WV Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge

 

My path into environmental history began when I was ten. That was a long time ago. So was the Pleistocene epoch to a ten-year old tom-boy who roamed the woods and old sand mines near her home almost like a feral animal. On one of those energetic expeditions found a shard of fossilized tusk. It was only about four inches long and heavily weathered but I knew right away what it was since I had been immersed in the Ice Ages at the local library, studying pictures of short-faced bears and saber-toothed tigers. My imagination burned with excitement when I learned that the piece of tusk belonged to a Wooly Mammoth. 

Add a short-faced bear and a few tapirs to complete the scene

The Pleistocene really wasn't that all that long ago. It's only been a geologic blink-of-an-eye since the great megafauna roamed this region as it was then, tundra, savanna, boreal forests, and vast wetlands. That piece of tusk I found when I was ten was gifted to a family dentist in my thirties because "it's a tooth and you should have it!"  since it was he who identified it for me. It was Dr. Silver who lent me several yellowed copies of Academy of Natural Sciences Journals to "graduate you from picture books" when I was in my teens. 

Canaan Valley NWR Visitor Center

I can easily rekindle that childhood excitement when I have the opportunity to explore a landscape that, minus its Ice Age animals, is pretty much as it was 75,000 years ago. Currently under ongoing restoration to revive historic Red Spruce forests that were destroyed by intensive logging in the early 20th century, I spent a day fully immersed in the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. I wanted to see what spruce forest restoration looks like thirty years in. 

Familiar tree seeds and nuts from the Port Kennedy Cave (Mercer, 1899)

Ringed by the mountains of the Monongahela National Forest, the valley is a center of tourist and outdoor recreation activity - ski slopes, resort-style communities, and golf courses. But there are many small farms, too, and the small Mon-Town of Davis. For the day's exploration, I brought my favorite Ice Age stuffy -my grandkids named him "Woolsey" to take fun pictures in his ancestor's native habitat. I also brought on my tablet a pdf copy of an 1899 article by Henry Mercer, a Pennsylvania  who worked in the Port Kennedy "Bone Cave" site at Valley Forge. I first learned of the exciting finds of the Bone Cave and Henry Chapman Mercer, a Pennsylvanian archeologist and historian, while reading those old copies of the ANS Journal. I am happy to see that Journal has been archived online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library. 

Add Mastodons and 

Mercer had been part of a crack team of celebrated American archeologists that excavated one of the richest troves of Pleistocene animal and plant remains ever found in North America at the time. His 1899 report is a classic telling of the dig site and what the remains meant to the developing story of North America's paleo past. It's a great read if you love the history of American paleontology (which I do) but it is also a trove of information about the plant communities that covered the Mid-Atlantic between 15,000 years ago to as far back at 2 million years ago, a period known as NALMA (North American Land Mammal Age). 

Bracken fern

I can imagine Teddy Roosevelt sitting on his veranda at Sagamore Hill in NY glued to a reading of this issue of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences Journal (for a copy sits on a table in the NPS restored Roosevelt home) and sharing his excitement with his children. What readers discover is that the plant material recovered from the Port Kennedy site represent ancient landscape populated by plant communities all very familiar to us today, plants that co-evolved with their herbivore mammal cohorts like Hickory, Walnut, Locust, Oak, Crab Apple, Red Spruce, Pine, Aspen, Poplar, Ash, Gum, Tamarack, Willow, Heath Berry (Bog Bilberry, Blueberry, Huckleberry, Cranberry) among others.

Remains of the Beale Road Bridge over the Blackwater River

To include the restoration of Red Spruce to the Canaan Valley, the forest and open grasslands  within the refuge is claimed to be a nearly intact Middle Pleistocene landscape minus its NALMA mammal assemblage, of course. The conserved landscape within refuge boundaries is classified as a high altitude post-glacial ecological complex that represents the climatic conditions, flora, and fauna of hundreds of thousands of years ago as glaciers to the north came and went. Everywhere I wandered I saw the efforts of the NFS and USFWS to restore the Red Spruce. But I also saw evidence that the restoration efforts were being challenged by invasive plants, habitat degradation, and development. 

Hornbeam and Hickory compete with Red Maple

Technically today we are still in the Late Pleistocene, still locked into the cycle of ice ages but challenged by rapid changes brought about by human-caused global warming. I asked a staff person at the Visitor Center about those challenges and what's ahead for the restoration of these sub-alpine environments. He explained that invasive plants arrive all the time with the landscape industry often destined for developments and resorts and are a constant threat to preserving the ecological integrity of cold-adapted landscapes. "These plants spread from more developed areas and are surviving and spreading into places that maybe a hundred years ago they wouldn't have thanks to warmer conditions and changing soil chemistries." 

Restored Red Spruce glades

Dr. Maria Wheeler-Dubas of the Phipps Botanical Garden in Pittsburgh states "It is important to note that while, yes, the global climate has always changed, we humans have caused a change in climate that is unprecedented in speed due to our greenhouse gas emissions over the past one hundred and fifty years. It is not accurate to compare the naturally changing climate to the human-made climate change we are unfortunately seeing today."  Knowing this, the park staffer explained, the effort to protect and preserve these very old landscapes is proving to be a real challenge. He described the constant battle against non-native and/or non-regional trees, grasses, and shrubs that spread into the refuge as ongoing and never-ending.

Restoration area reducing Red Maple.

He pointed out one of the areas that I had hiked around that morning on the Beall (pronouced as Bell) Trail where active restoration of a wet meadow grassland involves toppling hundreds of invasive Red Maples to make open ground for Alder, Witch-Hazel, and other wetland shrubs. While conditions now favor the rapid expansion of this southern native tree into the refuge's northern hardwood forests, he warns that Red Maple threatens to become a monocrop as it claims once open grassland. "It's the onslaught of Red Maple that threatens the biodiversity of our remaining hardwoods and meadows. Since periodic 'low' fires have not been part of the natural cycles of this landscape for over a century and saplings are surviving in conditions made even more ideal by warming,  Red Maple now seems to take over open ground and forest edges faster than ever."

American Crabapple (Malus coronaria) adapted to cold and wet conditions

The Beall Loop Trail winds along an old logging road close to the restoration area where tree crews have felled hundreds of Red Maples to allow an Alder wood to grow. A lone Red Oak stood against a backdrop of toppled trees and to someone who might not appreciate the work going on here, it does look destructive. But is also difficult to understand just how challenging this work is when even the rain that falls seems to be working against the effort. Acid rain, polluted by coal-fired power plants of the Ohio Valley to the west, falls here year-round and Red Maple, more tolerant of acid soils, seems to have the upper hand as regeneration of Oaks and Hickories are suppressed by leached soils. One strategy calls for felling of Red Maple in conjunction with application of lime-based fertilizers, selective use of herbicides, and prescribed fire. "It's an extremely complex restoration effort," he tells me.

A banded marsh - layers of native heath, grasses, alder, and forest glades

I visited the new Freeland Boardwalk Trail that offers a wonderful immersion into a vast wetland complex at the south-center of the refuge. Over 8,500 acres of wetland are protected across Canaan Valley with twenty-three different wetland types identified. The boardwalk trail gives a glimpse of some of the wetland complexity and biodiversity as well as a distance view of Red Spruce reforestation. It's pretty impressive and I have a newfound and great respect for the work being done here.

Prickly-tree Clubmoss 

There were many birdwatchers out and I spoke to one who seemed disappointed by the lack of birds today.  He said it should have been chock full of migratory songbirds, sparrows, and hawks. "No matter," he said, "That's what birding is all about, the spontaneity of those really good days against the days when it seems like nothing with feathers wants to show up." Just then a family of Ravens coursed overhead and they stirred up three Meadowlarks that flew into brush from the grass tussock marsh. Then a low flying Rough-Legged Hawk appeared and disappeared. "Oh! He's early!" And everything seemed right again. 

Basswood 

The sun was low in the sky when I finished the third of three hikes on the refuge and besides the group of birders out on the boardwalk and the staff  person I  met at the Visitor Center, I met no one else on the trails. This was the solitude I had been aching for over the past several months and for a few moments at my truck, packing to leave, I realized that I really didn't want to go. Instead and now at dusk, I walked down a short paved trail to an old dilapidated bridge across the Blackwater River as clouds filled the sky and the winds began to bluster. Rain was on the way. Can you imagine, I asked Woolsey, if we were to see a herd of  Wooly Mammoths plod through this floodplain or hear a Giant Ground Sloth crushing walnuts with his powerful jaws? 

Hickory Tussock Moth

As if someone had listened in to my talking to a plush toy, I jumped at a nasal growl followed by a big kerplunk. A Beaver cruised under the old bridge, annoyed by my presence, grumbling as he went and when I failed to vacate my sit spot, he gave the water another huge slap with his tail. Much smaller than his distant and extinct Pleistocene ancestors that grew to seven feet in length, this modern Castoroides has a much bigger brain than his long-gone giant-sized relatives. The decline of the Pleistocene Beaver coincided with the arrival of the Clovis people 75,000 years ago, the first of many human incursions into past and present landscapes of the Canaan Valley. That little guy under the bridge was not only smarter but part of a success story in the modern conservation landscape, restored to wild populations in West Virginia in the 1930s after having been extinct in the state since 1830. 

The Red Spruce forest restoration effort across the Dolly Sods and Canaan Valley high altitude landscapes is impressive and guardedly optimistic. Of the thousands of Red Spruce saplings that I observed while visiting the Appalachian Highlands I acknowledged that they had been planted by human hands. Started by the CCC in the 1930s, during a period of some of the first landscape-level restoration efforts to include forests and wildlife, the rewilding of West Virginia has been a multi-generation, nearly century long process. I can't wait to go back and see more.

Notes:

Henry Mercer's 1899 report "The Bone Cave at Port Kennedy" (Article IX, pp 269 - 286) in the Journal of the Academy of Natural Science, Philadelphia, Vol XI 1897 -1901.  Biodiversity Heritage Library online. Of the ANS Journal's most enthusiastic readers was Teddy Roosevelt. 

 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/36863427#page/8/mode/1up

National Park Service History Bulletin #23 (2) Fall 2005 "On the Trail of an Important Ice Age Fossil Deposit" by Matt Daeschler, et. al. 

"The Pennsylvania of Yesteryear" by Phipps researcher and educator Dr. Maria Wheeler-Dubas in Western Pennsylvania. 

Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge https://www.fws.gov/refuge/canaan-valley