They say that, back before Europeans arrived in North America, the forest was so thick that a squirrel could have traveled from the Atlantic coast all the way to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground.
Even as an elementary school student, when I recall first hearing this tale, I knew it wasn’t literally true; surely there was a river or lake in there somewhere. But I took the story to heart anyway and for many years had a mental picture of the unbroken forest primeval that covered New England back when the world was young.
I wasn’t alone. Many people – adults and children alike – share this vision of what our native forests used to be like. Which is unfortunate, because it turns out that the vision is not true. The story of the mythical squirrel is both literally and metaphorically false – a misleading tale with profound implications for how we view forests and our place in them.
The mythical squirrel’s journey is based upon the otherwise sound idea of forest succession, in which shade-tolerant trees replace sun-loving trees as a forest matures from fields and openings into unbroken, old-growth timber. Forest succession is a cornerstone of forest ecology and a phenomenon easily observed during the past century as fields and pastures across New England have “reverted” to woods. The implication seems clear – leave the woods alone, and eventually the climax forest of old will grow back.
But what if the woods have never been left alone? Take the infamous Hurricane of 1938, which knocked down close to a billion trees in one September afternoon as it streaked up the Connecticut River valley. That was a “once-in-a-lifetime” storm, certainly, but that’s once in a human lifetime. Such storms occur with astonishing frequency if you happen to be a forest that’s nearly 10,000 years old.
Or take the ice storm of January 1998 that knocked out electricity to some half a million homes in New England and Quebec, and whose effects are still readily visible as ragged gaps on many forested ridgelines across our region – another once-in-a-lifetime event that has probably occurred hundreds of times since New England was most recently forested.
These “mega” events don’t begin to mention the garden-variety thunderstorms, tornadoes, micro-burst wind events, floods, and lightning-sparked wildfires that occur every year somewhere in our area. Not the kind of thing to level thousands of acres, certainly, but events nonetheless that would make it difficult for our mythical squirrel to keep his paws aloft.
And, of course, our squirrel would have had to contend with the many openings and disturbances created by Native Americans back before the first Europeans arrived. The Abenaki of Vermont and New Hampshire opened up sections of forest, often using fire, for many of the same reasons we still do today: to grow food, to make travel easier, and to benefit from the diversity of habitat that comes where forest and field meet.
But the clincher that ought to lay the “virgin forest” myth to rest is the archaeological and anthropological evidence that humans have lived in these woods since before the woods themselves were even here. The ancestors of the Abenaki were living and hunting game here at the end of the last ice age before the forest itself had started growing back. The idea of our forest primeval preceding human influence has no meaning.
Clearly, all the ice storms, hurricanes, wildfires, and human-set brush fires of the pre-colonial period never damaged and removed the forest in the way that the European colonists would within a few hundred years of their arrival. There were many more large, old trees in the past than there are today, and many more areas of “old growth” forest in which large trees were better represented. That mythical squirrel could have traveled some long miles using only the treetops. But there were clearings in the primeval forest, too, and openings and blowdowns and areas of young trees and saplings. Forest succession has always been at work in the woods of New England; this does not imply, however, that the forest of old ever “succeeded.”
Why does all this matter? Many, many people have a gut feeling that our forests should be treated in the way that nature originally intended. Propagating myths about the good old days – even myths as wonderous as that of the treetop squirrel – only makes it harder for us today to understand our forests and how they evolved. And that, in turn, makes it harder to reach common ground about the future of the forests and our place in them.