Tweeters,

I spent Friday afternoon at the Washington Historical Museum in Tacoma. I
paused for
a minute or two whenever I found an old photograph that provided a landscape
view.
The forests in these photos taken around the turn of the century were strikingly
open. In one photo of a coastal indian village, the surrounding forest was
dominated
by trees that had sparse foliage, many were broken off and a high percentage had
large areas of white on the trunk where the bark appeared to be gone. There
was little understory as well (perhaps fires from the indian village got
loose and burned it off on a regular basis?). Other photographs showed
stands of trees that were similarly high in dead, broken, and barkless
trees. The level of decadence and death in these stands looked enormous.

The photos I was looking at were primarily on the coast or along major
rivers, sometimes
where the first white settlements were aspiring to become the major cities
they are
today. I suspect that these areas were the first to have their large trees
taken
in the "high-grading" that was typical for the time. So, the forest that
was left was
rather a mess, and I have heard many biologists refer to the "messy" logging
techniques
of old.

Anyway, looking at these pictures gives a real sense of the boom times that
might have
occurred for certain cavity nesters and species that inhabit forests with a
very "open"
structure. There have been Tweeters' discussions in the past on this topic.
I know that Dennis Paulson cited the Western Bluebird, perhaps the Lewis'
Woodpecker and Purple Martin, as species that were formerly more abundant in
western Washington because of the effects of the early logging. It's
fascinating to see pictures from that time period.

There were also plenty of pictures of huge trees that had been felled by
loggers. I didn't see any photos of landscapes dominated by stands of the
huge trees that comprised pre-logging stands (probably a difficult photo to
obtain because of the inability to see the forest for the trees).

Kelly McAllister