Nature Wars I

Striped Maple tree bark
Harvard Forest

Striped Maple tree leaves
Harvard Forest

I picked up Jim Sterba's Nature Wars: The incredible story of how wildlife comebacks turned backyards into battlegrounds, at the library recently and have been reading through it. As with many books there are things written within them that  you are very familiar with. For example, Sterba visited the Harvard Forest in Petersham, MA to learn about how the deciduous forest of North America regrew. If you go there for a visit you can view the dioramas, which really are beautiful works of art, that were created in the 1930s to depict the history of the forest from pre-settlement (1700) through 1930. Here in New England we have no concept of what it must have been like to see the land cleared of trees akin to what the mid-western states are like in topography. It makes sense when you stop to think of  all the stone walls that run through the woods. They didn't get there by themselves. Those stones were moved by the early settlers attempting to clear our glacial soil of rocks in order to plant their crops.

Once farms were abandoned in the 1800s with farmers moving to the newly opened west, or to work in the newly built mills in the every growing cities, or even to take jobs in the ever expanding whaling trade, the land was left to revert to its previous state. In ecological terms this is referred to as secondary succession (primary involves the destruction and replacement of the soil).

I too visited the Harvard Forest for a professional development workshop to learn about forest succession and how to teach this very topic to my students. It was here that I saw for the first time a striped maple as pictured above. Although their distribution covers New England I was unfamiliar with this variety of maple tree as we do not have any around my area. I love learning something new every day whether it be from a personal experience or a book.