashes have been growing in the southeastern United States for more than 30 million years.
It will be a great pity if the North American varieties are all wiped out by the emerald ash borer, which is a very real possibility. For today, at least, they are alive and seemingly healthy on this remote swamp island.
Forest of Champions
For some perspective on champion trees, I reached out to Gary Williamson, one of the most prominent big tree hunters in America. The 81-year-old Williamson and his friend Byron Carmean, both of Virginia, have found hundreds of state and national champions in their four decades of searching. In the latest National Register of Champion Trees, they are noted as the most prolific nominators in the country—of the 548 trees on the national list, Williamson and Carmean tracked down 62 of them.
A few years ago, Ferreira contacted Williamson online. Ferreira and Cain had started finding potential champions of their own, and he was eager to compare notes with the two experts north of the state line. A kind of intergenerational friendship ensued, one centered around giant trees.
“We have a good national program at the University of Tennessee, and from what I understand, North Carolina’s big tree program is rolling,” Williamson said. “It’s in good shape with two young hunters like Lucas and Spencer. Those two are the future of the North Carolina big tree program.”
But what about tree hunting itself? I asked Williamson. Do champion trees have any role to play in our lives—in forest management, for example, or in conservation? Do they do anything other than just stand around, being big?
“They can play a big part, and I’ll use the Congaree as an example,” he said.
The Congaree floodplain spans thousands of acres in Richland County, South Carolina. It’s a special kind of ecosystem, an old-growth bottomland hardwood forest, one of the best preserved and largest remaining of its kind.
“When it was just Congaree Swamp, and it was under private ownership, they called it ‘Congaree, Forest of Champions,’ because it had so many big, impressive champion trees,” Williamson said.
“Those two are the future of the North Carolina big tree program.”
Gary Williamson
The landowners, however, were from a logging family, and they harvested timber from the property off and on from the 1880s into the 1970s. The logging eventually threatened the last remnants of the old-growth forest, producing a public backlash and a popular movement for the federal government to buy the property and preserve it.
Congress acquired the land and turned it into a national monument in 1976 and then a national park in 2003. The number and sheer size of the champion trees in the area was central to the push for protection.
“It became a national park,” Williamson said. “Because those trees were so impressive, the Congaree was saved.”
A List of Big Finds
Cain and Ferreira eventually locate the overcup oak right where they left it two years ago—a few hundred feet inland from Turkey Quarter Creek, next to a mucky slough. It’s the perfect place for an overcup oak, a swamp-dwelling species that loves to cast shade over standing water with its lustrous, deeply lobed leaves.
The tree is huge, especially around the trunk. But Ferreira, estimating the height at close to 100 feet, determines that it’s probably too short to challenge the 124-foot specimen in Martin County that currently holds the state title, even if its trunk circumference and crown spread turn out to be larger.
At best, it might be named a co-champion, a designation given to trees that score within a few points of the current state or national champion but aren’t large enough to supplant it outright. However, Cain and Ferreira aren’t interested in nominating co-champions. If they were, they would have nominated a half-dozen other specimens they’ve found—including a hackberry, an American bladdernut, a Washington hawthorn, and others—that are big, but probably not big enough to become undisputed state champions.
Still, Cain and Ferreira mark the coordinates of this overcup oak. Seasoned tree hunters keep running lists of their notable finds, even if they aren’t yet clear contenders. No one knows which trees will keep growing and which will fall. Should the current champ die, it’s good to have potential replacements at the ready and to know exactly where they are.
I ask Ferreira and Cain if the trees we’ve seen today have any commercial value.
“Yeah, a lot of these trees out here do,” Ferreira says. “Laurel oaks, not so much. But the overcups do. And on a bit higher ground than this, cherrybark oaks, they’re one of the most commercially valuable oaks. They grow fast, really tall, and straight.”
That species name awakens a memory in Cain. “We found a huge cherrybark oak on the north end of Jordan Lake, near Durham,” he says. “And right at the base of it was a bobcat and its babies. That was the first time I’d ever seen a bobcat.”
I’ve never run into a bobcat before, and I’m not sure I would want to in a forest wilderness, especially if it was with its babies. But Cain’s story is a welcome reminder that commercial value isn’t the only kind of value these trees hold. Oaks, in particular, nourish and shelter countless species.
Back in the boat and cruising down a cut-through to the Neuse River, we pass a section of Turkey Quarter Island we haven’t seen yet. Ferreira, one hand on the tiller of the outboard motor, lets his gaze run across the canopy overhanging the creek and sighs with disappointment. He points to a few sickly trees next to the bank, their outermost twigs and branches bare of leaves.
“I was talking about how the emerald ash borer hadn’t made it out here,” he says. “I think it’s made it now.”
Treatments exist for ash trees infested with the borer, but they are too expensive and impractical to be used in forest settings. Within 20 years, this section of the river likely won’t have a single mature ash left alive—whether green, Carolina, or any other kind. Saplings might continue sprouting up here and there for a while, but no ash will ever live long enough to resemble anything close to a champion.
A Modest Champ
Out on the flooded banks of the Neuse River, Ferreira and Cain have brought me to the last tree of the day, a very big deciduous holly. This one is so big, they’re thinking of bypassing the state big tree list entirely and nominating it directly to the national list.
Though when I say big, I mean big for a deciduous holly. These are naturally smaller trees, and when we find the specimen partly submerged in the floodwaters, I’m struck by the possibility of a champ that’s so modest in size, at least relative to the other trees we’ve seen today.
Ferreira points out, though, that the champion trees of smaller species are often the most impressive. They don’t get the kind of attention that huge oaks and pines do—most people walk or boat right by them, oblivious to their existence—but they’ve survived a long time to get where they are.
“They grow pretty slow, especially being in the understory here,” Ferreira says, “but this one’s probably about 100 years old.”
Due to the flooding, it’s impossible to get exact metrics on the tree for a nomination, so they take some approximate measurements instead for a quick check on its chances of making the national list.
“I think the national champion is what, 80 points, Spencer?” Ferreira asks.
“Oh, close,” Cain confirms.
“Forty-one inch circumference,” Ferreira says, inspecting the tree, “and then probably, oh, I read it at 30 feet tall. So that’d be 71 points right there.”
And that’s not even including crown spread, which would add more points to its score.
“It’d probably be right around 80 points,” he says. “And it might be taller than 30 feet. Definitely the biggest deciduous holly I’ve ever found.”
Ferreira and Cain determine that it’s worth coming back in drier conditions to get numbers for an official nomination. If a certified tree measurer from the National Register of Champion Trees comes out and validates those numbers, and this tree does score 80 points or more, it will easily replace the current national champion, which sits at 76 points.
In other words, if this big holly on the Neuse River keeps doing what trees do, putting one ring on top of the other, it stands a good chance of becoming a champion some day. And if it can defy the forces arrayed against it—floods, storms, pests, and others surely to come—it might even remain champion, at least for a while.
Correction: This story originally said trees are given scores on criteria, including one point for each foot of average crown spread. It is one-quarter point.
Jonathan Pattishall is an editor and translator from Durham. He currently lives in Brunswick County. To comment on this story, email [email protected].
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