It’s the spruce top cutter vs. the game warden in a ‘head-butting battle’ in North Woods

BABBITT, MINN. — They met in the woods behind a substation, the game warden and the tree-top cutter, old adversaries confronting each other once again.

The warden was checking on a call from Minnesota Power about a trespasser. He followed a fresh set of tire tracks into a black-spruce swamp until he found a parked ATV that he had seen before, painted black with parts of its original red showing through. Next to it were all the familiar signs: empty bottles of Hawaiian Punch, food wrappers, cigarette butts and twine. A little deeper into the woods, Anthony Bermel saw them.

Stacked bundles of cut-off tops of young spruce trees, about 3 feet long.

“You’re back at it again?” Bermel asked the man standing by the ATV.

Blake Buschman indicated he was, according to Bermel’s report. It was late September 2021. Bermel asked Buschman how many spruce tops he’d already cut that year.

“A lot,” Buschman answered.

Demand peaks around this time of year for the tops of young spruce trees.

They make perfect Christmas greenery for planters and pots, adorned with ribbons and bows. They’re sold, stuffed into arrangements with birch bark and balsam, in garden stores, grocery stores, department stores and any other place that wants to cash in on a winter décor craze that shows up every 30 years or so.

Lately, demand has been high, perhaps the highest since the first recorded spruce top rush in the 1930s.

If it was cut in the United States, it almost certainly came from northern Minnesota, one of the few places in the Lower 48 where black spruce grows.

Buschman, 37, of Babbitt, would very much like to carry on as one of the people who cuts spruce tops.

Bermel, a warden of the northern woods since 2012, would very much like him to stop doing it illegally.

Neither remembers exactly when they first ran into each other.

Buschman said he thinks it was about 10 years ago, when he first started topping spruce.

He needed to make money. When he found that spruce top buyers would come to nearby towns like Floodwood and Embarrass, he decided to give it a try.

“I just kind of went with it,” Buschman said. “I got better at it. It’s not a common thing.”

The season is short. It starts in early September, ideally after the first freeze so the tops will stay green and fresh. It ends in early November, when stores have typically stocked all the fresh spruce they’ll be able to sell through the holidays.

Buschman looks for areas where the spruce is mostly short, in the 9- to 15-foot range. He’ll snip off the top 2 to 3 feet. He’ll spend several hours or days in a good location, cutting and tying the tops into the bundles of 10 buyers prefer. Years ago, he would sometimes have help from his brother or friends. Mostly, he’s been on his own. In some seasons, he would use his black ATV — a three-wheeler — and a makeshift trailer with a bed-frame propped up as one of the sides to haul the tops from the woods. Other years, he goes by bicycle and on foot into the bogs and drags the tops out with a sled.

“I used to do it straight by the book,” he said. “Completely legitimate. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if I cut them in a legitimate place or not, he’s taking them from me. It’s become a head-butting battle, this Bermel character and me.”

Bermel said he’s frustrated, too, and that sometimes as fast as he can write a ticket, people are back cutting more. He likens it to any other kind of theft, but in this case people are stealing trees.

“It becomes a frustrating cycle, because it is lucrative enough for people to make thousands and thousands of dollars stealing these things, but the only real penalty they face when we catch them is losing the tops they cut,” Bermel said.

Anyone can legally cut spruce tops on private land so long as they have written permission from the owner. They need to show that permission to any buyer, who then has to record exactly where the tops came from, how many were cut and who cut them.

Topping spruce on county- or state-owned lands is trickier. The rights to cut the tops out of public forests are auctioned each year, and are typically awarded to larger operations that can afford down payments and offer the state or county a larger cut of the proceeds than Buschman said he can offer.

Anyone caught cutting tops on land without permission, or in public forests without winning the rights, can be charged with theft and trespassing. It’s treated like any other form of poaching. In those cases, the green contraband will be seized by game wardens, along with sleds, pole cutters or other tools used in the cutting.

Buschman admits he doesn’t always cut with permission. He once tried to win a public bid, but his offer was blown away in a silent auction by a Wisconsin company.

“They make it impossible to do unless you’re a big company,” he said. “But I have to eat, too. This is about the only money I get all year.”

Buschman can make several thousand dollars in the two-month season. When he started, he was selling tops to a handful of buyers for 70 cents apiece. As demand has gone up over the last decade, so has the price. He now sells them for $1.20.

Those buyers then mark the price up by a few dollars apiece when they supply the stores, which sell the spruce in decorative arrangements to the public, often for $60 or more.

Buschman’s first charge for wrongfully cutting spruce tops came in 2019.

A landowner called the sheriff’s office about a pile of the tops stacked on the side of road. The caller had seen Buschman getting dropped off there after dark two nights in a row, according to the incident report.

Bermel and another warden followed footprints in the snow through the private land into Bear Island State Forest. That’s where they met Buschman, walking back toward them with a black sled loaded with spruce tops.

Buschman admitted to cutting on state land without a permit, Bermel wrote. The warden seized about 500 tops and gave Buschman a $165 fine.

The next year, in September 2020, the state wanted to sell the rights to cut in Bear Island. Foresters went to the site before the auction and discovered someone had already cut it. Bermel went to Buschman’s house and found him pulling a trailer loaded with spruce tops.

He didn’t carry any proof that he had permission to cut the tops, Bermel wrote, and admitted that some came from the state forest.

The encounter was captured on video by a friend of Buschman, and the interaction between Bermel and Buschman was cordial.

“Hopefully,” the warden said, “I can find you doing it right sometime.”

“I’ve been trying,” Buschman answered. “I’ve been trying, man.”

Two months later, Bermel again found Buschman cutting tops on land without permission. Buschman had received permission to cut on adjacent land, but crossed into a neighbor’s property. Bermel seized 790 tops and charged him with misdemeanor theft.

Next season, in September 2021, Bermel got a call about a trespasser at Minnesota Power.

Confronted in the power company’s woods, Buschman said he had gotten permission through an email address he found on the company’s website. Buschman showed Bermel a picture on his phone of a hand-written note.

“Buschman paused when I asked him how he obtained a written permission slip from an email,” Bermel wrote.

Bermel called the company, which confirmed that nobody had give permission to cut spruce tops on its land. Bermel seized about 100 tops and charged Buschman with trespassing and misdemeanor theft.

A few weeks later, Minnesota Power called again. Buschman was back. He was given another trespassing charge. Bermel cited him twice more in 2022.

Buschman pleaded guilty to a handful of the charges between 2019 and 2022. Many were dropped or reduced to petty misdemeanors. He owes a few hundred dollars in fines and late fees.

Buschman estimates he’s had roughly $20,000 worth of tops seized from him over the years. “He’s been harassing me like this for 10 years now,” he said of Bermel. “He’s bird-dogging me. He just follows me around and waits until I get them ready, all loaded up on the trailer and then he swoops in and takes them. No work for him then.”

Buschman admits that he has taken tops without permission. But he said he’s frustrated because the wardens that seize the tops will turn around and sell them like he would have.

He’s asked many landowners for permission, he said. But most of the time they don’t know what he’s talking about. And, he said, taking the tops does no real damage to the trees.

“It’s pruning,” Buschman said.

Spruce trees are resilient and if the cut is done properly, the top will grow back in four or five years. Cutters have to be careful to leave about 70% of the foliage intact. They also have to make sure they are leaving a certain number of trees untouched in any stand, according to state foresters.

What happens to the seized spruce tops depends on where they came from, Bermel said.

If the tops were taken from private or county-owned land, wardens return them to the landowner like they would any stolen property, he said. Those landowners can sell the tops, or just discard them. If the tops were taken from state-owned land, the state will sell them for the best return it can get, he said.

Babbitt is a small town, said Julia Johnson, a friend and one-time spruce-cutting partner of Buschman.

“Every time Blake turns around and there’s Bermel,” she said. “It’s like white on rice, like hair on a gorilla, he is on Blake.”

“I’ve told Blake in the past, ‘No, he’s not picking on you,’” she said. “But now that it’s gotten to this point, it’s a little extreme. I mean 28 charges in a year or two? Come on.”

In 2023, Bermel cited Buschman for a total of 15 misdemeanor counts of trespassing, theft and cutting without a permit or permission after catching him with several thousand spruce tops in three separate incidents. That year Bermel also started citing him for littering, finding empty jugs of Hawaiian Punch, Coke cans, beer bottles and assorted trash at the cut sites.

Buschman said he was pulled over 20 times driving between Babbitt and Embarrass by police officers and sheriff’s deputies during the 2023 spruce season.

This season, Buschman was charged with five more counts, including a felony. In October, Babbitt police saw him riding a bicycle and pulling off on the north side of County Road 21. They knew a spruce bog was there, and Buschman’s history, so the officers called Bermel.

Bermel checked the site out, found fresh cuts, tools and trash. He came back the next day and found Buschman, cutting.

Foresters mapped the area and counted more than 5,000 spruce tops cut across 3.5 acres that included some private land and some public. Because the value of the tops was more than $1,000, Buschman’s theft charge rose to the level of a felony, Bermel said.

He pleaded not guilty.

On Monday, Buschman was fingerprinted at the St. Louis County Courthouse in Virginia, where he had a pretrial hearing and met his public defender. He wore black jeans and red suspenders and was with his grandmother, Bonnie Buschman, whom he’s lived with for a little over 20 years.

She’s still trying to make sense of the felony charge.

“He needs money too,” she said. “He’s a hard worker. He’s very helpful. He keeps our driveway shoveled, our lawn mowed. It’s hard work going out there when it’s cold and wet and raining.”

A pretrial hearing is set for Jan. 14.

Bermel said he hopes the more serious charge will deter illegal cutting.

“I’m going to continue to do my job and keep catching them, and what happens beyond that is out of my control,” he said.

He probably won’t see Buschman in the woods for a while. The season won’t start again until September.