PA: Nixon County Park, York Co. - I'd Rather Walk

Autumn hillside, Nixon County Park, York County, PA.

I used to drive the lead Jeep in long caravans of 4WDs full of tourists visiting the South Carolina coast. We rolled over dunes, roared up barren beaches, and snaked through jungle-like lowcountry forests bedecked in curtains of Spanish moss. The sea island park I worked for made almost all of its money on these tours, so they were important if we wanted to take home a paycheck. As one of my first professional jobs in my early twenties, it's when I really began to dislike tourism. I still do.

Ruby-crowned kinglet, female.

I understand that many natural areas around the world wouldn't be what they are today without the money tourism generates. But the kinds of people who paid a hundred dollars or more for a Jeep tour to look for 'gators weren't the kinds of people I felt any connection to. And they certainly didn't spend enough time to develop any relationship to the landscape. There are different kinds of tourism of course, but I have my particular 'beef' with ecotourism. But after a recent trip to Acadia National Park with its packed tour buses with camera-wielding out-of-towners clogging roads and parking lots, I had to re-examine my dislike for all thing touristy in nature.

UK birders on a morning hike, York County, PA.

Near where I live there is a large Amish Market placed just off a busy interstate. Like in Acadia National Park, the buses can quickly clog the parking area and the sheer numbers of people can overwhelm the vendors and the space inside. I shop here frequently and have often wondered how the Amish bakers, butchers, cheese-makers, and produce sellers handle it.  I asked Susan at the bakery about the tourist hoards. She said "Yes, sometimes I feel like the attraction, and they don't necessarily buy much of what we sell. We rely on our local folks like yourself to sustain our business."

Savannah Sparrow.

I make a terrible tourist. I am not into resorts and I don't enjoy manufactured or fake landscapes. I don't feel the need to be entertained by guides or hired locals, and sure as heck wouldn't pay money for a tour when there is a perfectly good trail system nearby!  I just get out of the car and walk. There's something about the earth underfoot that can tell you more about a place than any guide. Having the freedom to stop along the trail and simply listen or look speaks volumes about the forest, farms, neighborhoods, waters, and people you meet along the way.  But my distaste for tourism runs deep and I credit those first few years on that beautiful sea island in South Carolina with stoking it. 

Overgrown farm road in York County, PA.

The people who paid over a hundred dollars to explore our remote sea island for a two hour Jeep tour had the money to do so, and this leaves travelers without such means to find places and experiences that are affordable and accessible. More affordable or free and accessible places tend to be better patrolled and policed: a good thing for the benefit of those environments. But those out-of-the-way places that cost a lot of money to visit? They are probably out of range of local natural resource authorities as well.  I used to collect those funds. Off-road enthusiasts paid the park hundreds of dollars in back country fees and private tour groups with their own 4WD expedition vans paid three times as much. Tour guides walked out with pamphlets that explained back country rules after they signed a piece of paper to promise they wouldn't harass wildlife.

Monkshood in October.

As leaders of our own tours, we were expected to demonstrate proper back-country travel protocol but I frequently observed permit holders busting over dunes for some 'air time' and once watched an expedition van loaded with "nature" photographers racing a flock of black skimmers up the beach - straight through a nesting area! There was nothing I could do except radio our HQ and hope the one back country ranger (usually on another island) could come by to investigate.  When a region depends on ecotourism to expose rare and fragile environments as economic privilege, the ecosystems suffers first and foremost. Additionally, the influx of ecotourism dollars rarely stems profitable  illegal activities such as poaching, logging, fishing, and resource extraction.   

A healthy young crop of chestnut oak forms a colorful understory.

Before I left my position as rookie ranger in South Carolina I asked permission to walk the island rather than drive it. My supervisor was intrigued. "Walk it?" he asked. "That's eighteen miles up and eighteen miles back." It took me three days. After working on the island for several years, I had never known the island as I did that week hiking it. What I experienced would fill a book. Two hours by Jeep failed to reveal the dozens alligator nests, osprey, eagles, owls, red-bellied mudsnakes, and glass lizards that lived just yards from the vehicle trail. I counted fifty sea turtle nests in places we hadn't even considered good nesting sand, far from the egg poacher's trails. I added ten new birds to  my life list. I watched dolphins cooperatively herd schools of small fish into mud cuts on the back island edge and sat for an hour counting clapper and king rails in a low tide marsh. I caught sight of my first American bittern staring at me from only yards away. I learned to "see" hawks and owls by the chatter of other birds. I began to understand landscape as an immersive experience. 

Nixon Park, York County, PA.

Shortly after my island walk we moved to Maryland where I began my teaching career and continued to work in natural resource education and law enforcement. I made it a point to never spend a full day in the classroom, taking classes outside for hikes in the woods or just around campus. With my park assignments I left the truck and patrol car parked and did most of my shifts on foot, though I worked with rangers who never left their vehicles unless they were writing a ticket or answering nature's call. I hiked with my young children on the AT or local park trails, fly-fished, rode bikes, bird-watched, camped. I never felt the need to travel to resorts or vacation-lands when there was so much to explore close to home.  And when I travel for work now, attending this conference or that meeting, I still make time to walk the landscape and to get to know it from the ground up. I'm a bit feral when it comes to striking out to the woods, mountains, rivers, and  I could easily go completely wild.

An October morning over the foothills of central York County, PA.

I often wonder how much more scientifically and culturally literate we could become as a society of pedestrians who chose to walk or hike compared to touring from inside a tour bus or SUV. I know that freedom from extravagant costs of exclusive resorts and access to privileged locations opens me up to actually putting my money thoughtfully into the pockets of those who work and live in the landscapes I want to explore. My guides are often the folks I meet along the way. Today while hiking at a local park in York County I met up with two nice folks from the UK who had just visited the busy Amish Market and were doing a little birding. I was happy to serve as their 'local guide' and direct them to a nearby hawk watch, the AT, and some great local eateries. (We friended each other on Facebook so that when I get to the UK they can return the local favor!)  "How beautiful to just spend this time and walk," Bryan said as he and his wife Kim topped a ridge trail to look over the view. "We find that in America you imagine more sightings of wild beasts and tend not to see the real ones." 

Bug and Annie hike with their noses.

The idea of being a tourist places me immediately outside an intimate experience of the land and the people who live on it. It's a temporary experience I need only endure for the scheduled time slot. Walking instead unhitches me from an agenda framed by the constraints of the short-term visitor and frees me to look for those things I would otherwise miss. Better yet, walking with my coonhounds engages a whole new world of scent and track that I would have missed completely had not they strained against their harnesses to follow some trail or sniff some sign. 

Crossing.

Debates over the pros and cons of ecotourism are held at all levels of conservation, biological science, economic development, and cultural preservation. But I think that a walk in the woods (not a movie about a walk in the woods) even and especially close to home can certainly be a personal trek well-grounded to the wilds of our own perception. Beyond the itinerary of a highly structured day or week as a visitor with limited time in a new place, pretending (even for just an hour or two) that your feet are striding on home ground can make all the difference, and for that experience alone I'd rather walk.

PA: Abandoned Farm Snowshoe Hike - Nixon County Park, York Co.

By the mid-20th century, farmers using technologies unimaginable to colonial agriculturalists had replaced farming systems  heavily dependent on human and animal labor. New systems utilized mechanization to make more efficient the process of growing food, fodder, and fiber. In effect,  the mechanization of agriculture simplified tasks as well as landscapes.

Yearling white tailed deer in an old overgrown pasture.

Ecological landscapes are by nature 'messy' and complicated in their relationships, functions, and effects. Highly controlled and managed agricultural properties are maintained for efficiency in production. Today I strapped on my showshoes after an all day snowstorm in search of how simplified landscapes become complex after farm abandonment.  

I made my way around a long loop of trail called Bird Hollow at Nixon County Park, York County, Pennsylvania, and noted landscape structures created by humans (sometimes inadvertently), embellished or transformed by nature over the past fifty years. When this old dairy farm was abandoned in the 1960s and sold to the county park system, park managers did little to stem its rewilding. Today winter is the best time to look for the human-built scaffolding of this once highly productive (and ecologically simplified) farming landscape. With the high contrast of a thick blanket of snow set against the forest, I could locate and travel to these features without worrying about thick underbrush, ticks, or damaging tender plants underfoot.

Old farm road, now Bird Hollow Trail.

The forest that occupies the hollow is typical of Piedmont ridge and valley types: tulip poplar, black walnut, white oak on the slopes, and red oak on the ridge. None is particularly large, and wind-throw seemed the main reason for a toppled tree or leaner. The higher into the valley I hiked, the deeper the stream gashed into the hill, revealing high cut banks. This is a centuries-old landscape feature, common to areas once heavily farmed. As an environmental historian, I take a long view of nature and man on a landscape and as an artifact of past landscape use and appearance, stream scouring and straight-down-the-hill gashing may be the most reliable clue that this area was devoid of trees. This stream runs out of the hollow and joins the stream in the valley below. With a wide floodplain and gentler slope, the gashing ends.

I followed the valley stream for some time, crossing  trails of red fox and deer. Snowshoeing up into the wetlands that define the head of the valley, brushy areas harbored birds and grazing white tailed deer - by the dozens! The trail underfoot was packed solid ice beneath the fresh snow and I went down several times. The deer were mildly curious as to why I couldn't walk more than a few dozen yards without crashing. I left the established trail and sidestepped up to an old cattle path, clearly visible in the snow as a ledge in the valley slope that wound diagonally up to a high pasture, thick with goldenrod stems, briars, and small trees.

Downhill leaning osage orange hedge row - a thick layer of ice beneath the snow!

Looking back down at the valley I could see how animals have made trails along the boundaries of this wet meadow for a long time. From the hillside I could see deer highways that cut straight through the wetland (and the deer who made them nestled down in the warmth of grassy hummocks). The cattle trails of the past century circled the valley on higher ground intersected by modern roads beyond the suck of mud. Imagine farmers of a hundred years ago looking down at this valley now with its housing development across the way, modern (and busy) paved roads ringing the hollow and the wetlands, and an overgrown pasture holding twenty deer instead of fifty cattle.

Song Sparrow along in the pasture wetlands.

I topped out on top of the ridge with Bird Hollow just on the other side. I took out my binoculars and watched a red-shouldered hawk hunting in the wetland below. Sitting warm in my snowpants against an old osage orange hedgerow, I sat quietly for an hour and watched the drama of hunter and hunted play out. Finally the hawk scored a meal when it dropped into a hummock and came up with a rat. It perched very close to where I was sitting!

Red-shouldered hawk.

Farmers today keep wild edges intact around their fields and pastures, understanding that hawks help keep rodents under control. Agroecology, a cross-discplinary combination of agricultural sciences, conservation biology, and landscape ecology, allows for a new way for modern farmers to think about and utilize natural landscapes to help control pests, conserve resources, and build resiliency into working lands. Back in the day, however, hawks would have been shot out of the sky. Rough and wild edges would have been grazed down, burned, or put into cultivation.  Ideas about nature have changed over time, as have some (but not all) attitudes about wild things, but it seems some Americans still have issues with certain four-legged predators!

The more I looked, the more I saw.

The more I looked into the valley below, the more deer I saw! I upped my count to thirty, adding another ten bedded down on the opposite hill. With the absence of grazing cattle, the deer find plenty to eat.  The realist in me knows that this many deer yarded up in a small valley could be in trouble if another big storm moves in and they can't get beneath the snow and ice to find food. From this distance I could see dark patches of mud where they'd pawed and scraped their way to roots and shoots.

An old hayloading ramp almost obscured by brush.

Finished with my bird watch sit, I trekked over the hill and back into the woods. Here I saw an old cellar hole, spring house, corn crib silo footing, and the back wall of a bank barn. And more scrapes. Lots of them!  But these were much smaller compared to the scrapes in the wetlands. I soon observed flocks of sparrows settle into the snow and start a hop, scrape, jump up and back dance as they cleared a new patch of snow to reach the rich ground below.

Sparrow scrape.

Working in groups of ten or twenty birds, white-throated sparrows (and two fox sparrows!) attached a patch of snow and within minutes exposed grass and soil and all kinds of seeds, grubs, and good things to eat. I sat again, my back to the spring house wall and watched this energetic group open one scrape after another until - vroom! - a sharp-shinned hawk pivoted into the flock in hopes of getting a quick meal. Unsuccessfully, I might add. Within minutes the sparrows returned and the hopping and scraping began again.

Fox sparrow joining white-throats at a scrape.

Again I hopped off the trail and trekked back out to the old pasture to visit a classic 1940s osage orange hedgerow, one of my favorite landscape features of the park. Intentionally planted to create a living fence to hold cattle, the elder 'mock orange'  trees still support gate posts, rails, and barbed wire embedded in their heartwood. The conservation value of a mature hedge is incredible. Europeans, especially the Brits and Scots, have come to know (the hard way) the value of hedgerow conservation for protecting wildlife, wild plants, and edge habitat for bees. I wish the NRCS would start a hedgerow program here. Bringing these magnificent boundary features back through new plantings and careful management for those that escaped road widenings and brushing out of the 1970s and 80s would serve our native bees and birds very well.

Edges are interesting features. There are few if any examples of straight-line boundaries in nature, so when I come to an edge of habitat against the edge of different habitat, I'm pretty sure humans had something to do with it. The edge of a trail against the pasture, the edge of woods against the old field, a straight long rut in the snow along the valley floor, the lip of dark slate roof of the spring house against the slope of snowy woods - all are clues that the landscape has been altered by people. I find it endlessly fascinating how landscapes adapt and change over time when people walk away.

It was interesting to see an old pasture gate, still chained shut under lock, seeming to hold in old ghosts of dairy cows.  I could imagine the cows running up the old road, now the Bird Hollow Trail,  to fresh green pasture after the winter snows had gone. The main 1930s barn and milking parlor still stand, a beautiful renovation that serves as the nature center down the hill from here. And so, I decided to head that way and stop in to say hi to the staff there.

An elder among youngsters - 60 year old osage orange.

I asked the naturalist about the care or management of the old osage hedge. "It's a beauty isn't it?" she replied, "Most people don't notice it or ask about it. I'm glad you did!" We chatted a bit about old farmsteads and she gave me a few sites to visit - which I'm eager to see. She shared with me an old photo of the barn before its conversion to a nature center. And just as I was saying goodbye, that sharp-shinned made a pass for the center's bird feeding station. Unsuccessful, again.