Bob Leverett with his laser rangefinder

NORTH SYRACUSE, New York—Deep in shadowy woods, Bob Leverett slowly circles his prey. With great care, he raises his laser-aided viewfinder. He aims! He fires!

Then he whips out a calculator and punches in a few numbers. "One-hundred-three-point-five," he announces. "It's a noble tree. A red maple over 100 feet is very nice."

National Champion Quaking Aspen Kootenai National Forest, Troy Montana
height: 144 feet — girth: 8 feet crown spread: 9 feet

Leverett's quarry is not animal, but vegetable. Leverett is a big-tree hunter, one of the keenest in the country. He and dozens of other devoted—some say crazy—enthusiasts spend nearly all their spare time tracking down and measuring the USA's biggest, oldest and tallest trees.

Recently, tree hunting has gone hi-tech. Using laser technology, tree hunters are now taking measurements accurate to within a few inches. Old methods, by contrast, often missed the mark by a yard or more. Already the new technologies are causing a gentle uproar in the tree-hunting community, toppling old champions and spurring accusations of fictional trees.

Tree hunting is not so much a hobby as an obsession. Big-tree hunters have bumper stickers reading, "So many species, so little time." They have their own bad puns. (Q: What kind of math is used to measure trees? A: Twigonometry.) They stuff their photo album with pictures of fabulous arboreal specimens rather than snapshots of relatives.

Why would anyone spend the weekend bushwhacking through thick woods, looking for that perfect white pine? Part of the motivation is the fame, of sorts, that comes from finding a champion tree. The National Register of Big Trees and the many state big-tree registries list not only dimensions of the biggest and tallest trees of various species, but also the finder's name.

Tree hunters also have the satisfaction of knowing that their work may one day be useful to science. The biggest trees' DNA may hold clues to how they grow to such gargantuan size—knowledge that would interest timber companies as well as dendrologists, the scientists who study trees. The big trees also provide a rare window into past genetic diversity, before axes swung in America's primeval forests.

But the real reason tree hunters spend hours in the forest is because they love trees. Tree nuts say that recording the statistics of a giant white oak is a way of expressing affection, just as writing a sonnet would be. "I'll measure the same tree a dozen times," Leverett says. "It isn't that I don't know what the measurements are. Measuring them is a way of communing with them."

If so, Leverett is one of the best communers around. He owns a $350 laser range-finder, which measures the distance between the viewer's eye and the target at which it's aimed, and three $90 clinometers, which calculate the angle between the horizontal and any spot the viewer chooses. Using data from these instruments and high school math, Leverett can calculate the height of even the tallest tree to the inch.

But few people besides Leverett have invested in the technology. And that has made Leverett and a few others something like the Supreme Court justices for trees: the final arbiters of how large a tree really is.

Leverett journeyed from his home in central Massachusetts to North Syracuse in upstate New York, for example, to size up some trees that local enthusiasts had estimated to be state champions. By Leverett's calculations, they weren't. "Not that any lives are at stake, but we just have to be accurate," he says.

National Champion Yellow Birch Gould City, Michigan
height: 101 feet — girth: 16.5 feet crown spread: 105 feet

The New Yorkers accepted the defeat of their trees gracefully. But not everyone does. People in Michigan and Virginia "appear to be making up trees," says Will Blozan, a tree hunter from Black Mountain, N.C. "There are trees that are misidentified, and they know it. Leverett says that he has detected some "bogus trees" in registeries, trees so outrageously large that even the most incompetent tree hunter could not have come up with such a number by mistake.

But the competition and the mistakes are not stopping enthusiasts from stalking through the woods. Greater trees, and greater glory, await them, they are sure. "There's always a larger one somewhere," says Robert Van Pelt, a forest ecologist at the University of Washington and an avid tree hunter. "The biggest trees are not on the list. They're yet to be discovered."

Bob Leverett sights a big tree with his clinometer

When a ruler isn't enough

Tree hunters combine simple math and sophisticated instruments to measure tree height accurately. The method doesn't work for crooked trees, or trees on uneven ground.

The sum is the height of the tree.

Diagram: [deleted]

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Champion Trees and Ancient Forests — www.championtrees.org — updated: 5/1/2003