For
close to half a century, a forest in central Pennsylvania’s Perry County — about 5 square miles of mature hardwoods — has been a sanctuary; a place free from hunting, trapping and logging; where the natural world can remain “free as far as possible from molestation,” where visitors can “be enlightened and educated…”
The quotations are from the will of Florence Waring Erdman, of Philadelphia. Most of her estate went to protect the forest as a memorial to her mother, Florence Jones Reineman.
And the Reineman preserve has surely provided an education, visited frequently by students from nearby Dickinson College in Carlisle. But its lessons, still evolving, are nothing Erdman imagined.
Ash Nichols, a literature professor, has come on a brisk November afternoon to walk the woods with his nature-writing class. Their text: Aldo Leopold’s classic 1940s essay, “Thinking Like A Mountain,” one of the earliest popular expressions of ecological thought, is still pertinent.
The essay opens with the howl of a wolf, “a deep, chesty bawl that.…rolls down the mountain…every living thing pays heed…” but only the mountain, Leopold wrote, “has lived long enough to listen objectively.”
Most hunters of his era, including a younger Leopold, assumed fewer wolves meant more deer, and exterminating wolves “would mean hunters paradise.”
But he came to realize that “just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.” As a forest scientist, Leopold was seeing “newly wolfless mountains…every edible bush and seedling browsed to death…as if someone had given God a new pruning shears and forbidden him all other exercise.”
Professor Nichols does not have to do much teaching today. The woods at Reineman speak eloquently. Their wolves, as in all Eastern forests, are long gone; and deer hunters — our best, poor substitute for top predators — have been kept out of Reineman’s 3,400 acres for many decades.
“Thousands of acres and not a single sapling coming up here,” said Gene Wingert, a Dickinson biologist. Deer browse them to the ground as fast as they come up.
As far as the eye can see — and you can see a long ways through this forest — there’s no shrubby understory, no midstory of younger trees. For miles it’s a savannah, invasive Asian stiltgrass flowing up the hillsides beneath 70-year-old hardwoods, themselves browsed of limbs as high up as a deer can stretch.
Only in a few “exclosures,” areas about 85 feet square that have been fenced from deer by Dickinson botanist Carol Loeffler, does anything close to a natural forest grow. One tiny exclosure is chockablock with oak, hickory, tulip poplar, maple, birch, black gum and other species. “If we took the fence (erected in 1992) down, only a couple bigger tulip poplars would survive,” Wingert said.
The herds of white-tailed deer that populate Penns Woods were nearly extinct, maybe 5,000 statewide, in the early 1900s. Deforestation, extermination of predators and year-round market hunting were the reasons.
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