Forests Falling Victim To Saws Of Tree Rustlers From ‘Mistakes’ To Outright Theft, Southern Timber Owners Take Losses

Skulking into the piney forest in the dead of night, they pick off their prey and cart it to market. These are thieves, reminiscent of the cattle rustlers once well-known in Texas.

But now the prey are trees.

Timber has become a valuable commodity in Southern states, including Texas. Where once only cotton was king, 58 percent of all the timber produced each year in the U.S. now comes from the South, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Southerners who own lands graced by forests and smelling of pine needles are facing losses of $75 million each year from stolen hardwoods and Tall Southern Yellow pine, said Bruce Miles, director of the Texas Forest Service.

The practice has become so rampant that the joke in this part of East Texas is it’s gotten hard to see the forest for the thieves.

Rip-off artists trespass or ignore neighboring property lines to cut down trees because the price of logs has about doubled during the past two years and the number of absentee landowners has increased, said Alan Matecko, spokesman for the National Forests and Grasslands in Texas.

“Where sawlogs were bringing $30 a ton, they’re now bringing $60 a ton,” said state Rep. Billy Clemons, who lost about $5,000 when unscrupulous loggers harvested more than 50 pines, some hardwoods and a few small pulp wood trees from his land.

“I am a victim,” he said, adding that natural disasters have added to the number of thefts. “The price of raw material has increased greatly. It’s worth their effort to sneak onto somebody’s property and steal some logs.”

Many landowners are easy targets for the crooks because, unlike livestock, trees aren’t easily identifiable.

Unethical loggers have been known to clear-cut without permission, and falsify sales bills and scale readings. And just invade someone else’s land.

“It’s easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission,” Miles said of loggers who trespass for trees.

Miles tells a story of a case in Cass County, where a thief stole the trees from a 160-acre tract but left a stand of pines along the perimeter. That way the owner wouldn’t know when she drove past her land.

No one is safe. In November, a Louisiana timber buyer confessed to stealing timber from the Sisters of Providence in Indiana. The nuns lost around $100,000 when about three-fourths of their 104 acres was cut and sold, according to Harrison County Sheriff’s Deputy Mike Alexander.

A hanging used to be the justice served up for rustlers in Texas. Today, landowners have trouble even getting a conviction for tree thievery.

“If you have good documentation of what happened it’s not hard, but a lot of times people just go in in the dead of night and cut down timber without a trace,” said Assistant District Attorney Art Bauereiss, who successfully prosecuted Clemons’ case.

So, posses have been forming. Law enforcement, landowners and forestry officials have combined efforts to go after the tree rustlers. That’s resulted in numerous lawsuits and convictions across the country.