Forests and Wildlife

Above: The bear was once a respected animal of the western range and forest country.

WILDLIFE IN THE SMALL WOODLAND

EDWARD H. GRAHAM.

SMALL WOODLANDS are natural homes for such valuable fur bearers as the skunk, opossum, mink, raccoon, fox, and weasel. Among game animals, woodlands harbor squirrels of various kinds, woodcock, ruffed grouse, rabbit, and snipe. Fox and raccoon provide sport as well as pelts. In the woods also live flying squirrels, chipmunks, pocket gophers, mice, and other forest rodents. Song and insect-eating birds are abundant the thrushes, warblers, woodpeckers, and nuthatches, kinglets, and whippoorwills. Predators, hawks and owls, live in the woods and feed upon insects, snakes, frogs, and small vertebrates.

Many kinds of wildlife that live in woodlands are found nowhere else. When the woodland is harmed or destroyed, these creatures become fewer or disappear. To protect the useful and beautiful wild things of the woodlands, we must first protect their woodland homes, where they get food, shelter, a place to breed and hide and live.

The things to do to help woodland wildlife are much the same as the rules to be followed in growing the trees, for when trees are protected they make homes for wild animals.

The rules for the management of the woodland wildlife are: Protect the woodland from uncontrolled fire, protect the woodland from intensive grazing, cut the trees selectively, preserve den trees, develop woodland borders.

Wildlife usually benefits most when fire is kept out of the woodland. In the few instances in which fire is employed as a tool in forest management, it must be carefully supervised. Reckless burning destroys cover that is used by wildlife for nesting, escape from enemies, roosting, and other purposes vital to their survival. Uncontrolled fire also reduces the food supply of wildlife and may burn them to death as well. After a serious fire it may take years for the woodland trees to recover and as long to recreate the proper habitat for the birds and mammals.

The woodland that is subjected to intensive grazing is usually a poor place for wildlife. Constant trampling and disturbance by cows, sheep, goats, or horses is especially damaging to wild animals that live on or near the ground. Severe grazing, which destroys young trees, affects the existing conditions and the future conditions under which the wildlings live.

Studies by Charles A. Dambach in Ohio disclosed that eastern woodlands that are protected from grazing have twice as many species and numbers of plants as grazed woodlands. Under protected conditions are found about twice as many kinds of birds that nest on or near the ground and nearly twice as many kinds of mammals than are found in comparable woods that are grazed.

Harvesting trees as they mature here and there throughout the woods instead of cutting the whole lot at one time is especially valuable to wildlife.

An even-aged stand of trees has less variety of wild birds and mammals than a woodland that has a mixture of mature and young trees. The more variety in the habitat, the more variety in the wildlife it supports. Furthermore, openings where trees are felled are especially valuable to certain kinds of wild creatures. In them there is a variety of herbaceous and shrubby species along with young trees, and such spots make the woodland more desirable for grouse, rabbits, and other living things.

Some of the most useful, interesting, and valuable animals of woodlands are missing when there are no trees with hollow trunks or hollow limbs. For some kinds of wildlife, a hollow tree is essential. The raccoon, for instance, is rarely found where there is not a hollow tree for a den. Another fur bearer, the opossum, also holes up in hollow trees. Flying squirrels use the holes for homes, and so do other squirrels, the wood duck, screech owl, sparrow hawk, chipmunk, nuthatch, crested flycatcher, chickadee, bluebird, purple martin, and chimney swift.

In Europe, the foresters found that the woodlands composed of even-aged stands of a single tree species supported practically no wildlife. Injurious insects were also abundant. So much damage was done by forest insects that nest boxes were finally set up to attract birds. The birds fed upon and helped to control the harmful insects. Woodlands that compose a natural community of living things give us less trouble than artificial plantings. A few scattered den trees help a great deal toward maintaining a natural balance in our small woodlands. They are especially valuable near streams or near the margins of the woodland.

At the outer margin of the small woods, where it adjoins a field or pasture, a border of shrubs is especially valuable to wildlife. It is a principle of wildlife management that there arc more wild creatures in the edge of a particular type of vegetation than within the type. Counts of birds and mammals show more species, and more individuals, along the shrubby margin of a woodland than within the woodland or in the adjacent pasture or field. Protecting the woodland edge thus increases wildlife. Often fruit- and seed-bearing shrubs grow there naturally.