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Editor’s Note

By the time you read this, summer will have long ago become a fish story - just a memory in a Polaroid that was “this hot” (spread your arms apart) and went by “this fast.” Autumn’s color also seemed to pass quickly this year, which means that it’s somehow suddenly winter, the best and worst of seasons – an exhilarating hike through angel-feather snows juxtaposed with a depressing, dark commute to work that begins with you rubbing ice off the inside of your windshield with the meaty part of your palm.

If it’s safe to say that humans have a complicated relationship with winter, then the winter issue of Northern Woodlands is the right place to feature Madeline Bodin’s story on white-tailed deer – another one of our difficult loves. This species has brought out the best and worst in humankind, as evidenced by the fact that we hunted them to near extinction in the 1800s and then brought them back so successfully that these days many parts of the U.S. are being overrun.

Today, it’s common for forestry magazines with scientific bents to tell the whitetail’s story through statistics. There are an estimated 30 million deer in the United States; each fall about 6 million deer are killed by hunters; each spring another 12 million fawns are born (Did you think this was a set up? ‘Scientific bent’ is our genre!); about 1 million people will hit deer with cars this year; deer will consume about 15 million metric tons of vegetation; in the 13 northeastern states, deer will cause about $248 million in damage to agricultural crops and landscaping; and on, and on, and on.

It’s important to have some sort of statistical background, whether as a forestland owner struggling with regeneration, or as a naturalist struggling to reconcile emotional reactions with science-based management principles designed to encourage a balanced ecosystem. But the personal moments we share with these animals can render science meaningless. As Bodin points out with intentional vagueness in her piece, at the end of the day the right number of deer is the number that people are happy having around. We can make broad generalizations – northern Maine has too few deer, suburban Connecticut has too many – but the vast majority of our region falls somewhere in the gray, hazy middle. Management decisions in many places are becoming contentious, complicated affairs – birders advocating for more lethal control face hunters who don’t like to shoot does, and so forth. As hunter numbers decline and the region becomes more suburbanized, these management issues will only become more intense.

Too much contention and complication can be dangerous in this season of low light, and so we devoted the other features in this issue to good old-fashioned storytelling. In “Slolly, Sprinklers, and Mackinawed Men,” the late Dr. Edward Risley takes us back to the events of one winter’s day in 1912. Risley’s granddaughter, Adair Mulligan, submitted this piece of found writing to us and then bolstered it with her own annotations. This off-hand journal entry was written for no one but friends and family – certainly not for 15,000 readers in a regional magazine, and yet Risley’s polished prose shines. The whole thing nods to an older time when people wrote as easily as they ate or spoke. To those who admire language, it’s a piece to savor.

We find a nod to 21st century lumberjacks in Pat Hendrick’s beautifully photographed “School of Hard Knocks.” And in “Saving Herbie,” writer Scott Gibson takes us to a town in coastal Maine where the community rallied to give new life to what had been the largest elm in the Northeast. It’s easy to imagine other communities emulating this story – applying the noble virtues of human empathy and artistry to celebrate wood, wood products, and town spirit. It also begs the question: where’s the new king elm? If you know, drop us a line.

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