Bicknell's Thrush and the Adirondack Park: Historical Context

Our pursuit of Bicknell's Thrush started with a three hour car trip from Cortland to the Adirondack Park. We traveled north on Rte 81 to Syracuse through U-shaped valleys carved out by glaciers, then headed east on the New York State Thruway across the plain created after the last ice age when ancient Lake Iroquois drained to leave behind modern Great Lake Ontario. We exited the Thruway at Rome, and took Rte 365 northeast to Rte. 28 on the last leg of our journey. Soon we started to see sandy soil and rolling hills dotted with glacial erratics, telltale signs that we were nearing the Adirondacks. Eventually the perfume of balsam fir in the air and frequent sightings of some of the more than 3,000 Adirondack lakes and ponds announced that we had reached our destination.

Despite the fact that the landscape was shouting "Adirondacks" at us, it was not easy to determine when we actually entered the park. The entrance was marked only by a surprisingly unobtrusive brown and yellow wooden sign that was visible through our car windows for perhaps 10 seconds. There was no kiosk, no stop sign, no entrance fee, no posted regulations, no map and no pamphlets. As we continued driving we saw stretches of road lined with homes and businesses alternating with stretches of road lined with forest. If we had missed the entrance sign, and it seems reasonable to assume that many travelers do, there was nothing to distinguish the landscape inside the park from the landscape outside the park.

About twenty minutes after we entered the park we reached the hamlet of Old Forge. Only a few people were in evidence along its five-mile-long stretch of restaurants, gift shops, and tourist attractions where, later in the summer, thousands visitors often bring traffic to a near standstill. On a previous visit to Old Forge we stopped at the parking lot of its biggest tourist attraction, the Enchanted Forest Water Safari theme park, and asked several patrons if they might tell us where the Adirondack Park was. They invariably told us they weren't sure where it was, even though they were many miles inside the Park's borders. Given that only one small sign out of the hundreds that lined Rte. 28 even mentioned the park it is not surprising that many visitors fail to recognize that they are actually inside the largest park in the contiguous U.S. Since Enchanted Forest was not yet open on this visit we did not repeat our experiment, but continued on to Long Lake and our appointment with Joan Collins, who conducts an annual survey of Bicknell's Thrush that is described in detail in Steve's earlier posts.

After a delightful dinner with Joan, and a somewhat less satisfactory night's sleep, we started out at 2:30AM for Blue Mountain by car. We arrived at the trailhead at 2:45 and started our hike almost immediately. There was no moon so we could see only the small area in front of us that was illuminated by our headlamps and flashlights. In our haste to reach the summit we hiked mostly in silence (except for my increasingly heavy breathing). When we stopped briefly to peel off some layers and catch our breath, I glanced at the pamphlet we had picked up at the trailhead. The first thing it described was the mixture of public and private land in the Adirondack Park, noting that the trail up Blue starts out in private land and ends on state land, but there was no mention as to where this occurred, and I wondered briefly if there would be any way to tell when this happened.

I soon forgot about looking for the dividing line between public and private land and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. In just under two hours we reached the summit. Joan quietly sat down with her legs tucked underneath her, spread her charts on the rocks in front of her, and clicked off her headlamp. Steve and I moved about 30 feet away and he quickly assembled his parabolic microphone and digital recorder. For the next twenty minutes Joan sat almost motionless, occasionally turning on her headlamp and leaning forward to make a brief note on her chart while Steve trained his microphone on the various birds that were vocalizing around us.

When her time was up Joan moved on to her next survey point and Steve moved around the summit tracking birds with his recording gear. Grateful for the chance to rest my leg muscles before we headed back down the mountain, I pulled my hat down around my ears to ward off the chill breeze and watched the sun rise over the cell tower that dominated the south side of the summit. The stark contrast between the cell tower and the surrounding spruce forest brought back to mind the public/private character of the Adirondack Park that the pamphlet now folded in my pocket had started me thinking about on our way up the mountain, and I continued thinking about the divided nature of the park as I looked down at the lights that dotted the shorelines of lakes off in the distance and the car headlights that followed the thin thread of highway that linked Raquette Lake and Blue Mountain Lake. When the sun hid behind the clouds that had rolled in just as we neared the summit, I sought shelter behind a large rock and thought about how this arrangement had come to pass.

The mixture of public and private lands found in the park has its origin in the natural history of the Adirondacks. The region's short growing season, nutrient poor and often poorly drained soil, and rugged terrain determined that Adirondack forests were not settled and cleared for agriculture as were those in much of the rest of New York. In the mid-1800's wood and timber products fueled the industrial revolution in the U.S. in much the same manner as petroleum fuels our modern economy, and loggers went to work in the Adirondack forests in earnest. The accelerated pace of logging in the Adirondacks brought about one of the first political coalitions devoted to protecting the environment. This coalition was a curious blend of early conservationists and downstate business interests who derived from George Perkin Marsh's influential 1864 book Man and Nature the idea that the destruction of the Adirondack Forests threatened the watershed upon which the Hudson River and the Erie Canal depended.

In 1872 this coalition realized their first victory when the New York Assembly appointed a commission to recommend actions for protecting the Adirondacks. In 1885 the State Legislature created the Adirondack Forest Preserve, which consisted mainly of scattered parcels of logged-over land previously acquired through non-payment of taxes totaling about 681,000 acres. Although the enabling legislation for the Adirondack Forest Preserve stated that it would "be forever kept as wild forest lands" conservationists kept pushing for stronger protection, and in 1892 the legislature drew a blue line around the scattered Adirondack Forest Preserve holdings and declared that "all lands now owned or hereafter acquired by the state" within specified Adirondack counties and towns "shall constitute the Adirondack Park." The Park's creators left the difficult task of deciding how to deal with the private land that fell within the Park's boundaries, and the people who were living on that land, to future politicians.

As we started back down the mountain I concluded that we were fortunate to have ended up with the Adirondack Park's large-scale marriage of public and private land. Steve's post on the likely extinction of Bicknell's Thrush illustrates the enormous threats facing nature today. It is obvious that nowhere in the world will we be able to protect natural ecosystems solely by using what E. O. Wilson (in his 1992 classic The Diversity of Life) called the "bunker" approach of placing large areas of land in public ownership. Instead, we will need to create parks and preserves that combine public and private land, and the Adirondack Park provides us with abundant examples of things that have worked, and things that haven't, to learn from as we strive to create parks that are up to the challenges facing nature in the modern world.

One of the difficulties of creating parks that marry public and private land is that the contest between nature and private enterprise is so heavily weighted in favor of the latter. Joan is usually alone when she hikes up Adirondack peaks in pursuit of Bicknell's Thrush and often finds herself singing loudly as she hikes to "keep the bears away." It is safe to say that, if the payoff for the hike were a thousand dollars rather than a few glimpses of an endangered bird, she'd have a lot more company. But surveys confirm what Joan's lonely hikes suggest: love of nature is a widely, but not deeply, held value for most individuals. As a result environmental interests are at a distinct disadvantage compared to economic interests when they must settle their differences in the arena of democratic politics. The Adirondack Park's "Forever Wild" clause and its land use plan help to balance these interests, and we plan to explore both in future posts.