Blow Down Natural History Part 2

Any visitor to a New England or Adirondack forest will note the pock-marked surface of the forest floor. The boils and depressions of the forest floor are grave markers where the past giants of the eastern forests once stood. Trees die of old age in the forest. They reach a point in their life where wood rots from within, insects and parasites rob the tree of energy, and even the stress of maintaining tissues on a giant tree decreases their vigor. Many trees fall on their own, but more often than not, they receive a nudge from occasional winds.

The winds of July 15, 1995 were anything but occasional. The blow delivered to the forest toppled healthy trees along with the diseased trees. The canopy of leaves acted like a sailboat spinnaker capturing the wind and bending to inflate. Yes, some trunks buckled, stretched and snapped. Roots cracked from the strain and where the wood held tough, the roots were pried from the sandy Adirondack soils. The legacy of the great blow was recorded in tree trunks laying in an easterly direction, shallow root profiles erected 90º from the horizon, and divots left where the roots once lay. Smaller sub canopy trees still stand and smaller saplings still dotted the forest floor.

Although the woods must have looked like a war zone, they remained healthy over the coming weeks, months and years after the mighty blow down. Leaves slowly died and fell to the forest floor. The greenness of the leaves represents the tree tissue of the highest nutrient content. Leaves are loaded with nitrogen rich photosynthetic pigments and proteins. Foliage also contains essential elemental nutrition of calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium. The leaves softly buffer the forest floor and protect it from excessive dryness and intense sunlight. The salamanders, wood beetles, bacteria, and fungi all profit from the added protection as the woodlands suddenly were more exposed to life outside of the forest. As the leaves decompose, the nutrients are quickly capture by bacteria and fungi and transferred to forms utilized by the saplings. The forest babes grow quickly with the added sunlight and flush of life supporting nutrients.

Wood takes longer to decay. Wood beetles assist by tunneling under the bark and through the wood. This activity introduces bacteria and fungal spores to the tree’s interior and channels oxygen rich air in to support the decomposition. Armed with the right stuff in terms of enzymes and metabolic machinery, the fungi dismantle the hardened lignin and cellulose of the tree. Wood Decomposition takes time. Over several years, the bark loosens, the wood softens and splits and fungal threads infiltrate deeper into the wood. The tree cadaver becomes a sponge and water is slowly wicked from the soil upward and held in place by the pits, cells, and capillary fractures in the wood. Wood is not the most nutrient rich tissue, but it does add vital elements of calcium and potassium to the soil as it decomposes. By now, the tender saplings have grown into vigorous adolescents and shade the trunk. New organisms colonize the exposed surface of the bark. Moss and fern spores, land and germinate on this optimal bed of wet organic matter. The fragile filaments of moss branch, take root, and begin their assault on the new territory. Without surprise, red-backed salamanders have found the understory beneath the tree trunk as an ideal place to find invertebrate food and to mate, lay eggs, and bring forth young. New tree life springs forth from the mossy surface. Hemlock and yellow birch have a crazy itch to grow only atop mossy logs, tree stumps, and rocks with thin moist soil. This unique behavior ultimately produces hemlocks and birches with stilted roots in the woodland.

Every bit of the dead tree provides life and new opportunities in the Adirondack woodland. The empty divot where the roots once laid creates an interesting microhabitat of shade and moisture. Herbaceous wildflowers and ferns may utilize the more protected facets of the wind throw. The newly excavated underground caverns provide dens for weasels, fox, and skunk. Black bears may use larger excavations for winter dens. Owls seek winter refuge in the hollows of tree snags from the giants that snapped leaving a partial trunk in place.

So, what if the state/NYS DEC elected to harvest wood from the 1995 blow down? What impact would the harvest have on the land? Clear cut practices have a definite detrimental impact on the future recovery of the forest. Clearing wood from the blow down is far from clear-cutting, but some of the land would be negatively affected. First, machinery used to drag, load, and process the wood will rake and aerate some soil. Tire ruts and truck paths will compact the soil in other areas. Both disturbances will negatively impact the soil flora and fauna. Higher aeration leads to more rapid decomposition and drying of the soil. Mycorrhizal fungi that worked diligently with the forest die, retreat, or hide as spores. Rapid decomposition floods the environment with nutrients faster than the remaining seeds and saplings can use. Some of the more soluble elements such as nitrogen and phosphorus may leach from the soil throughout the watershed. Without the mycorrhizal fungi and the elemental nutrition, a new forest will recover more slowly and less vigorously. Without a quick recovery of juvenile trees, the slash and remaining wood dry and fail to support the microcosm of invertebrates, moss, salamanders, and young birch/hemlock seedlings. Without a rapid recovery, the ecological impact is felt in local streams that choke with increased erosion and mineral enriched waters.

Over the period of hundreds and thousands of years, the impact of a single wood harvest would be negligible. The most destructive force in the Adirondacks during the past 25,000 years hasn’t been wood harvests. Glaciers after all scoured all terrestrial life from the Adirondacks. The greatest threat from blow down harvest is a recession of ecological recovery. If timber harvests were allowed very time a blow down occurs, then the great AMerican forest may loose species diversity, and its rugged aesthetic appeal. Harvesting wood without ecological thinking will diminish the natural process of recovery that our state constitution guarantees for the Adirondack wilderness.

Our camping excursion to Spruce Island in Lake Lila on September 17, 2008 placed Tom and I near the heart of the 1995 blow down. The island is about 400 meters in length and no more than 100 meters at its widest point. For the most part, the island contains vegetation representative of the surrounding forest. Red spruce and balsam fir dominated the narrow north end of the island with paper birch, white pine, and hemlock on the wider southern end. It is within the later area that the impact of the 1995 blow down was observed. Former trees with heights of 75 meters lay in an easterly direction with root mass upturned and facing westward. The trunks were in various stages of decay. The bark was intact on most of trees from the blow down, although it was loosened and could easily be broken or lifted from the trunk. Shards of paper birch from the blow down provide the ignition matrix for our evening fires.

It was easily to distinguish trees from the 1995 blow down from older falls. The island was full of decaying logs where moss had colonized the trunk surface and rain and wind had deteriorated exposed root masses. The older trunks laid at angles much different from those that fell in 1995. The island has numerous craters, divots, and pock-marks of various stages of weathering. Much of the forest floor looked as if artillery explosives had once battered the island. The abundance of fallen trunks and overhanging limbs made island exploration a gymnastic adventure. Magnificent white pine trunks were still solid enough to permit the combined mass of Pasquarello and Broyles. Our greatest fear from trekking across blow down timber was the potential to impale our body part from half broken limbs.

We were impressed with the destructive power of blow down winds. Not only had massive trees with thousands of pounds of biomass tumbled, but incredible root systems with hundreds of pounds of soil had been uplifted like the light end of a school yard teeter-totter. Any rock with roots wrapped around it had also been uplifted and reoriented. Some of the craters were nearly a meter deep although most were significantly less than 0.5 meters. Adirondack soils, after all, are sandy and thin.

The blow down trees created light gaps in the forest and several species of tree took advantage of the sudden increase in sunlight. Several root masses provided a suitable site for new paper birch seedlings to colonize and grow. Straight vigorous paper birch saplings burst forth from the vertically oriented root masses. Red maple had colonized another light gap, and fire cherry was quick to invade two other sites. The presence of fire cherry is interesting on Spruce Island. No other large fire cherries occurred here and there was no indication that it existed on the island before the blow down. These plants were most likely new recruits from the surrounding forest. Their seeds probably traveled by blue jay, hermit thrush, or grosbeak from the surrounding Lake Lila forest. After passage through the avian intestinal pathway, the seeds of this pioneer species landed in these new light gaps with intent to grow.

Fallen trees from the 1995 blow down were evident elsewhere in the Lake Lila Wilderness. In all but a few locations, the damage was well-hidden within the forest. Three-hundred year old yellow birch still stood tall in upland areas, and wind-shaped white pine lined the lake. On the north end of Lake Lila, two campsites (#4 & 5), free exploration of the surrounding woods was limited by large fallen trees and tangles of dead branches. ALthough I didn't observe these campsites before the 95 event, I can imagine that the effective area of these camp sites had significantly decreased. A small pennisula just south of camp sites 4 & 5 bore the most glaring woodland scar. Here a large notch had been carved out of the pine forest. The site was impenetrable with downed logs. Nevertheless, recovery was evident here as well as seedlings and saplings had begun their assault on the freshly contested terrain. Nature wields the pain or destruction and the cures of ecological recovery in the Adirondacks.

Doctors of Philosophy Camp at Lake Lila

One of the interesting episodes in the history of the Adirondacks took place at Follensby Pond in 1858. There Philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, Biologist Louis Agassiz and eight other artists and scholars participated in what has come to be known as the Philosopher's Camp. On it's 150th anniversary there is little on record about this event except for a few pages in some comprehensive histories of the region (see, for example, Frank Graham's 1978 book The Adirondack Park pp.20-22) and a lengthy poem by Emerson that can be found at: http://wildernessandwaterslides.blogspot.com/2008/10/adirondacs-this-poem-in-its-entirity.html

It might seem a tad self-inflated to call the recent camping trip Steve and I took to Lake Lila a modern-day version of the Philosophers Camp, but both of us have Ph. D's and that at least allows us to claim a similar title for our experience. We did not dissect any animals as they did at the original Philosopher's Camp (although Steve did sacrifice some mushrooms to make "sporecasts"), and we did not hunt, fish, or shoot at targets with rifles as they did. We drank our "foaming ale" from not from "hunter's pans" but from plastic cups, and at times our laughter "echoed through the woods" as theirs did 150 years earlier. We ate processed food we brought with us in a smooth plastic anti-bear canister rather than feasting on "wild game and fresh baked bread." When we weren't pumping our drinking water through a micro-filter, gathering "dead and down" firewood to get us through chilly nights and mornings when temperatures dipped into the 30's, washing our dishes and ourselves with biodegradable "camp soap" made from hemp oil, or taking care of other camp chores, we explored Lake Lila in the same manner that the Philosophers explored Follensby Pond, by canoe and on foot. After two days we returned to soft beds and "the fires of home" and were greeted by news of collapsing financial markets that history may someday judge as significant as the laying of the Trans-Atlantic cable.

At about the midpoint of our stay we began to focus our explorations and discussions on two questions: What makes camping at Lake Lila special, and what circumstances and policies make or help keep it that way? One of the first things we noticed about Lake Lila was how quiet it was. So quiet, in fact, that during our stay we noticed at times that our ears "ringing" in response to the lack of background noise. Much of that quiet is due to the fact that motorized boats and vehicles, generators, and chainsaws are prohibited. The nights were clear, and that made us aware of the fact that there is almost no light pollution, which made the night sky a much more crowded and interesting place then the night sky in Cortland (it actually made some of the familiar objects we looked for to help us find our way around the night sky unfamiliar). Isolation from other campers contributed to the quiet and our sense of solitude. A quick check of the register at the parking area revealed that there were probably fewer than 30 other campers occupying the 1400 acre lake and shoreline during our stay, and the only other voices we heard aside from our own were from two or three boats that passed by during the 48 hours we spent at our island campsite.

Another special things about Lake Lila were water that is probably clean enough to drink without filtering if it weren't for the omnipresent backwoods threat of Giardia contamination. We saw no litter on land or water except for a few small scraps right near our campsite and a helium-filled mylar balloon that had blown in from somewhere (Ohio? Michigan? California? China?). With the exception of a two foot tall box privy DEC had placed near our campsite and the railroad tracks we crossed over on our hike to the summit of Mt. Frederica, no man-made structure was visible anywhere on the lake, and Steve noted the welcome absence of invasive species such as purple loosestrife and zebra mussels.

We decided that the spacing of the campsites was one of the things that made our experience at Lake Lila special. With three exceptions, the twenty-four designated shoreline and island campsites are strategically placed to minimize contact with each other. The most desirable campsites (and we concluded this was probably somewhat a matter of personal preference) regularly become available to newly arriving campers due to a regulation that limits stays at a specific campsite to three days unless prior permission for a longer stay is granted by a forest ranger assigned to the area. A provision that allows camping anywhere in the area outside of 150 feet of lakes, ponds, streams, trails, or roads insures that no one will spend a lot of effort only to be completely denied the experience of camping at Lake Lila, and the fact that there is no fee means people are less likely to feel cheated if they must camp at one of the less-desirable sites. Lake Lila's location near the center of the park, far from the popular tourist and commercial centers such as Old Forge, Lake George, Lake Placid/Saranac Lake, and Tupper Lake that dot it's edges keeps visitors down, which contributes to the sense of isolation and solitude. It also means that people who wish to camp must plan there visit carefully since there are no stores, restaurants or motels nearby, and we concluded that such people are likely to be better neighbors when it comes to camping in a natural setting.

Despite the its isolation, Lake Lila provides a relatively safe and comfortable camping experience from July through October. The lake can be choppy, but it is relatively narrow and the water is warm if the waves cause paddlers to tip. The Adirondacks are generally free of dangerous flora and fauna (especially compared to, say, tropical rain forest). There are no poisonous plants or snakes. There are no grizzly bears, only relatively unaggressive and (thanks to Lake Lila's widely spaced campsites and generally well-equipped and well-educated campers that frequent them) wary of humans black bears. The largest predator in the Adirondacks is the coyote, and we know of no instance of coyotes attacking humans.

On the other hand, the often early onset of harsh winter weather and Lake Lila's cool and buggy (e.g. black flies) springs keeps most campers away for seven months, and this reduces human impact on the ecosystem. So does the fact that it takes 1/2 an hour to cover the last 8 miles of bumpy dirt road to the parking lot, after which campers face a 1/3 mile portage for boats or a 3 mile hike. This makes most campers reasonable well-equipped, educated (e.g. about bears, camp soap, burning only dead and down wood, etc.), and respectful of others' camping experience, although the physical demands of camping at Lake Lila are not such that only a tiny percentage of people may reasonably participate.

In some ways, Lake Lila has changed considerably since I last camped there in the mid 1990's. Where before it was a thin strip of state-owned land surrounded by large tracts of private forest products land, it is now part of a large new wilderness area in the Adirondack Forest Preserve that was created in March 2000 by the purchase of 15,000 acres of land from the Whitney family using money from the Environmental Protection Fund and the Clean Water/Clean Air Bond Act (need links). The William C. Whitney Wilderness that resulted form this purchase embodies a pragmatic view of nature in several important respects.

The William C. Whitney Map and Guide published by DEC states that the "former road system of the Whitney purchase is quickly being overtaken by vegetation (and gradually taking on) the character of a wilderness." At the same time, a well-maintained combination of a paved and dirt road provides relatively easy travel to designated parking areas, which greatly increases access to the interior of the wilderness. A road around the north edge of Lake Lila is closed to motor vehicles and bicycles, but owners of private land bordering the wilderness retain a legal right to use the road. Other roads at the headquarters area of the wilderness are closed to public motor vehicle use but open to "people with mobility impairments who utilize mechanized aids (i.e., non-motorized or motorized wheelchairs or other similar devices), and there is a privately-owned inholding of several hundred acres adjacent to the headquarters. Finally, the Remsen-Lake Placid Travel Corridor, which allows public use of snowmobiles and ATV's borders the wilderness on the west, but riders and their machines are not legally allowed into the wilderness itself.

In the end, it may be that Lake Lila provides an outstanding camping experience to those who for whom outstanding camping requires a healthy dose of nature because its design and regulation allow it to function as a "public good" whose use in this context by one does not significantly diminish its use by others. At the same time, it is accessible to a relatively wide range of individuals who are seeking a natural camping experience. This arrangement is appropriate given that it is collectively-owned by the citizens of the State of New York.

Since we got home we've begun to explore the idea that Lake Lila "works" because it is rooted in a pragmatic concept of nature. As Louis Menand explains in his 2001 book The Metaphysical Club for a pragmatist ideas are "tools people devise to cope with the world", and ideas work best when they are adaptable. this means, Menand tells us, that ideas "should never become ideologies -either justifying the status quo or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it." In a sense the entire Adirondack Park embodies a pragmatic concept of nature that is adaptable enough to balance the diverse and sometimes competing values (spiritual, recreational, ecological, utilitarian) that humans impose on the landscape. Lake Lila illustrates on how this concept can work to protect nature on a smaller scale. This is, in turn, provides a model for our research and writing about the Adirondack Park where we seek to examine various aspects of the park with an eye toward devising tools that can help us protect nature in our industrialized, mass-society, world.

Back to School in the Adirondacks

As children across New York State return to school this week, Steve and I return to writing our Wilderness and Waterslides blog after a brief hiatus. A few thousand of those children live in the Adirondack Park, and the schools they are returning to are funded in part by taxes New York State pays to local governments on the Adirondack Forest Preserve. A closer look at one of those communities shows why this practice is essential to maintaining the Park's marriage of public and private land.

Many towns and counties in the Adirondack Park contain a large percentage of state-owned land. Approximately 80% of the land in Hamilton County, for example, is owned by New York State. Until recently, the Hamilton County town of Raquette Lake operated a two-room public school for children in grades K-6. But declining enrollments made that arrangement impractical, and now the three elementary students who live in Raquette Lake must make a 45 minute journey each way to attend school in Indian Lake. The taxes New York pays on Forest Preserve lands allows Raquette Lake to pay for transportation and tuition for those students. It also allows the town and county to maintain the roads the children travel on, and the Raquette Lake School to stay open as a community meeting place. Throughout the Adirondack Park roads, schools, bridges, and public safety are supported by local taxes paid on state lands that require very few services in return. This makes it possible for permanent residents of the park to maintain viable communities under circumstances where this might otherwise be impossible.

Recently the arrangement has been threatened by the November of 2007 decision of acting state Supreme Court Justice Timothy Walker, who found the mix of payments and examptions made by New York on various types of state-owned land to be arbitrary and unfair, and ordered payments to municipalities stopped. Walker then stayed his own decision pending review by higher courts, but his action prompted Assembleywoman Theresa Sayward and State Senator Betty Little, both of whom represent Adirondack districts, to propose a moratorium on purchases of state land until the case is resolved. Senator Little argued that "enough is enough" suggesting that future state land acquisition would interfere with necessary development in the park. Environmental groups such as the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks argued against the proposed moratorium as "counter to the best interests of Adirondack and Catskill residents" since "if the State cannot compete to acquire important lands coming on the market in near future, those very lands could be enrolled under the forest tax law by private landowners, who then receive an 80% tax exemption, thus forcing other landowners to be taxed more to be able to maintain local services."


As the events above illustrate, decisions about environmental policy are often made in the political arena where competing values interact in complicated ways. This sometimes leads environmentalists to yearn for a decision-making process that circumvents the messier aspects of democracy. In 1990 environmentalists thought they had such an opportunity when Mario Cuomo put together his Commission on the Adirondack Park in the Twenty-First Century. But the result was policy gridlock and political rancor on a scale unprecendented in the often-turbulent history of the Adirondack Park. If we wish to use the Adirondack Park as one of the world's oldest and largest experiments in marrying public and private land and derive policy lessons for those who would use such arrangements to protect nature in the modern world, we must examine its failures along with its successes. In future posts we will examine the failure of the Commission on the Adirondack Park in the Twenty-first Century with that in mind. Meanwhile we await a decision on Walker's ruling by the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court later this fall.

Blow Downs are Natural Disturbances--Part I

Disturbance is a natural force, and blow downs are part of nature. This is my view and I stand by it.

Disturbances have value and importance in the Adirondack forest. They may be as innocuous as a bear footprint on a decaying log or a winter frost heave on exposed soil. Disturbances may also be as grand as a hundred year flood on a river plain, a fire that burns of days, or the blow down of July 15, 1995. Nature is full of disturbance. In the short term, the disturbance may radically change the ecosystem. For the frost heave, the soil becomes freshly aerated changing the composition of soil bacteria, thin hyphal filaments of fungi shredded, winter hibernacula of insects and amphibians destroyed. The Adirondack blow down opens the forest soil to more sunlight, air flow, and dryer air that affect the birds, amphibians, ferns, insects and microbes. In the long term, nature recovers and the disturbance no matter how grand or how small disappears to the forest.

There are three elements of disturbance that are important. First, the type of disturbance sets in place a series of immediate imprints and changes. For example, a fire removes ground vegetation, recycles nutrients, and reduces competition for survivors. A flood on the other hand, inundates the soil and kills seeds, animals, and microbes than can’t survive anoxic conditions. The flood may also deliver a different slate of organisms adapted to periodic soil saturation.

The frequency and magnitude of the disturbance are important features that drive the evolution of adaptive traits in organisms. Seasonal floods are frequent and predictable disturbances along some rivers. Thus, if you were to visit a river basin in the lower Mississippi valley or southeastern Atlantic coast in December, you might find a flat dry bed of crusty soil in a bald cypress water tupelo forest. Return to the exact same spot the following April and you might be ten feet underwater. Seasonal flooding selects for tree species whose seed bank remains alive, germinate, growth and reproduction under the influence of disturbance. In this case it is bald cypress and water tupelo that survive and selection works against sugar maple and American beech.

The magnitude or size of the disturbance is a final feature of the disturbance that determines the community response. Fires can be so intense, hot and devastating that nothing survives. Fires may also appear as minor, albeit important, occurrences that burn small areas of ground cover. It is important to note that magnitude is not determined by the physical size of the affected area, but more the scale of the impact within an area. In a similar way, meteorologists use the Fujita Scale to measure the magnitude of a tornado in a give area and not the distance traveled by the storm.

Why are these features important? The biological response and recovery time to pre-disturbance conditions is determined the type, frequency, and magnitude of the disturbance. Biological organisms and communities adapt to disturbances of predictable nature, rate of occurrence, and size of impact. Many pine forests in the southeastern and western United States are adapted to periodic (on the level of decades), low magnitude fires. The ponderosa pine retains its seeds in closed cones for many years until heat from a fire break the seal on the hard cones and allows the seeds to fall on fresh mineral rich soil days after the area cools. Long leaf pine saplings grow slowly at first. The young growing tissues are insulated from low magnitude fires by a dense covering of green needles. Pitch pine and California Redwoods grow a thick protective bark and self-prune lower branches to protect the canopy from fires that frequently race through their communities. Just like bottomland forests of the lower Mississippi valley have adapted to seasonal floods, many pine lands are adapted for periodic, low intensity, fires. The community does not radically change follow these forms of disturbance.

To humans the blow down of July must seem like a massive, unpredictable, once-in-a-lifetime disturbance. Certainly we don’t find organisms adapted to the intense winds experience from 4 to 6 A.M. that day. Trees fell and roots were turned upright. Animal nest and dens were destroyed. The interior of the forest was opened to strongest sunlight, wind and dryness that the soil has experienced in several hundred years. Our concern, sadness, and pain over such a “disaster” elicit emotional and perhaps irrational responses. Do we promptly harvest the wood and plant seedlings to start the process of recovery? Do we harvest the wood to reduce the threat of fire on human settlements? We want to help, but should we? And, would our actions help or hinder the natural process of recovery?

My next installments will discuss the pathway to recovery of the Adirondack forests following the 1995 blow down. I will also discuss if this disturbance was truly one of disastrous magnitude and as unpredictable as a short-lived human might believe.

Forever Wild and the Great Blowdown of '95: Part 1

Today marks the 13th anniversary of the "Great Adirondack Blowdown of 1995." My personal experience with the "Great Blowdown" started while I was sleeping soundly in the Staff House at SUNY Cortland's Huntington Outdoor Education Center, which is located on a peninsula on the roadless eastern shore of Raquette Lake that is accessible only by boat in the summer, and ice road during the winter. The Huntington Center was originally named Camp Pine Knot, and is justly famous for being the first of the Great Camps of the Adirondacks and the birthplace of William West Durant's "Adirondack Rustic" style of architecture. It was the last day of the "Adirondack Park Policies and Issues" course that I had co-taught for the past week with my colleague and friend, Bob Buerger, who was also sound asleep a few bunks away. The Staff House (also known as the Huntington Cabin) is a log cabin that was built by the camp's second owner Collis P. Huntington after he acquired the property from William West Durant in the late 1800's. The cabin is made of thick pine logs, and it still has its original glass windows without screens to preserve the architectural and historical integrity of the facility. The entrance to the cabin does have a screen door, however, so we left the inner door open when we went to bed to allow fresh air to circulate throughout the cabin since it was extremely hot and humid.

Somewhere around dawn the next morning the inner door of the Staff House slammed shut with surprising force. Bob and I sat up and looked groggily over at each other. We heard the sound of a storm raging outside. I concluded that wind from the storm had blown the door shut, and I assumed that Bob had reached the same conclusion since he quickly laid back down. I followed suit and, even though thunder was crashing and the wind was howling outside, I felt secure behind the the thick walls of our cabin and quickly fell back asleep.

A little later the Director of the Huntington Center at the time, Joe Pearson, opened the door to our cabin and called in "Are you okay?" Bob and I sat up again and looked at each other less groggily, but more quizzically, than we had earlier since the director rarely visited our cabin and never visited this early in the morning. The sun was shining brightly around our drawn curtains, and the wind was no longer howling outside, so his query made no sense to us. By then he had reached our room and, when he saw that we were obviously just waking up, he said something like, "Don't tell me you slept through all this?" Bob and I looked at each other sheepishly since, whatever "all this" was it was obvious we had indeed slept through it. Joe quickly filled us in. The storm had knocked down trees all over camp. Our students, who were sleeping in a wooden-frame building with open screen windows that faced directly into the path of the storm, had tried to signal us with their flashlights when trees began to fall all around them and they were unable to close their storm windows as rainwater blew through as though someone were throwing it in with a buckets. He concluded by telling us with obvious relief that some buildings around camp had been struck by falling trees, but none of the students or staff had been hurt and only one of the historic buildings had suffered minor damage.

After a quick breakfast, Bob, the students, and I went to work helping the Huntington staff with cleanup. They cut fallen trees apart with chainsaws, and we hauled the debris away. At every turn the students took delight in reminding Bob and I that we had slept through what seemed like the end of the world to them. As we worked, news filtered in by walkie-talkie from SUNY Cortland's Antlers facility on the other side of the lake. Roads were blocked and power was out all over the park, and at least one person had died at the nearby Eighth Lake State Campground when a tree fell on their tent. We briefly considered staying at Huntington for another day to help with cleanup and avoid traveling under what seemed likely to be dangerous conditions but we decided to head home since there was no way for our students to let their friends and families know they were okay because all the land phone lines were down and there was no cell coverage on the peninsula at that time. We drove slowly past emergency crews who were clearing trees and fallen power lines. It is normally a three hour drive from Huntington to our main campus in Cortland, but on that day it took us closer to six hours. The relieved looks on the faces of the people who were there to meet our students told us we had made the right decision since news of the death and destruction caused by the storm had spread quickly to the rest of the state.

Over the next several days news reports continued to document the events surrounding what was now being called the "Great Blowdown." Five people died as a result of the storm, and many hikers and campers were briefly stranded. Approximately 150,000 acres of forest suffered severe (60% or more of trees affected) or moderate (30-60% of trees affected) damage. A few months later a proposal emerged to salvage timber from trees on the Adirondack Forest Preserve that had fallen during the blowdown. The precedent for this proposal was the timber salvage operation that took place on Forest Preserve land following a large cyclonic storm that damaged trees in large areas of the Adirondacks in 1950. As in 1950, the legality of the 1995 salvage proposal hinged on the interpretation of the Forever Wild Clause of the New York State Constitution. Since the Forever Wild Clause is arguably one the strongest laws ever established in the area of environmental protection, its origins are worth examining.

The creation of the Adirondack Park in 1892 did not halt logging on state-owned lands within its boundaries, nor the sale and exchange of prime sections of Forest Preserve to timber companies, so conservationists went to work during New York's constitutional convention of 1894 to change this. Eventually they were able to secure passage of the Forever Wild Clause, which stated that: "The Lands of the State, now owned or hereafter acquired, constituting the Forest Preserve as now fixed by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest lands. They shall not be leased, sold or exchanged, or be taken by any corporation, public or private, nor shall the timber thereon be sold, removed, or destroyed."


The significance of the Forever Wild Clause is manifest in three ways: Its inspiring language ("forever kept as wild forest lands"), the extra protection (delay and referendum)afforded by its status as part of the New York State Constitution, and the historical impact of the last minute addition of the words "or destroyed" to the original language of the amendment. Later this summer we will travel to Lake Lila to see how the Adirondack forest has fared in the thirteen years following the blowdown, and in subsequent posts we will examine the policy lessons the Forever Wild Clause provides for those interested in preserving natural ecosystems in the modern world.

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.

Adirondack Forest and Brown-headed Cowbirds

The Brown-headed Cowbird is a brood parasite that lays eggs in the nests of other birds for the host species to raise. The cowbird has been observed to lay its eggs in the nests of more than 220 host species in North America. Brood parasitism by the cowbird is one of many recent disturbances believed to contribute to the decline of North American songbirds.

The brown-headed cowbird is formerly a prairie species that followed bison migrations. The colonization of North America by European settlers, their westward expansion and destruction of virgin forests has contributed to a rapid eastward spread of cowbird populations. This expansion has allowed cowbirds to parasitze nests of forest bird species because forests are now fragmented between field, meadows, and open areas where cowbirds forage. One solution to managing cowbird populations may be to increase the size of forest plots where cowbirds are unable to parasitize nests deep within the forests. Such is the case and plans for ecologists and ornithologists in southern Illinois.

Earlier today, I examined the 2000-2005 breeding bird atlas for the brown-headed cowbird in New York State. The following graph shows that the cowbird is largely absent from the Adirondack region. Despite an ample supply of host species (warblers, thrushes, vireos, sparrows, and flycatchers) in the ADK, the numbers of putative breeding cowbirds is very low. Perhaps this is one of many favorable ecological consequences of land management practices in the Adirondacks. The large tracks of land with pristine forests limit access to brown-headed cowbirds and, therefore, reduce the negative effects of brood parasitism.