Big, Wild, and Connected

Part 2: From the Central Appalachians to the Catskill Mountains

John Davis, Wildlands Wildlands Network, Wildlands Network

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781610915076
• Subtopic: Zoology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This E-ssential is a three-part series that covers John Davis's epic journey from Florida to Maine. In 2011, with support from the Wildlands Network, Davis traveled 7,600 miles in 10 months from Florida to Maine by foot, bicycle, skis, and canoe/kayak. His extensive travels were motivated by wanting to answer the question “Is it possible in the twenty-first century to identify and protect a continental-long wildlife corridor that could help to protect eastern nature into the future?”

John paints a vivid picture of the physical challenges of the trek, such as climbing the highest point in South Carolina with a heavily loaded bike and trying to consume the 8,000 calories per day he needed to fuel himself for the journey. As readers adventure with Davis, they will also share his evolving understanding of what it would take to implement an Eastern Wildway.

Eastern wildlife, both seen and unseen, from Florida panthers to North Carolina’s red wolves to the ghosts of cougars farther north, are the real focus of this adventure as John explores how such wildness can coexist with human development in the most populated regions of the United States. The science and conservation of large-scale connectivity are brought to life by his travels—offering unique insights into the challenges and opportunities for creating an Eastern Wildway. This is a must-read for enthusiasts of hiking narratives, as well as professionals and students interested in issues related to large-scale connectivity. Compelling photographs and other graphics complement John’s fascinating story.

CHAPTER SIX

A Forest Hungry for Cougars

West Virginia Highlands and Larger Central Appalachians

Late June and early July in some of the most topographically diverse country in the East; sultry in valleys, rainy and almost boreal in mountains; shoes wet for days, as I ramble the High Alleghenies. Biting flies irksome in some low areas.

Where the trophic cascades story finally struck me unforgettably powerfully was in the West Virginia Highlands. There much of the forest was scenic but simple, reduced to a visually pleasing but wildlife-poor layer of ferns beneath a middle-aged class of hardwood trees. Wildflowers, shrubs, and saplings had been browsed away by an unnatural abundance of deer—a consequence of the elimination of the apex predators that should be governing these forests. As much as any forest I visited during the long eastern trek, Monongahela National Forest is hungry for cougars and other extirpated carnivores.

The Best and Worst of Appalachia

West Virginia evokes emotions. Parts of it, particularly the High Allegheny Mountains, are stirringly beautiful. Other areas, especially the massive mines of southern West Virginia, are as heartrending as the poverty that goes with such boom-and-bust economies.

I avoided the strip mines, for my quest was not so much to expose crimes against nature as to find ways wildlife might return to lost homelands. Rather than rail against the coal mining industry—though I agree with NASA’s great scientist James Hansen that a coal train is a death train—I suggest reading Plundering Appalachia: The Tragedy of Mountaintop-Removal Coal Mining, edited by Tom Butler and George Wuerthner, and following the climate-justice work of 350.org. The number 350 is the maximum safe level in parts per million for carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, according to Hansen and other climate scientists. We are at 390 parts per million and going up fast.… Without getting into energy debates, let me simply repeat the basic truth that mining and burning fossil fuels destroy wildlife habitat, pollute air and water, and destabilize climate. I would further urge that the answers to America’s and the world’s energy crises are energy conservation and efficiency, land conservation and restoration, and small-scale renewable energy sources like rooftop solar panels and residential wind generators. Let me also applaud the brave work of other groups central in the fight against strip mining such as Climate Ground Zero, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sierra Club.

So I stayed on my bike after hikes in Ohio’s Shawnee and Pike State Forests and Highlands Nature Sanctuary, and made my way relatively cleanly to Monongahela National Forest and other public lands in West Virginia. On the long road to the Otter Creek Wilderness, I gazed often over a landscape fragmented but still mostly green, like so many in the Appalachians.

Some of the green, though, was not the forest this land wants to grow but instead livestock pasture. Before TrekEast, I was dimly aware that livestock grazing occurs on some of our eastern national forests because my mother had pointed this out while doing research for her old-growth forest surveys. Livestock grazing on public lands is a huge problem in the West, where cattle and sheep have overgrazed and degraded hundreds of millions of acres of public land managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management, US Forest Service, and state agencies, with American taxpayers in effect subsidizing commercialization of public lands (it’s the same irrational leasing of public lands for private profits that happens with logging on national forests). Fortunately, livestock grazing is not such an entrenched and pervasive use of eastern public lands, but some national forest managers here have allowed continued livestock grazing in certain areas. I mentioned in part 1 of this series, Big, Wild and Connected: From the Florida Peninsula to the Coastal Plain, the unnatural clearings on the flanks of Virginia’s Mount Rogers National Recreation Area, lands kept open by and for pony and cattle grazing. Here in the Monongahela National Forest, the pastures are apparently for cows, which were out of sight, and horses, which are hard to fault (being small in number and handsome in appearance). So I did not grumble much (not that anyone would have heard!), but really, public forests ought to be protected as wild ecosystems, not managed for the small amount of forage they can provide to a few domestic ungulates. The more forage fed to domestic animals, the less available to native grazers and browsers.

Nonetheless, West Virginia in many places lives up to its self-proclaimed Wild and Wonderful status. West Virginia’s mountains are beautiful in ways topographically different from (though sometimes biologically similar to) those I usually climb, in the Adirondacks or northern Appalachians. Substantial areas in West Virginia are above four thousand feet, yet none of it is above five thousand feet, and few of the high points are really distinct peaks. I climbed above four thousand feet many times in the West Virginia Highlands, but only a few times did I feel like I was on a high peak with vistas stretching in all directions—the views again showing deep green in most directions but with cuts and holes in the cover from roads and other development.

A Park for All Seasons and Reasons?

As a traveling conservationist trying to promote an Eastern Wildway, I was looking for key connections not only on the ground but also among the people who care about our country’s natural heritage. I was often pleased to see or hear about cooperation between various groups and individuals working to protect a wildlife corridor or refuge or park. Unity is elusive, however, and the conservation community sometimes divides over particular proposals. A case in point is the High Allegheny National Park and Preserve proposal spearheaded by Friends of Blackwater and allies but dismissed as impractical or unduly divisive by some other conservationists. Being biased toward big wild ideas, I was quickly persuaded to support such a High Allegheny National Park, a half million or so acres in size, to better protect the West Virginia Highlands. Judy Rodd, executive director of Friends of Blackwater; Michael Kellett, executive director of RESTORE: The North Woods; and other park champions convinced me that a national park is the right tool to preserve this nationally significant landscape. The proposal they’ve drafted would encompass and consolidate much of the existing public land in northern West Virginia.

Another conservationist I admire, however, Helen McGuiness, longtime internship coordinator for the Cougar Rewilding Foundation, argues that a national park would not significantly increase protections for West Virginia’s Highlands and would needlessly stir up opponents of land conservation.

National parks are generally off-limits to hunting and commodity extraction and therefore can engender opposition from sporting, mining, logging, and other resource-extraction groups. Much of the land within the proposed High Allegheny National Park boundary is currently afforded at least nominal protection by the Monongahela National Forest; smaller amounts are afforded stronger protection by Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge, Canaan Valley and Blackwater Falls State Parks, Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area, and designated wilderness areas in the national forest.

Support from sporting interests can sometimes be won by designating a National Park Service unit as a preserve rather than a park, or as a combination of the two, as is now the case with the High Allegheny park proposal. Denali National Park in Alaska, for instance, is actually in part national preserve, where regulated hunting is allowed (most federal land units in Alaska, even those not open to sport hunting, are open to subsistence hunting by native peoples).

No need to go into the pros and cons of park creation here. Others more knowledgeable have done so well. (See especially publications and websites of RESTORE: The North Woods, New National Parks Project, and National Parks Conservation Association.) I support big parks like the proposed High Allegheny and Maine Woods National Parks (more on the latter in part 3 of the series) because they would essentially be wild core reserves, off-limits to industrial resource extraction, and would help bring people of all ages and walks of life closer to nature. They would also be anchors in eventual continental conservation corridors, like the eastern Wildway this trek is all about. Preserving North America’s natural heritage depends on broad and deep public support. National parks are “America’s best idea,” to borrow from documentarian Ken Burns, because they both protect nature and reconnect people with nature. National parks, as much as wilderness areas and more than national wildlife refuges (which too often are managed mainly for shooting of game), are an antidote to a civilization that spreads by subjugating nature and alienating people from it.

Deer browse wildflowers and saplings without critical apex predators to maintain balance. (Photo courtesy of Philip T. Lacinak)

Ideally, national forests would be protected like parks but without the tourist infrastructure. In fact, many national forests have long been managed primarily for logging and/or livestock grazing to the detriment of shy and sensitive species, water quality, and ecological integrity. Thanks to the good work of West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and other conservation groups, significant portions of the Monongahela National Forest have been designated as wilderness, but the bulk of our nation’s only major federal land holding in the High Alleghenies is subject to periodic logging, and some of it is open to livestock grazing. Moreover, the economy in the region is dangerously dependent on extractive industry. Thus the case for transferring federal lands from the Forest Service to the Park Service, absorbing also the national wildlife refuge and state parks, and slowly replacing extractive businesses with restorative and educational ones. Despite Helen’s legitimate concerns, I suspect a High Allegheny National Park would be an excellent place to restore cougars.

From the standpoint of wildflowers and young trees and songbirds, this restoration cannot happen too soon, for the forest understory here is being browsed too heavily by the unnatural abundance and sedentary behavior of a deer herd deprived of its governors and fitness trainers, cougars and wolves. My walks in Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge and Monongahela National Forest were strangely silent and monochromatic. Although the West Virginia Highlands are among the East’s greatest wildlands complexes, there is a real danger that the forests here will not continue regenerating. The combination of deer overbrowsing, fragmentation from roads and mining and logging, and invasive species, including tree pathogens like hemlock and balsam wooly adelgids and emerald ash borers, could doom much of West Virginia’s forest. A sign near a lovely wetland in Canaan Valley Refuge explained that the combination of deer overbrowsing and the invasive balsam wooly adelgid has left the future of West Virginia’s iconic balsam firs in doubt. In a fenced enclosure nearby, firs are regenerating; outside the fence, where deer have access, few young firs survive.

These threats to the forest are another argument for creation of a High Allegheny National Park. Thus far, the National Park Service has been more open to predator recovery and aggressive treatment of invasive species than has the Forest Service (recall Linville Gorge, where hemlocks on national park land are still thriving, whereas on national forest land they’re dead). Moreover, consolidating management of public lands in the West Virginia Highlands under one agency whose mission would uphold conservation of biological diversity might increase the odds that threats to the forest will be effectively addressed. In any case, whoever may be the future managers of West Virginia forests, all parties should agree that Monongahela National Forest and surrounding public and private forests are vital to our country’s natural heritage and ought to be protected as much as possible. We should also agree that these forests need their native predators restored if they are to prosper in the future. Wolves are needed, too, but are a “harder sell,” so with Cougar Rewilding Foundation friends, I urge exploring opportunities for cougar recovery first.

Bobcat populations are relatively strong in the East despite pressure from their main predator, humans. (Photo courtesy of Larry Master)

Feline Affinities

My keenness for cougar recovery, I admit, stems not only from my understanding of their ecological importance but also from my love of cats. Like my western conservation mentor Dave Foreman, I consider cats to be among the highest manifestations of evolution. Some of the greatest experiences in my life have been seeing bobcats, lynx, leopards, lions, and cheetahs in the wild, but I also love domestic cats. My family has usually included two or more cats, which we generally keep inside to prevent them from eating songbirds and protect them from cars and coyotes. Saying farewell to the cats is always a difficult part of a long trip, for I have not the ability to communicate with them from afar. (Yes, Denise tried putting the phone next to the cats’ ears, but they seemed unmoved by my transmitted voice and offered only quiet meows in return.) I suspect that as I near the end of my days, decades hence, I’ll reflect back on my life as a series of wild rambles happily punctuated by a succession of great cats.

Much of what I know about cats I’ve learned by watching our cats and by tracking with Susan Morse, founder of one of our continent’s premier citizen science groups, Keeping Track. Sue is among North America’s top wildlife trackers and ecologists and has introduced thousands of students of all ages to the joys of studying wildlife and their relationship to habitat. For nearly twenty years Keeping Track has pioneered the concept that trained citizen volunteers can and should play a key role in helping communities shape wildlife conservation planning goals. (I track with Sue in Vermont’s Green Mountains later in this journey.)

Sue taught me about what she calls “precision jumps,” leaps of phenomenal accuracy that bobcats and other wild cats make in order to reach safe ground, or to descend cliffy terrain while stalking prey. When I, along with Denise and Justin, visited Sue at Wolfrun near the western flank of the Green Mountains, she took us up a steep scramble to Bobby Knob, a cliffy bobcat refugia that Sue has studied for nearly forty years. Her work has revealed the importance of this rough terrain for a wild felid like the bobcat. Her studies have documented three generations of bobcats using the same refugia for escape habitat, which provides them safety; thermal habitat, in which they can safely warm themselves on inaccessible cliff surfaces; resting habitat, in which a bob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Island Press E-ssentials Program
• Contents
• Acknowledgments and Dedication
• Introduction. Still Moving After All These Miles: Into the Central Appalachian Mountains and Foothills
• Chapter 5. Securing an Appalachian Arc: Wildlands Philanthropy on the Edge of Appalachia
• Chapter 6. A Forest Hungry for Cougars: West Virginia Highlands and Larger Central Appalachians
• Chapter 7. Roadblocks to Recovery: Transportation and Energy Development Fragmenting Penn’s Woods
• Chapter 8. Wild Playgrounds: New York’s Shawangunks and Catskills
• Want More John Davis Adventures?
• About the Author
• About Wildlands Network
• About Island Press
• Island Press | Board of Directors
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