I was tromping around last week in what I regard as some of the most beautiful forests in the world — mature, longleaf pine forests. With their stately trees in open, grassy settings, they look more like big-city parks than wild places.
The forests we were visiting are part of two sprawling quail hunting estates in the Red Hills region of Thomas County, deep in south central Georgia near the Florida line. However, the forests are only remnants of a great longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered most of the bottom half of Georgia and the Southeast.
In all, a boundless longleaf pine forest once covered 90 million acres, or about 60% of the land, in a continuous 1,200-mile stretch across nine states from Virginia to East Texas. Some 98% of the forest, however, was lost over the decades to agriculture, development, logging and fire suppression. (The forests depend on occasional fire to stay healthy.)
The Red Hills region, though, had an abundance of the remaining longleaf forest, which is ideal habitat for the bobwhite quail. Beginning in the late 1800s, wealthy industrialists began buying up the surviving forestland for quail hunting preserves — and thus saved huge tracts of longleaf pine.
Scientists studying these forests have documented that the longleaf pine ecosystem is one of Earth’s most biologically diverse natural environments. The forest understories contain from 150 to more than 300 species of wildflowers and other ground-cover plants per acre. More breeding birds are found in longleaf pine forests than any other Southeastern forest type, and about 60% of the amphibian and reptile species found in the Southeast occur there.
But with the massive loss of longleaf forest over the past century, many creatures that depend on the ecosystem have become endangered — such as the red-cockaded woodpecker and the indigo snake.
It’s why state and federal governments, conservationists and private landowners have undertaken ambitious efforts to restore longleaf pine on hundreds of thousands of acres in Georgia and elsewhere in the South.
IN THE SKY: From David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer: The moon will be last quarter on Friday (Oct. 6). Venus is low in the east just before dawn. Mars is low in the west at dark. Jupiter is in the south at dark. Saturn rises in the east at dusk and is up nearly all night.
Charles Seabrook can be reached at charles.seabrook@yahoo.com.
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