Robert Davis

Bob Davis, Executive Director of the Winnikee Land Trust, explains the importance of understanding the history of the Hudson Valley in managing the land. He gives an example of how he used his knowledge of the history to determine the age of a forest and understand its development. He also discusses the impact of the chestnut blight on the Hudson Valley, including the loss of the American chestnut tree and its effects on wildlife populations and forest composition. He mentions efforts to bring back the American chestnut using genetic techniques. Davis also talks about the indigenous history of the Hudson Valley, mentioning that the area was largely virgin forest with a significant presence of American chestnut trees. He explains how European settlement led to the clearing of the forests for various purposes, including farming and sheep pasture. This rapid conversion of forest to agriculture had a significant impact on wildlife populations, such as deer. Davis concludes by emphasizing t Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Hudson Valley Historian. Today, if you want to introduce yourself. I'm Bob Davis of Winnikee Land Trust, Executive Director of the Winnikee Land Trust, and a retired forester. Awesome. I just had a couple of questions for you today, Bob. First was, for one, what got you into, like, being interested in the history of the Hudson Valley and all of that? Or in this land history? Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry. No, no. Go ahead. Go ahead. It's kind of necessary to do what we do. At the Land Trust, we try to protect and preserve lands, but we go a little bit further than that. We actually try to manage them actively and keep them, hopefully, in better shape than they were in when we encountered them. In order to do that, I have to understand exactly how things came to be on those properties. How did we arrive at the present state? Which would enable me to understand what kinds of treatments we need to apply in order to bring about our desired future conditions. I'll give you a little example of that. I'll give you a preview of our event on Sunday. We're doing a little winter tree ID out at Ferncliff Forest, but we're also going to talk about the natural history of the Hudson Valley and the process, and how we can interpret the landscape at Ferncliff to learn a little bit more about how things happened in the Hudson Valley. One of the first things we want to do is try to date the age of the forest and try to determine what were the different activities that led to its current condition. I had some difficulties doing that at first, walking through the forest the other day. I stumbled upon an old American chestnut stone. I didn't know what it was at first, but it looked familiar. I cut it up, took a look inside. Sure enough, that's what it was. My history tells me that the chestnut blight blew through the Hudson Valley sometime between 1910 and 1914. Those trees were probably killed within about two to four years of the disease passing through. Given their size and the number of growth rings between the exterior diameter of the tree, I was able to figure out that these trees, the farms that these forests were growing on, were actually abandoned in about 1860. That helped me piece together the natural history of the forest. I could then use my knowledge of ecology to figure out what trees seeded in, what came after them, and how we actually arrived at where we are today. Knowing something about the natural history of the valley and when different events occurred helped me to understand how our forests actually developed. Going into that, my first question was about that chestnut. What caused all the chestnut to die? I know this is an infectious thing. I've always been interested because I'm a big fan of truffles. When I was younger, I was like, oh, why can't we find truffles here? I guess there's no chestnut trees anywhere. Well, that may be changing. Back in about 1904 is when most folks agree that chestnut blight, which was introduced from China, probably in Chinese chestnut wood that was probably in some packing material brought over a pole. They discovered it in 1904, actually at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, although some people say it's been around since at least 1893. Since 1904, it began to really just take over. It was able to spread. The fungal disease was able to spread. Actually, it was able to spread at about 50 miles a year. It really moved. It blew through the Hudson Valley. By the Hudson Valley, I mean all the way up the Hudson, up to about Lake George and further in about four years. It's basically just a disease that produces ... It's a fungus, but it produces a chemical called oxalic acid, which actually ... It gurgles the trees. That is, it kills the cambium layer that is the living layer, which helps to produce the cells that transport the nutrients to the leaves and water and things down to the ... Water from the roots up to the leaves and nutrients from the leaves down to the roots. That chemical was the real problem. More recently, up at the College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, both two of the researchers up there, Bill Powell and Chuck Maynard, using recombinant DNA techniques were able to come up with ... They were able to take a gene, a simple gene from wheat, and deposit that into the American chestnut. After a number of years of breeding, they were able to get to the point where it's about 300 times as resistant to the chestnut blight as Chinese chestnuts are, which co-evolved with it. Wow. There's a very good chance that we might even be able to bring back American chestnut. Sorry, I kind of drifted off. No, no, no. I'm just going to tap on those little bits. What kind of impact did that have on the Hudson Valley at that time period? You said early 1900s. What happened to the people here, and what did that do? The impact is intense. American chestnut was one of the most versatile woods in the forest, not only in terms of its rock resistance and its utility in building, but the chestnuts itself that it produced with massive volumes, massed the wildlife. It was one of the major species feeding passenger pigeons. It was a major species feeding just about every species of wildlife. Instantly, within just a few short years, it was all gone. It had an immense impact on wildlife populations up and down the Hudson Valley, which have already been significantly impacted by earlier history throughout the valley. It also had a tremendous impact on the resulting species composition of the forest, and what took over, and was able to grow up and to try to replace American chestnut in these forests. Again, the various species composition of our forests and the wildlife populations that they sustain today are all due to that very incredible short period in which we lost almost an entire species. Another question. How much do you know about the indigenous history of the Hudson Valley and before European settlers? What was the Hudson Valley like then? A heck of a lot of American chestnut. It probably comprised somewhere between a third and a quarter of all of the trees in the forest. Prior to European settlement, it was largely virgin forest. What you would see today is what you'd probably see in certain portions of the Adirondacks today. Trees that were 200 to 400 years old. Old growth stands with a variety of different heights and different ages and cohorts of trees. If you think about the Hudson Valley, remember what happened here after European settlement. Essentially, by sometime between about 1810 and about 1870, the entire state of New York was virtually cleared of trees. It was almost all grass. A few areas in the Catskills and the Adirondacks and a few swampy areas or rocky ridges was all that was left in terms of trees. We had such immense need for the material, whether it were the Hudson Valley to fire the 100 or 150 brick kilns that lined the Hudson River, to use as firewood to heat colonial homes, to use as building materials. We had the whole sheep fever episode when, as a result of Napoleon invading Spain in 1908, one of our ambassadors to Portugal actually shipped out a whole bunch of Merino sheep that were previously under embargo by Spain. They brought them back to the U.S., shipped them to lots of different friends, as any good politician would do, one of which was Robert Livingston up in Claremont, who bred the sheep. Farming was basically the first market farming opportunity up and down the Hudson River because of the War of 1812 and the embargo against British woolens. If you could make your own wool in clothing here, you had a market opportunity that never existed before. People just started clearing whatever was left, whatever hadn't been cleared at that point, they cleared and they put in sheep pasture. I know I'm going in quite a direction here, but that conversion, that very rapid conversion of essentially virgin primeval forest to essentially agricultural fields in the course of less than 100 years, more like 50 years, you virtually extirpated deer from the state, believe it or not. There virtually were none left. Then when we finally abandoned the farms, the eerie canal opened up in 1825 or so. By about 1850, maybe 1870, everybody realized that if you go out to the western New York, the Lake Plains, you've got real soil. What are we doing farming these rocks when we could be out and get 10 foot deep soil out on the Lake Plains? The eerie canal enabled people to move out west, start farming, and they started abandoning the farms here, which we grew the trees, and we created this new environment in which it's essentially a candy store for deer. It created the almost perfect environment for them. Now the populations have skyrocketed and they've become a significant pest. We've wrought a lot of change as a result of our historic activity, the Industrial Revolution, and the history of the Hudson Valley. It's incredible. Trying to work with those, trying to understand how that all happened and how the forests we have today came to be is what informs the way we treat them in order to try to sustain them long term. Going into that as well, what relates to the Hudson Valley history destroyed all the natural predators or was it just hunting? Normally the deer would be balanced out on the cement. You almost didn't have to worry about hunting because we basically pushed the deer almost out of the entire state of New York because there was no more habitat. The deer populations back then were much lower than they are today. When we cleared all the forests and burned everything to open up the fields and started plowing everything, that pushed them further and further north, east, and west. There virtually wasn't all the remaining habitat for them. It wasn't until we started abandoning the farms that the populations were able to rebound. It wasn't even about extirpating the predators, although we did that too. We almost wouldn't have had to have done that. The deer would have disappeared anyway. Now it's a bit of the opposite situation. We've got dramatically overpopulated deer habitat and they're really wreaking havoc on the forests and their ability to regenerate. You were talking about, was timber a big export in the past for the Hudson Valley or was it just used locally in manufacturing and stuff like that? Actually, historically, other than really the old mass pines that the British Navy were interested in, most of the material was used locally. One of the biggest industries in the Hudson Valley was bricks in the mid to late 19th century. They used the charcoal to fire the kilns and they used the coal in the brick itself. If you think about it, let me back up a little bit. Think about a completely denuded Hudson Valley. You've basically got nothing but grass. Most of the trees had been cut. They were used, again, in the brick manufacturer, would be used for building material, be used for firewood, be used for a lot of different things. What is it that's so characteristic of the forests today in the Hudson Valley or even the agricultural lands? It's these old stone walls that you see, right? Nobody built stone walls on purpose if they could avoid it. That's a lot of work. It would be so much easier to build these wooden split rattle fences, the old zigzag fences. The reason they had to move to rock is there wasn't any more wood. It was all gone. They actually had used everything. Mostly in local manufacture and just keeping warm and then manufacturing byproducts. It got to the point where we had virtually used up all the wood. It caused people to have to build their agricultural fencing out of rock that they would otherwise rather not have had to work with. That's just so crazy to think about. If I look out my window, there's trees for miles and miles in every single direction. It was purely out of need that they had to build these stone walls. It was gone. The wood was already cut and used, whether it was to open the fields to pasture sheep for the marina wool market or whether it was to create charcoal for the brick market or to heat your home with firewood or build your home with the material. We essentially used it all. We're really forced. In the early 19th century, we're talking about 1800 through about 1850, when all of these walls were built. It was that really brief period. I thought I saw somewhere estimated that there were about a quarter of a million miles of stone wall that were built in about a 40 to 50 year period. It's incredible. What's even more incredible is once the Erie Canal opened, people realized that there was real soil further west and that you could farm and ship your goods back to the city through the canal. The farms were starting to become abandoned. The peak of that abandonment was right around 1870. The abandonment period probably lasted up through the 30s. All of those forests that you're seeing out back all regrew since the beginning of the 20th century. It's amazing the resilience that we see, even in these forests that have been beat up for hundreds of years. Yeah, that's really amazing. I guess most of the trees here are fairly young then, in terms of tree. Yeah, that's exactly the problem. Well, that's not a problem, but what we did was we went through this primeval forest where everything ranged in age from maybe several hundred years down to relatively young material. We homogenized the whole thing. We cut everything down and it all began to regrow at the same time. Now, instead of having these multi-cohort forests, everything is uniformly the same age or very close to being uniformly the same age. That again imparts certain challenges to wildlife populations that require habitat of different age structure, a different composition that comes with age. We've homogenized everything and we've narrowed that age structure. One of the things we try to do when we acquire new properties is we try to restore that former diversity. It can be a challenge, but knowing some of the history and how we arrived at where we are today helps us to devise the kinds of treatments we need to implement in order to rebuild that structure. Yeah, we are at 20 minutes. I don't know, let's keep it around 20 minutes. Just concluding, you would say that that's one of the most profound ways that we've had an impact on the current Hudson Valley would be the massive clear-cutting of all the forests and them all being used up and then now that we just have trees exclusively at one age. Absolutely. That's going to have an impact that lasts the next several hundred years. Nowhere else in the country have we had that sort of an extensive impact on the landscape as we have here in Hudson Valley. It's just incredible. Wow. So thank you so much for coming on. So everyone knows Robert Davis, head of the Winnikee Trust, and they do a lot of great work in Hudson Valley. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. I really appreciate it, Leo. It's been fun. Yeah, I'm so glad I got to talk to you. I learned so much. It's such a good observation. I look outside and I'm now just realizing that the trees are a really similar age. They are. They are. Come with us on Sunday, this Sunday. You'll never look at the forest the same way again. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Talk to you again soon. Thank you. Bye.