Arborist Fred Breglia admires the view downstream from the "Gallery of Giants" in Zoar Valley
PHOTO: David Yarrow 2001 |
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GOWANDA, New York—About 415 acres of woods on the southwest shore of Hemlock Lake are untouched, ancient old-growth forest and may constitute the largest such tract in western New York. That's the claim made by a group of forest ecologists in Buffalo, who have been researching, mapping and cataloging old growth forest remnants for more than a decade.
So far, they have mapped 24,000 acres of old growth in western New York on 57 separate tracts. The Hemlock tract—No. 57—is the largest find.
| Characteristics of
ancient old growth forests |
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"It knocked my socks off," said Bruce Kershner of Buffalo, a nature writer and forest ecologist. "Parts of it looked like ancient virgin forest—the rarest of the rare—never touched by human beings, a chain saw or an ax." His team visited the area in July and mapped it. They planned to return yesterday for further exploration and measurements.
On Hemlock Lake, the old growth is tucked into some forbidding terrain, marked by at least 15 steep ravines that slope towards the lake. It's owned by the city of Rochester, part of 7,200 acres of city-owned land bordering Hemlock and Canadice lakes, which supply the city's water system. Edward Doherty, Rochester's commissioner of environmental services, said the city's forest management plan has inventoried the land around the lakes, but does not make clear that any of it contains old-growth forest.
"We'd like to see what their information is," he said of the Buffalo-area researchers. If the claim is true, added Doherty, the city would probably forgo any plans to log or add logging roads in the area.
Don Root, the city's watershed conservationist, said he was aware of very old trees along steep portions of the Hemlock Lake shore—but would like to know more about how the researchers define "old growth" forest. Within three weeks, he said, the city will meet again with the Sierra Club, Rochester Region, area landowners and others concerned about the issue.
"We're looking at (the old growth claim) more closely now," said Root.
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The realization that the Hemlock tract was so large—about 2.5 miles long—took the Buffalo scientists by surprise. One fallen hemlock tree there had 515 rings, one for each year, making it a seedling before Columbus made his famous voyage.
"It was like counting the grooves on a vinyl record,' said Kershner.
He said the tract exceeds in size and botanical complexity a 400-acre area of old growth forest in Allegany State Park, two hours south of Rochester. An old growth tract is assessed by dating tree core samples and by noting features of old growth forests. Those include undulating forest floor terrain, a lack of uniformity in tree height and unusual biological diversity.
Kershner and his team have recorded old growth tracts in counties as far east as Wayne County, as far south as Allegany and as far west as Erie and Niagara counties. Near Rochester, there are old growth remnants in Bentley Woods, near Victor, Ontario County; in the privately owned Big Woods area of Webster, bordering Lake Ontario; and at Hemlock Knoll, a five-acre patch within 1,800-acre Bergen-Byron Swamp in Genesee County.
Unlike wetlands, old growth tracts are not formally mapped or protected by the state. But academic authorities estimate that New York has about 350,000 acres of old growth forest, mostly on public land in the Adirondacks and the Catskills.
Author and old growth expert Robert Leverett of Holyoke, Massachusetts, one of the founders of the Eastern Native Tree Society, was expected to visit the tract yesterday. "It certainly exceeds our expectations, given what we had assumed survived" in western New York, he said. "The assumption was that the rest of New York would have a spot or two here and there of 5 or 10 acres."
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Kershner and others estimate that western New York has retained about 0.25 percent of its original forest cover. Whatever survived was preserved in estates of the wealthy; in areas set aside by fiat, including the Adirondacks; and in steep, remote areas that were hard to reach with the logging technology of the 19th century.
Leverett said old growth tracts give scientists a rare glimpse of a primeval forest's intense complexity, including canopy-limb lichens that help fix nitrogen and colonies of underground fungi that stretch for acres. They might also provide a sort of biological baseline for research into global warming. And such places have cathedral-like aesthetic value, as living remnants of pre-settlement history, said Leverett.
"They shake us back into reality about the grander order of things."
Leverett and Kershner have co-authored a book, The Sierra Club Guide to Ancient Forests of the Northeast, which will be published at this time next year by Random House. It will include about 20 examples in the western New York and Finger Lakes regions—though not the Hemlock Lake tract, which is too hard to get to.
| see also:
Zoar Valley is gorge-ous Ecologists find old growth forest Nature's cathedrals Our forests primeval |
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Leverett planned to measure the height of trees in the old growth tract, using a laser range finder and other high-tech tools.
The Hemlock Lake old growth includes stands of hemlock, evergreens and maple on steep slopes. Most surprising, said Kershner, are its stands of hardwoods like oak and ash growing on relatively flat terrain. Normally, such trees would have been the first to fall to the logger's ax, he said.
