The sale I'm cutting now was marked OK in some units but not others. They hire summer students from the university to mark, so lots of experience at nothing at all.
We have some kind of disease coming through and killing a lot of the maple. They die from the top down, well these student markers must have stiff necks. They never tip their heads back enough to see higher than twenty feet. May times there will be a ten or twelve inch slick hard maple marked right next to a withering one or a thirty foot stob which isn't marked. The residual stand isn't nearly as good as it could be.
Oh well, I gave up on arguing. Its their timber. Cut the paint and shut your mouth. I'm not university educated so how could I possibly do a decent job.
We have some disease that sounds similar. As a former marker, I'll tell you that nobody can production mark a unit and please everybody. Also, if that maple thing is the same as out here, and they marked the area a year or two ahead of you, there's no way they could tell it was infected with whatever it is. I've got a dead maple that looked very healthy last year.
Marking is the introduction to forestry job. Now, it might help if you loggers suggest to the person in charge of the district that it might be nice for the markers to take a day and wander a unit with you. We can't all be faller gods
and if nobody talks to the crew or shows them what is going on, they'll continue to do the same thing.
Also, there usually are no "university educated" folks out marking timber on crews, unless they are liberal arts grads who can't find another job.
Most folks I've worked with marking are locals or just folks who want to work in the woods.
I spent a morning "training" some fallers so they could mark. They did an excellent job. Excellent.