wild thing
More than meadows: Reserve’ s grasslands preserve critical habitat for threatened birds
by Rick Borchelt
Imagine what Montgomery County looked like in the century or so before European colonization. The last major Ice Age had ended around 10,000 years before, and the tundra and conifer forests of that cold, wet era had quickly been replaced by what we see today— mixed hardwood forest adapted to a warmer, drier climate. These towering, majestic woodlands— dominated by chestnut, oak, and hickory on the dry ridges and slopes, tulip poplar, sycamore, gum, and maple along the waterways— formed a mostly unbroken canopy over the county.
Prehistoric peoples had arrived in Maryland well before the Ice Age ended, perhaps as early as 18,000 years ago, living in small hunting and gathering groups following a nomadic lifestyle tied to the movements of bison, elk, mammoth and other megafauna. Very gradually, over millennia, indigenous people shifted from hunting those nowextinct prehistoric grazers to the deer, bear, and beaver we know in Maryland today.
The new prey animals were not migratory, allowing huntergatherers to establish larger, more permanent camps and villages. At the same time, they began smallscale cultivation of wild plants around the villages— sunflower, amaranth, gourds, and knotweed. They probably cleared small areas around the camps to create sunny glades for their new crops.
Nuts, fruits, and berries were also an important part of the lives and cultures of Montgomery County’ s early Americans, and here these peoples wielded fire aggressively to manage the landscape. Rather than clearing swathes of forest with fire to establish large-scale agriculture, however, pre-Colonial people used fire to clear just the forest understory, preserving the trees while making it easier to harvest nuts and acorns underneath them, and encouraging the growth of blueberries, blackberries, pawpaws, and grapes.
These carefully managed forests proved ripe for European exploitation, first for logs to support building homes, sheds, and palisades, and later to launch a robust shipbuilding industry. Agricultural crops the
Europeans favored— tobacco, maize, wheat, and barley, in particular— required vast acreages to be cleared. European settlers rapidly converted Maryland’ s forested piedmont into a patchwork of small plantations, farms, and pastures.
The change brought about by this shift in land use profoundly affected Maryland’ s plants and animals. Elk, wolves, and mountain lions were wiped out quickly; forest-dwelling birds like grouse and turkey dwindled as their food disappeared.
But some birds thrived in the new, open environment: grassland birds— doves, quail, and some songbirds among them.
This new habitat didn’ t last very long, however, historically speaking. By the middle of the 20th century, the iconic rolling farm fields we so admire were already shrinking, victims of urban sprawl, transportation corridors, and the fierce economics of agribusiness. Shrinking, too, were habitats critical to grassland bird survival.
The same was true across the American landscape, and today, grassland birds are among the most critically endangered groups of birds. Populations of most grassland birds have dropped by almost half since the 1960s, and the declines have been even steeper for many species in the Northeast and Mid- Atlantic, making places like the Agricultural Reserve increasingly vital for their survival.
PHOTO: wib middleton