On FS land, the SA, forester, or whatever is required to give a copy of the report written up to the LEO (cop) ANY time undesignated timber is cut. Usually, it is cut because of safety and no SA up there at the time. If it was because of evil or stupidity, the contract calls for liquidated damages, the regular stumpage paid for plus another bill for it. And, the LEO is likely to go give a ticket to whoever cut the tree. It may require a court hearing, depending on how serious.
I had one, obvious case of timber theft. The faller took off to Canada, where he lived. I think we had to handle it all contractually because of that guy staying on his side of the border.
There are lots of mistakes made. Like one crew thought that blue paint meant leave trees when it was the opposite. They did the right thing when the bullbuck realized what was going on, they shut themselves down and came right into the office--all the cutters came in wearing their calks but the office was carpeted.
I came in and we sat down and did a write up and phoned all the parties that needed to know. It was complicated because the sale was a tree measurement sale so we had to go up and crawl through the fell and buck scaling timber. We went liquidated damages because it was still negligent, but no fines because the intent was not to steal anything. It was a helicopter unit so the timber was kind of jackstrawed and not easty to scale out.
I called in the cops, who I saw were about to drive by, when I was talking to a faller and he lost his temper because "The State does it that way!" That was one of the few times I feared getting punched in the nose. In fact, his boss quickly moved BEHIND me thinking that. Oh well. All worked out. My nose is intact. The faller cooled off and we handled it contractually.
