Later, when I finally made it to California, I learned that the birds of heaven, here called marble murrelets, nested in the lofty redwood boughs, and ten thousand mysteries were lodged in the fern-thickened shade of the forest floor. All those senescent stands will be harvested within the next ten years. Even age rotations are what those timberlands need. Good forest management will take care of that. When I graduated from the University of Maine in 1980, I had a B.S. in Forestry and they gave each graduate a white pine seedling, but still I had not found my tree.
Proverbs are the original field guides to life.
In Russia it is said that from all old trees comes either an owl or a devil, and this wisdom holds true in North America as well. Local legends and vernacular histories abound with tales of strange goings-on connected with trees. Near High Point, New York, for instance, there is the story of Rowland Bell, a barefooted fiddle player who lived in a log cabin and had quite a reputation as a healer. He would cut a lock of his patient's hair and place it in the hole of an aged chestnut tree that grew along the road nearby. The tree would then shake and tremble like an aspen and the patient would be cured, the malady having been shifted to the tree.