I had always thought of the woods as static. I’d seen stone walls in the woods, and conceptually knew some of the woods had been cleared earlier, but it wasn’t until my ‘other’ hobby, collecting antique tools, brought me into contact with old maps of Easton that I realized that almost all of this area was clear cut in the mid-1800s. Part of it was to clear land for crops and grazing. Part was for wood to heat and raw materials to build. And some of it was for wood to make charcoal. Bottom line, by the mid-1800’s Easton was mostly ‘field’ with only small circles of trees… people’s woodlots.
I had heard about ‘old growth forest.’ Without really thinking about it I’d thought that meant ‘forever’… but forever isn’t as long (in geological time) as we might think. As I started to research trees I found that this wasn’t the first time that the trees had been cleared. The last glacier covered southern New England about 15,000 years ago. OK, that is a long time to you and I, but not compared to how long New England has been here. (More on that when we touch on rocks and geology later in the series.)
So, if there was a glacier here 15,000 years ago, how did we get from glacier to the trees we see today? And how do people know those answers? One way they know is by looking at the pollen that builds up in peat bogs. Every year pollen from the surrounding trees lands in the peat bogs. After thousands of years, scientists came along, took core samples of the peat, and counted the pollen in each layer. It turns out that different trees have different sized and shaped pollen, so they can count the different pollen, and estimate the makeup of the surrounding forests at the time the pollen fell. Pretty neat.
So here’s a ‘best guess’ of what happened in southern New England after the glacier receded 15,000 years ago. At first the area remained treeless for several thousand years after the glacier receded. Spruce trees reached Connecticut about 11,500 years ago. 1000 years later alder, fir and jack pine arrived. White Pine reached the area 9000 years ago. Shortly thereafter birch, maples, hemlocks and oaks arrived. Interestingly some of these trees migrated here from the south, others from the west. Once they came this direction oaks were a fast migrating tree, which doesn’t make intuitive sense, since they are slow growing and have heavy seeds which can’t be carried great distances by the wind. Squirrels carry and bury the acorns, but not usually very far.
American chestnut was one of the last species to arrive, reaching it’s northern limit only within the past 1000 years. But once here it became a dominant species in our woods. OK, so why don’t we see them now? Stay tuned for the next chapter…
Source:
Jorgensen, Neil. A Sierra Club Naturalist’s Guide Southern New England. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco, 1978, pp 56-62.
