Forester Matt Kelly escaped the city to find beauty in nature

Oct. 22—When Matt Kelly was about 10 years old, he cut down his first tree.

Growing up in Madison, Conn., Kelly — who today is Cheshire County's forester — lived on a cul-de-sac near the Hammonasset River, where several square miles of woodland stretched through the rolling hillsides.

In the summers, he would play and fish in the woods with his siblings, and every winter his father, who loved to decorate the house for Christmas, would send him up the cliffside with a sleigh and a handsaw to cut down a hemlock.

"That was the first time I ever cut down a tree," Kelly said. "It was the first time I was ever really in the woods looking at trees with some sort of intended purpose."

He did not know it then, but the childhood memories he forged in those woods — and his experience seeing parts of the forest become off limits as they were clearcut for the development of a neighborhood — would compel him to change careers later in life.

A saxophonist, guitarist and pianist, Kelly went to college for music and, upon graduating, worked for several years in the music industry in New York City. He found day jobs working at a small studio that composed music for television and film and as a manager in the record label's royalty department.

And, at night, Kelly would play music with different groups: a Mardi Gras band, a couple rock bands and with a Brazilian composer, with whom he would travel to Indonesia and Russia. For about 20 episodes, he played in the band on Last Call with Carson Daly.

But, living in the city, something was missing. To escape urban rush, Kelly and his now-wife, Nicole Kelly, would make regular weekend trips to camp in the Catskills, where he was reminded of his childhood in the woods of Connecticut.

"I realized pretty quick that the 18-year-old version of myself that made the decision on what to go to college for didn't know the 30-year-old version of myself very well," Kelly said. "So me and my now wife decided that we wanted to live somewhere where we could enjoy being outdoors, not a busy city environment."

That prompted the couple to move to Syracuse, N.Y., where Kelly enrolled in a masters program at the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry and went on to get his doctorate in forest resources management.

Around 2015, Kelly and his wife moved to Michigan, where he had found a job as a professor at Michigan Technological University in Houghton. There, he taught classes in forestry and did research for several years until he became aware that the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension was hiring a county forester.

Looking to be closer to his extended family in New England, and excited for a job that would involve spending an abundance of time in the woods, Kelly, his wife and their two kids, Sidney and Nyssa, moved to Keene in the summer of 2021.

As Cheshire County's forester, Kelly spends many days in the woods, meeting with landowners, surveying their land and making recommendations about how best to manage or utilize the natural resources there.

"Ultimately, any landowner is just a temporary steward of the land," Kelly said. "So thinking long term, we want to set these landowners up so they can make informed decisions about what to do with their forestland."

Most landowners in the state are small families or individuals who own anywhere from five to 10 acres of woodlands to upwards of 500 or more acres, Kelly said. With a variety of forest environments cloaking Cheshire County — from stands dominated by northern red oak and white pines to hemlock groves and northern hardwoods, like sugar maples, yellow birch and American beech, in the upland areas of Stoddard and Marlow — there is a lot for a landowner to parse.

That's where Kelly comes in: He'll discuss with landowners what sort of species of tree are on their land, the condition of the trees and the health of the forest, what kind of insects and invasive species are there and how they might be managed.

Different landowners have different objectives for their land. Some want to know whether there is a commercially viable timber harvest, while others are interested in how best to protect the forest for future generations, he said.

"A lot of these landowners I respect greatly for wanting to learn more about their forests," Kelly said. "So the fact that I'm getting a call from someone who is inviting me to their property, I respect that and I value that decision to reach out and want to learn more."

From explaining how to find an organization to partner with to establish a conservation easement on the land to discussing possibilities to create wildlife habitat or improve the forest conditions, Kelly provides expertise tailored to the landowners' interests.

"The landowners of Cheshire county are really fortunate to have Matt as a resource," Steven Roberge, the Extension's state forestry specialist, said. "He can take some pretty complicated subjects of forest ecology and carbon dynamics and really distill it down for a lot of these folks."

Roberge, who served as Cheshire County forester prior to Kelly, described him as well read and deeply knowledgeable about forestry. With his background in music, Kelly approaches problems in creative ways that many scientists might not consider, Roberge said.

Moreover, his sense of humor and easygoing nature make it easy for him to connect with landowners and he thoroughly enjoys the time spent walking their property with them, Roberge said.

Kelly also leads educational webinars and field workshops, guiding groups into the woods to teach them about identifying trees, forest ecology and climate change.

"I think the more people can appreciate nature, the more they're going to want to protect it and steward it," Kelly said. "The more you can get people to feel comfortable in the woods, get people to understand how ecosystems function and the integrated and intertwined role of trees and soil and lichen and wildlife and precipitation — all of that and how it affects these ecosystems — I think it is important because it establishes forests as something to be protected."

Though Cheshire County today is blanketed with forests, that wasn't always the case, Kelly said.

While Indigenous peoples, like the Abenaki, managed the region's woodlands for millennia, foraging and setting small fires to clear understory brush to improve hunting, European settlers in the 1800s cleared huge swaths of forest to make way for farmland.

"So the history of Cheshire County and New Hampshire, by and large, is one of human disturbance," Kelly said. "It's hard to imagine because as we look out now we just see a lot of mature forests, but we get on sites that clearly have been impacted from these old days of sheep farming, and you see the impacts it has."

During this era of livestock grazing, rock walls and open farmland dominated the landscape. Toward the end of the 19th century, the farming industry moved westward to more fertile lands, and the region's tree cover began to return, Kelly said.

Then, the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 battered Cheshire County and the surrounding regions, leveling the second-growth forests that had sprouted up on old farmlands and leaving dead trees scattered on the ground. About two years later, during a drought, one of the worst forest fires the county has ever witnessed set the timber that had been blown down in the hurricane ablaze, burning woodlands throughout Marlow and large tracks of Stoddard and Gilsum.

"Now we're getting more late successional forests, so hemlock-dominated forests, mixed forests with pines and hardwoods coming in under them," Kelly said. "A lot of our forests are in that 70-year-old to 100-year-old age class; so we don't have a lot of old growth and we don't have a lot of very young forests."

With invasive species and climate change, the region's woodlands continue to face threats today, Kelly said. Much of his work focuses on how to make forests more resilient to climate change, and he's also been involved with the Securing Northeast Forest Carbon Program, a cooperative effort between state forestry offices throughout the Northeast, that helps disseminate the most up-to-date knowledge on how carbon can be sequestered in forests.

(Human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, have raised the atmosphere's carbon dioxide content by more than 50 percent in less than 200 years, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The gas, which traps heat in the atmosphere, driving global warming and climate change, is removed from the atmosphere by trees and other plant life during photosynthesis and stored within the organism.)

"The best thing we can do for forest carbon is to keep forests as forests," Kelly said. "Make sure that they don't convert to development or to non-forest or development.

"And then the second best thing after that is we manage for healthy trees, have a mix of old forests that are good at storing carbon for long periods of time, have some young forests that are sequestering or removing carbon from the atmosphere at a rapid rate and then, if we are going to harvest, making sure we're getting the best quality wood, preferably durable, long-term products that will continue to store carbon — as furniture, as flooring, as housing materials — for many decades to come," he said.

Kelly noted that forests are an important part of the region's economy, not just for logging, but also for the leaf-peeping and tourism industries. He said if he can help a landowner on the path to being a more informed steward of the land or help them figure out an approach to managing invasive species, he's done his part to help protect Cheshire County's forests for generations to come.

"There's almost a humbling effect that forests have on me," Kelly said. "Both in terms of how magnificent some of these trees are, how beautiful they are, how long-lived they are — that when you are in the forest and surrounded by nature and wildlife it really gives you a sense of how valuable they are for many reasons — but also how fleeting we are in terms of our time scale relative to the forest.

"I'm always just awestricken by them," he said.

Ryan Spencer can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1412, or rspencer@keenesentinel.com. Follow him on Twitter @rspencerKS