ACTION ON THE BLUE RIDGE

THEODORE C. FEARNOW, I. T. QUINN.

Two persons met by chance on the banks of a Blue Ridge Mountain stream in the George Washington National Forest one day in the early 1930's. One was the new forest ranger; the other was a local resident. They paused for a friendly exchange of words, as is the custom in the Blue Ridge country, and tarried on the banks of the clear trout stream to eat their lunches.

As they sat there, a squirrel frisked nervously in a nearby hickory tree and finally dodged into a hollow limb. The Virginian, obviously a man interested in wildlife, turned to the ranger and asked, "You foresters look after the trees, but why don't you also look after the squirrel that lives in them, the turkey that roosts in them, and the deer that browses under them?"

The ranger explained that wildlife in the national forest was "primarily the responsibility of the State" and that consequently a Federal employee could not do much about it. That was a right bad state of affairs, the Virginian remarked, pointing out that the squirrel "belonged" to the State, but the tree that gave it both food and shelter was the "property of the Federal Government," and that the poor squirrel was like the man without a country.

The ranger and the Virginian pondered the situation carefully, then and later. The ranger, A. R. Cochran, became supervisor at Roanoke of the Jefferson National Forest. The Virginian, Justus H. Cline, of Stuarts Draft, later became a director in the American Wildlife Federation and a leader in the Virginia Academy of Science. During the years that followed, both men became active in shaping a plan for cooperative wildlife management. The plan was designed to bring "the squirrel, the den tree, and the hickory nut crop" under a coordinated program of management. The meeting of those two men has come to be generally recognized as the starting point for the widely known Virginia Plan for State-Forest Service cooperation in handling the wildlife resources on 1 1/2 million acres of national forest land in Virginia.

UP TO THEN, the management of wildlife in the Blue Ridge had been confined mostly to a few game refuges, and the history of wildlife there was monotonously like the history of wildlife in most parts of the United States. In three centuries, from the settlement of Jamestown in 1607, the wildlife had gone from abundance to depletion.

In the haze-shrouded Blue Ridge forests of oaks, hickories, and pines, chestnut, yellow-poplar, and hemlock, sassafras, the persimmon, chinquapin, pawpaw, and wild grape lived the white-tailed deer, a staple item of food for the early Virginia settlers; it is often said that the shooting eyes that won the American Revolution owed much of their skill to experience gained in hunting this fleet-footed animal. As settlers occupied the land, the buffalo, elk, puma, and wolf were gradually exterminated. Later, mountain farming in the Blue Ridge hastened soil erosion and depletion of fertility. The struggling population, existing at a hardship level, created (as it always does) a serious threat to wildlife; hunting and fishing, relentlessly pursued with little regard to season or other restrictions, left the Blue Ridge an impoverished wildlife province by the turn of the present century. Exhaustion of the wildlife resource was in many ways indicative of the general debility brought on by abusive occupancy of the land.

When the national forest program was launched in Virginia in 1912, the Blue Ridge was known as a region of low economic status. Erosion had exposed bare red soil in many places. Forests had been logged off and burned.

Wildlife had been depleted until much of the native fauna had been exterminated and the more resistant species reduced to a mere remnant of their former numbers. Even the white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), named by scientists in honor of Virginia, had virtually reached the point of extinction. Agriculture had ceased to be profitable on much of the area. Small wonder that a prominent Virginian, familiar with Blue Ridge history and a resident for more than half a century, referred to it as "the most abused mountain range in America."

But now the people of the Blue Ridge have a good deal of enthusiasm as they assume an active role in the broad program of restoring the resources.

THE COOPERATIVE PROGRAM for restoring wildlife to Virginia's mountain counties is rooted in a number of important actions. In 1911, Congress passed the Weeks Law, which authorized a program of purchases of forest lands for watershed protection, under which important forest areas on the headwaters of major rivers were added to the national forest system. Scattered units in the Appalachians in Virginia have been consolidated to form two national forests, the George Washington and the Jefferson. The forests included 1,409,060 acres on June 30, 1948; approximately 40,000 acres more have been approved for purchase. The two forests follow the backbone of the Blue Ridge for several hundred miles in Virginia, and extend westward and northward to the crest of the Allegheny along the Virginia-West Virginia border.

The national forest work program brought modern forest-fire protection to much of the Blue Ridge as early as 1913; besides, the Virginia Forest Service has done an effective job of fire Protection for many years. This work has been an important contribution toward restoring the Blue Ridge as a satisfactory habitat for wildlife.

Establishment of the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries in 1916 marked the first Statewide administration of Virginia's wildlife. A reorganization in 1926 created the present Commission of Game and Inland Fisheries, a progressive step that placed the State in a position to work more closely with sportsmen and with other conservation agencies. Professionally trained game and fish administrators were employed. The stage was set for renewed efforts to restore wildlife, and many sportsmen in the mountain counties dipped into their own pockets to match the dollars of the struggling new Commission to buy game animals for restocking purposes.

The Emergency Conservation Program in 1933 put a new reservoir of manpower at the disposal of the national forests for the work on natural resources. The first Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the United States was constructed in the Blue Ridge foothills of Shenandoah County, in the George Washington National Forest. There followed a public demand for the use of emergency conservation funds to carry on wildlife development projects, and kindred interests brought sportsmen, the Commission, and the Forest Service into a close but informal partnership to restock and restore wildlife habitat on the national forests. That was a prelude to the cooperative wildlife program now in effect on Virginia's two notional forests.

With the launching of the cooperative wildlife program, efforts were made to spread the work over much more of the national forest acreage. A formal agreement placing both the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests under cooperative wildlife management became effective on June 13, 1938.

Legislative action by the Virginia General Assembly in 1938 provided for collection of a fee of a dollar by the Commonwealth for the privilege of hunting or fishing on national forest land and earmarked all funds so collected for wildlife restoration and management on the cooperative area. This special license, in the form of a stamp, is issued each year to cover hunting, fishing, and trapping on all national forest land in Virginia. The purchaser affixes this stamp to his regular hunting and fishing license.

One of the cardinal principles of cooperative wildlife management under the Virginia program has been the requirement that all plans and programs be jointly developed and administered under a pattern of mutual participation and assistance. The policy starts with joint preparation of each year's budget by the Director of the Commission of Game and Inland Fisheries and the forest supervisors. The budget is shaped to finance an annual work program for wildlife, which is also jointly conceived, discussed, and approved.

The diversion of a part of wildlife- license receipts 'to the national forests to provide funds for developing and maintaining wildlife habitat marked a new approach to wildlife restoration in Virginia. This action stemmed directly from the concept that wildlife is a product of the land and that active participation of the land manager was essential to continued production of game and fish.

The joint plans, formulated on the ground, cover stocking of game and fish, law enforcement, planting of wildlife food and cover, mowing old fields to retain them as wildlife clearings, pruning and releasing trees and shrubs of value for wildlife food and cover, control of predators, emergency feeding of game when the ground is covered by deep snows, and a score of related jobs. Periodic inspections by representatives of the Commission and the Forest Service insure adherence to the work plans and faithful compliance with job specifications.