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After watching the logging of 150-year-old trees across the road from their home, two Douglas County residents hope to start a countywide discussion about logging and the values placed on the remaining pockets of natural areas in Douglas County.

Last week, loggers began removing bur oak, red oak, hackberry, locust and hickory from a 17-acre property on East 661 Diagonal Road owned by Dan Barrow Logging Company of Denison. Some of the trees are more than 150 years old, neighbor Terry Shistar said.

Terry Shistar looks over a logging operation Monday afternoon across the road from her home near Lone Star Lake.

"I view these trees as the elders in our community," she said. "I feel a sense of personal loss when I see those trees being taken off."

The trees line a tributary of the Wakarusa River and provide a buffer between the stream and a nearby field. Shistar and her husband, Karl Birns, said the trees were used as a rookery by great blue herons and turkey vultures and provided shelter to deer, coyotes and bobcats.

Shistar and Birns both teach in the environmental studies department at Kansas University. They said the logging provided a real challenge to the Douglas County community, rather than the hypothetical situations they often present to students.

Birns said more factors than just board feet of lumber should determine a tree's value, such as acorns for turkeys, habitat for birds and the cleansing effect on water quality.

"All those positive things that this forest provides are not taken into account when the landowner decides what to do with the resources," he said.

Instead of private landowners deciding the fate of natural areas, especially in a flood-prone riparian area like East 661 Diagonal Road below Lone Star Lake, Birns offered some suggestions for the county:

Identify ecologically sensitive lands and purchase them.

Locate private sector organizations, such as the Kansas Land Trust, that can purchase the lands.

Use a decision-making process requiring permits before logging can take place.

Loggers pause from work removing trees Monday on property at East 661 Diagonal Road below Lone Star Lake.

Birns and Shistar aren't against some harvesting of trees they often cut dead and down logs for their fireplace. But they do object to private decisions to log that could affect public goods such as wildlife and water quality.

"These are places that you'd walk in and feel like you're in a cathedral," Shistar said. "To me it's like someone going in there and bulldozing down a church. You don't ask what the value of a church is."

Birns said it would be too simplistic to characterize his concerns as a logger vs. tree-hugger issue. He said it was more an issue of protecting natural areas and green spaces for the future, thereby improving the quality of life in Douglas County.

"Is this the kind of thing that we want going on or do we want to protect the land for the future?" Birns said. "It's all wrapped up together in terms of viewing the resources in this county from a larger perspective."

Loggers removing the trees Monday did not comment, and the landowner did not return phone calls.

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