The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature by DavidGeorge Haskell Read Free Book Online

claim that the recent growth of the deer population is a continentwide catastrophe. Equivalent, perhaps, to throwing corn into a winter rumen; the community is thrown into an unnatural disequilibrium. The case against the deer seems unassailable. Deer numbers are growing. Plant populations are in decline. Shrub-nesting birds cannot find nest sites. Tick-borne diseases lurk on suburban lawns. We have eliminated predators, first Native Americans, then wolves, then modern hunters, whose numbers dwindle each year. Our fields and towns have cut the forest into ribbons and rags, creating the edge habitat in which deer love to feed. We have carefully nurtured deer populations with game-protection laws that time the hunting season to have the smallest possible effect on the deer population. Surely the forest’s viability is endangered?
    Perhaps, but a longer view adds some mists of uncertainty to this black-and-white portrait of the role of deer in the eastern forests. Our cultural and scientific memories of what a “normal” forest should look like arose at a peculiar moment in history, a moment when deer, for the first time in millennia, had been extirpated from the forest. Large-scale commercial hunting in the late nineteenth century edged the deer population toward extinction. Deer were eliminated from most of Tennessee, including from this mandala. No deer visited the mandala between 1900 and the 1950s. Then, releases of deer transplanted from elsewhere, combined with elimination of bobcats and feral dogs, gradually pushed the population of deer upward until the 1980s, when deer were once again abundant. A similar pattern was replicated across the eastern forest.
    This history distorts our scientific understanding of the forest.Most of the scientific studies of eastern North American forest ecology in the twentieth century were conducted in an abnormally unbrowsed forest. This is especially true of the older studies that we use as a benchmark to measure ecological change. The benchmark is misleading: at no other time in the history of these forests have ruminants and other large herbivores been absent. Our memory, therefore, recalls an abnormal forest, limping along without its large herbivores.
    Disquieting possibilities grow out of this history. Wildflowers and shrub-nesting warblers may be experiencing the end of an unusual era of ease. “Overbrowsing” by deer may be returning the forest to its more usual sparse, open condition. The surviving diaries and letters of early European settlers lend some support to these ideas. Thomas Harriot wrote from Virginia in 1580 that “of… deare, in some places there are great store”; Thomas Ashe reports in 1682 that “there is such infinite herds, that the whole country seems but one continued park”; Baron de La Hanton continues this theme in 1687: “I cannot express what quantities of deer and turkeys are to be found in these woods.”
    The writings of these European colonists are suggestive but hardly definitive. Their letters may be biased by boosterism for the colonists’ project, and they were entering a continent whose human occupants, most of whom were hunters, had just been decimated by disease and genocide. But the stories of genocide survivors and the archaeological evidence left by their ancestors suggests that deer were abundant even before the Europeans arrived. Native Americans cleared and burned forests to encourage the growth of young vegetation that, in turn, fired the deer’s fecundity. Deer meat and hides made human life possible in the winter, and deer spirits danced through the mythology of these first human inhabitants of the Americas. Historical and archaeological information therefore all points to the same conclusion: deer were plentiful inhabitants of our forests before guns removed them in the 1800s. The deerless forests of the early and middle 1900s were aberrations.
    The case against our modern deer phobia deepens when we lookback beyond the