By DENNIS APRILL, Outdoor Perspective
Last fall, while hunting deer on a low-lying ridge about four miles from my home, I worked my way up an old skidder trail, partially grown in with raspberry canes and brush.
On each side of me was country most humans would consider an eyesore — 6-foot-high hardwood whippets, berry canes, old stumps — the remnants of land heavily logged 10 years ago.
Only patches of white pine and hemlock broke the cut-over landscape; yet, here I found a patchwork of deer tracks, some rabbit sign, and tracks and scat of moose. I had been told by a friend there were two moose in that area. I passed where a bull had rubbed its antlers high up on a striped maple a month earlier. In fact, striped maple and poplar were taking over the cut.
When I reached the top of the notch, I heard crashing nearby; I glanced ahead and looked up to see a cow moose about 30 yards in front of me; evidently, that moose saw the immediate area as a virtual smorgasbord of food. Ironically, a mile away there was a big chunk of "Forever Wild" state forest preserve land that had been state land for a long time, but the land there held trees too mature for the moose to browse on; the forest lacked the underbrush and offered no food source.
This scenario reflects a contradiction that has existed for at least a century in New York: Some people want huge tracts of wilderness with tremendous variety of wildlife, including moose and wolves, but fail to realize the two don't necessarily go hand in hand.
Here's why.
Dr. Ken Adams, environmental science professor at Plattsburgh State, makes it perfectly clear: "Animals that eat woody browse during all or part of the year will be most abundant in areas where trees are young, in the seedling and sapling stage of development. The leaves, buds, and twigs on seedlings are within reach of the mammals that eat these plant parts as a normal part of their diet. Healthy populations of hares, deer, and moose, for examples, are typically found in young growth forest stands."
There is a mistaken belief that when the first Europeans arrived in North America they found a vast primeval forest. Actually, in New England at least, the Pilgrims found a forest well-managed for wildlife by Native Americans. How did they do it? With fire. Native Americans burned areas so new growth would sprout, attracting wild animals that would provide them with food.
Native Americans were not the first environmentalists, but rather the world's best pragmatists. They didn't even call the land wilderness because it was their home; it was the Europeans who saw it as wilderness, for them a negative term, a place to be conquered and given order and property rights.
Somewhere along the way in the 1890s, things flip-flopped. Wilderness, to those Europeans' offspring, became a sanctuary, a place to escape from industrialization. These romantic ideas were picked up by John Muir, co-founder of the Sierra Club, and Bob Marshall, organizer of the Wilderness Society.
In 1894, the New York State Legislature passed the Forever Wild Statute, or Article 14 to the State Constitution, a good move at a time when exploration of the land was rampant; but is that concept still viable today?
It depends on what you are looking for. If you want totally untouched mature boreal and northern hardwood forest with less species of wildlife, that is what this type of forest has to offer. Wood thrushes and red squirrels do well there. However, if you want a greater opportunity to see moose, deer, wild turkeys and smaller animals and the predators that follow them, you need a succession-type forest with different age groups of trees. To achieve this, either fire or human disturbance is needed, and neither the natural thinner (fire) nor the human option (logging) are considered acceptable on Forever Wild land.
Some would argue that the fall mast crop produced by mature oaks and beech trees attracts a variety of wildlife, and they would be right. The only problem is that there are few oaks in the central Adirondacks, and mature beech are disappearing fast, the result of the devastating beech blight that has been in the mountains for decades.
A few parcels of state Forever Wild land are the exception, mainly because that land was purchased in recent years after heavy logging had taken place. Whitney Park is an example. It will take decades for that land, now classified as Wilderness, to grow to a mature forest. Today, the reality is that, despite editorials and other calls for change, what is now locked up in Forever Wild will stay there. It is in the future when decisions on land use will be made that affect wildlife.
In past columns, I have referenced Leonard Lee Rue III, a well-known wildlife photographer, strong environmentalist and highly respected author. I met Lenny when I was a 14-year-old Explorer Scout on a canoe trip in the Lac Landron area of northern Quebec where he worked as the head guide for Adventure Unlimited. We canoed hundreds of miles, and I came to understand his philosophy. Years later, in his classic book "The Deer of North America," he writes of the dichotomy that lovers of what he calls the "wild places" feel: "A major problem is that today many people have a reverence for trees that is not necessarily good for the forest or for wildlife." He concedes that there are potential abuses when a multi-use strategy is employed, but when done right, he concludes, "This means that the bulk of our forests should be thinned or cut off systematically, by sections, at a prescribed rate, for a sustained yield. When this is done, both wood and wildlife are renewable resources."
Ironically, that canoe trip took us through a vast uninhabited area that had been logged many years before, yet it was more wild than any part of the Adirondacks. No one called it "wilderness" back then; rather, we were "back in the bush."
E-mail Dennis Aprill at daprill2000@yahoo.com and check out our Web site at www.pressrepublican.com/0105_outdoor_perspective for more photos and past articles.
