Prompted Post 10/24: Practicing Your Knowledge

There tends to be a lot of fieldwork necessary for forestry or at least for the part of the field that I’m hoping to pursue. I preformed a hands-on experience that served as exam preparation for my Forestry Field Methods course. This course has taught me a lot of basic and fundamental ideas for forestry. I’m glad to have taken it my first semester at MSU to further spark my interest in my major. It is really apparent why this is one of the first classes taken in the forestry curriculum.

For some field exam preparation I went to Baker Woodlot, with a few classmates, and got some extra practice on compass navigation. This lab-heavy class depends on this idea of practicing certain skills for forestry rather than reading about them. It can be helpful to just go and do these exercises to develop the skills and experience to excel on the tests. I essentially quizzed myself by figuring out compass bearings to navigate to certain mapped out points in the woodlot.

The interesting thing I noticed was the previous night I had spent close to an hour reading and re-reading an article on compass declination. The article was rather confusing and difficult to understand because of being away from the field. Compass declination by itself can be confusing when trying to understand the difference between true north and map north. It’s Especially confusing sitting behind a computer screen looking at an expensive new compass with more functions then I thought a compass could originally have. When someone looks at a compass, the red arrow is pointing towards the North Pole and this can be several degrees off of north on a local map.

Now for East Lansing the magnetic declination is 6 degrees west. So when you are looking at North on a compass you’re actually looking 6 degrees to the West of North. 6 degrees may not seem like a lot but after traveling 300 feet the 6-degree bearing can be a lot more significant. Adjusting this declination can be confusing without actually using a bearing in the forest. So I found it most helpful to go to the woodlot and set it there.

Luckily, I was able to get enough practice to improve my confidence and was more than pleased when I received my exam grade; the highest grade of the class on my first official forestry exam was exceptionally satisfying.

Works Cited

"Reader Poll: Does Your Compass Have a Declination Adjustment?" Section Hikers Backpacking Blog. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Nov. 2013.