They said they had been managing their land for well past 150 years and had learned to care for it as thoughtfully as any farmer did his own ancestral land. They were farmers and their crop was northern white pine. They said it might be different in other places but up here you cleared the land and let it rest for 30 or 40 years-- then you culled out all the underbrush and selected for your prime timber. The rest was pulped, or returned to the soil.
And it worked great. Coincidentally for the same period of time the lobstermen had evolved a set of traditional rules to manage the lobster that appeared to be better than anything that might have come up from Washington. That is, there were still more lobster out there than you could bring to market, and the only size that was pretty well depleted was the old jumbo whoppers, 100 years old (lobster are like beaver and racoons-- they never stop growing). But it was a good system, one that might not work anywhere else, just as anyone else's rules might not work there.
So if you develop a pristine landscape, are you going to let a transforming species like beaver (or in Africa, elephants) take the place of man and turn it into something else? Not always. I think sometimes you're going to want to step in, as an agent of modern landscaping management practise, and clear the varmints out so you can end up with more like what you want.
And if you want beaver, be sure to put your request in with all the municipalities. They don't have enough foster homes for urban beaver, so I suspect a lot of the varmints caught tree poaching in the city park end up as landfill.
Mike Elvin
Fuquay-Varina, NC
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