Pennsylvania Game News - December 2012 - 52

old-growth forests — the Porcupine Mountains, the Sipsey Wilderness, Congaree National Park in South Carolina, and our own Cook Forest. “These are the places I keep urging others to visit so they, too, will see and understand what our land aspires to be, and what it can perhaps be again in more places, given enough time.” Maloof, a professor of biology and environmental studies, is well qualified to write such an eloquent, opinionated and convincing book about the worth and beauty of oldgrowth forests. At last, we come to the ideal book for the nature nerd on your list The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature by David George Haskell. He, too, is a biology professor who chooses to sit for hours at a time observing one square meter of old-growth Tennessee forest on the Cumberland Plateau. He calls it his “mandala,” which he explains is “a re-creation of the path of life, the cosmos, and the enlightenment of Buddha. The whole universe is seen through this small circle of sand,” a mandala he saw that was created with sand by two Tibetan monks on his campus. But he sits on a flat slab of sandstone on a forested slope in steep, rock-strewn terrain that kept the loggers away. There he sits through the four seasons many times a week and covers a lot of subjects in great detail, such as how deer digest their food, the lives of Plethodon lungless salamanders, the biology of ticks, the reproduction of rattlesnake ferns, medicine from

nature, sharp-shinned hawks, in summary, something for everyone who has an interest in some aspect of the eastern forest. His account can be poetic, i.e. “lightning-white fungal strands crackle over black leaves,” and introspective, “the world does not center on me or my species. The causal center of the natural world is a place that humans had no part in making. Life transcends us. It directs our gaze outward.” He also makes frequent comments about conservation, some so subtle that you have to read them again to appreciate them. For instance, in a section he calls “Chainsaw” he asks, “How should we treat our forests, as a gift to be wisely and sustainably managed or as an ‘industrial process’ in which we run down nature’s capital, mining the soil, and then discarding the spent land? Our laws and economic rules place shortterm extractive gain over other values.” Finally, maybe the most controversial point he makes as an ecologist has to do with white-tailed deer. “Most of the scientific studies of eastern North America forest ecology in the 20th century were conducted in an abnormally unbrowsed forest. Overbrowsing by deer may be returning the forest to its more usual sparse, open condition,” he writes. Haskell quotes from old letters and diaries about the great abundance of deer in the 16th and 17th centuries and mentions that Native Americans cleared and burned forests to provide food for plentiful deer. Merry Christmas and good reading! 

JOEL SMITH, 7, Marysville, took advantage of the Mentored Youth Hunting Program and, while hunting with his father, STEVE, bagged this squirrel, along with two others, in Perry County during the youth squirrel season.

GAME NEWS

Pennsylvania Game News - December 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pennsylvania Game News - December 2012