A Breeding Ground for Conservation Biologists

readers, I trace theroots of my environmentalism back to childhood. I grewup covered by All-inspiring nature, surrounded by ex-tensive forests of often forbidding aspect. While veryyoung my expeditions into the big woods were under-standably of limited range and duration given the manydangers lurking amongst the immense trees. With age,my explorations increased and knowledge of the deni-zens of the forest replaced some of my fear.Survival instincts were strong among youngsters grow-ing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1950s, as theyprobably were and are everywhere. Village elders taughtus about edible wild plants and the behaviors of animalsto be feared and those to be stalked and eaten. The farewas often lean and the hunting hard but basswood buds,wild asparatus stalks, and white pine needles would of-ten get us through the almost daily famine betweenlunch and mid-afternoon cookies and milk. Jewelweedjuice was the preferred topical ointment for the variousstings, bites, burns, and rashes we accumulated.For a fairly non-violent adult, my childhood was sur-prisingly martial, and most of my military maneuverstook place in the big woods or in the savanna (read“schoolyard”) just to the north. Because rival tribes of-ten encroached upon our hunting grounds, we were for-ever vigilant or at least knew the fastest path to thesafety of a friendly garage or back porch. Ballistic botanywas our primary mode of territorial defense; our weaponcaches were stocked with horsechestnuts for long-rangeand sweetgum infructescenses for medium-range ex-changes of fire. Montmorillonitic clays also provided aready supply of dirt clods for hurling at enemies. Forcloser engagements our weaponry was most diverse inautumn when crabapples, acorns, and hickory nutswere plentiful. Hand-to-hand entanglements, which wetended to avoid because of the ferocity and size of someof the rival 7- and 8-year old barbarians, often involvedapplication of burdock infructescences to the hair andsweaters of our enemies; the latent impacts of these epi-zoochroic propagules were often substantial when parentstried to disentangle them (my hair remained closelycropped into my teens mostly for this reason).Pitched battles often occurred around our many arbo-real and subterranean forts. Small outposts of easy ac-cess were constructed in white pine trees. Larger estab-lishments were precariously perched on the moresubstantial branches of open-grown oaks. Our experi-ments in tree biomechanics were exhaustive and on sev-eral occasions taught us about gravity and the frightfullypoor aerodynamics of young humans. Excavation of un-derground forts provided a short-lived but importantpart of our training as naturalists. Although we nevermade it down so far as to hear people speaking Chinese(our goal), we penetrated several soil horizons includingdense pans of translocated clays, were swamped byperched water tables, and unearthed deeply buried peb-bles rounded in tumbling streams long ago. Our subter-ranean endeavors were terminated because of the effec-tiveness of our pits as large mammal traps (what wasMr. Allen doing out in the forest at night?). Fortunately,by the time of his entrapment, the accumulation of beetlesand drowned worms had cooled our pedological ardors.I stopped building tree forts many years ago (now Icall them arboreal observation platforms) and of courseonly climb trees in the interest of science, but I retainthe lessons I learned as a child in what turns out to be avery small patch of forest. After a lapse of many years, Irecently returned to my home town. The forest still ex-ists, probably because it is completely surrounded bythe split-level houses favored in the 1950s; you can actu-ally see through the forest from one side to the other.Tree forts and signs of other youthful activity are stillpresent, but our constructions are long gone (except forsome bent nails in what must be a very slow-growingoak). The sweetgum from which we stripped bark has re-covered, contrary to the admonitions of Mr. Allen, the self-