Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
White-tailed deer
(left)
; moose
But the business of wilderness-taming was hard, hungry work, and the settlers dined well on a variety
of wild game—such animals as wild turkey, white-tailed deer, and moose. Just as moose were highly
prized by the Native Americans, the settlers quickly learned to appreciate the huge animals for their
delicious meat and valuable hides. Lazy these settlers were not, and they pitched into the task of “civil-
izing” their environment and putting game on the table with astounding energy. Thus it was that with
ax and saw, fire and gun, the settlers inexorably eliminated most of both moose habitat and moose from
the Northeast.
Despite the passage of laws from the late 1800s to the 1930s, giving moose complete protection, and
the farm abandonment and forest regeneration that fueled the amazing comeback of the white-tailed
deer, the recovery of moose in the Northeast was very slow. In fact, it really wasn't until well after
World War II that moose numbers in the region began to increase appreciably.
The trigger for the moose's upward climb was a radical change in logging practices. Even the wilder
parts of the Northeast weren't true wilderness by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
for they had already been logged several times. However, timber-harvesting methods concentrated on
bringing the logs and pulpwood to the transportation system; that is, horses dragged timber from cutting
areas to rivers or roads for transportation to the mill. This was a time-consuming system that tended to
limit the speed with which areas could be cut.
All that began to change after the Second World War; now the strategy shifted to bringing the trans-
portation to the logs. Huge bulldozers began to push wide roads farther and farther back into what had
essentially been rather wild and inaccessible country. Logging became increasingly mechanized, for the
bulldozers were followed by log skidders, tree harvesters, and trucks.
As a result, huge areas covering many hundreds—even thousands—of acres were clearcut. In a very
few years those clearcuts began to grow back, mostly to the young hardwood trees which are prime
