KENAI NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Alaska (AP) – “Timber!”

Seven-year-old Zack Selinger scrambled to his feet as the white spruce he had felled with a hand saw tipped gently into his father’s arms.

“We should have brought a snowmachine,” he said, as his dad, Jeff, began hauling the family Christmas tree over the tussocks of a frozen swamp in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.

“That’s the easy way out, bud,” said Jeff, as the two tramped through the lightly falling snow. “We gotta do it the old-fashioned way.”

For most Americans, the old-fashioned way means picking out a well-manicured conifer at a country Christmas tree farm instead of a grocery store parking lot or big box store. But the Selingers live near one of a few wildlife refuges in the country that allow the cutting of wild evergreens at Christmas for free. Each year, they simply head into the forest.

In Maine, Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge integrates the harvest with a 150-350 acre clear-cutting program intended to stagger the ages of trees. Residents from nearby Calais, population 4,000, have come to the refuge for at least 25 years to comb the stands of indigenous balsam fir.

Managers say the annual harvests epitomize the refuges’ mission of dovetailing public land use with habitat preservation. Many of the nation’s 564 federal refuges also allow hunting, fishing and chopping trees for firewood.

The Kenai refuge is preserving a local family tradition that does little damage, if any, to the wild community of moose, bear and salmon streams, according to park ranger Candace Ward.

“You have an activity that not very many people are doing, so taking one tree is not a big deal,” said Ward who staffs the visitors center 150 miles south of Anchorage.

At least two refuges cut down the trees anyway as part of their forest management programs, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the refuges.

Two-day evergreen harvests held for the past five years in Minnesota’s Rydell National Wildlife Refuge are part of a program to raze 60,000 non-native spruce trees and bring back the original sugar maple and American basswood. Unlike spruce, the indigenous forest forms a protective canopy for neotropical birds migrating from Central and South America.

Refuge managers aim to rid the refuge of the last 25,000 Colorado Blue and Black Hill spruce trees, which homesteaders had planted to shield crops from the wind. Families took home 600 spruce this year, including some 25-footers, said refuge manager Dave Bennett.

“Ultimately, we could have done all of it ourselves, but this is a good way to partner with the public,” Bennett said.

In Maine, Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge integrates the harvest with a 150-350 acre clear-cutting program intended to stagger the ages of trees. Residents from nearby Calais, population 4,000, have come to the refuge for at least 25 years to comb the stands of indigenous balsam fir.

“We want a diverse age group of vegetation throughout the habitat to maximize it for various bird species,” said Robert Peyton, deputy refuge manager. The annual clear-cut benefits one of Moosehorn’s flagship species, the American woodcock, which prefers dense stands of early-growth forest.

Little Pend Oreille National Wildlife Refuge in Washington state distributes a limited number of permits for cutting Christmas trees. A local scout troop cuts about 200 fir and pine trees from overstocked stands each year, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

A Christmas tree or two for the hundreds of families who get trees from refuges “is not necessarily going to impact the habitat,” said Sean Cosgrove, national forest policy specialist for the Sierra Club. State parks and national forests also allow non-commercial Christmas tree cutting.

“We are big supporters of people getting their own trees,” Cosgrove said. “It’s just a good excuse to get out and enjoy the day.”

Each December, the Selingers select a tree from the same secret spot in Kenai and lug it almost a mile by sled up a steep embankment and down a wide track to their truck parked along Funny River Road. Snowmachines (the Alaskan term for snowmobiles) are not allowed in the refuge.

“Everything about Christmas is getting more and more commercialized, big expensive gifts and everything,” Jeff Selinger said. “This just kind of brings it back to earth a little bit.”

The full and flawless evergreen the Selingers towed out of the woods this year is not typical of a wild-cut Christmas tree. They tend to be asymmetrical and a bit scraggly, more akin to the scrawny tree in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” than to Rockefeller Center’s grand dame.

But, as Ward says, “Generally, people don’t need the perfect tree, as long as it looks nice on one side.”

AP-ES-12-19-06 1627EST