Kelly, and other tweets,

I'll hazard a guess that the photos you saw were of the native prairies
and woodlands in the vicinity of Tacoma. They are believed to have
been maintained by burning by Indians, who relied heavily on acorn
crops. Oaks compete poorly with Douglas-fir, so they needed fire to
keep the DF out. (Ever wonder why acorns, a common food staple of
native Americans and many other peoples in temperate zones, were
dropped from diets when alternate food staples came along? You'd stop
wondering if you ever tried processing and eating them.)

At least two early explorers commented on how orchard-like (with
respect to tree spacing) the woodlands were. The Woodland/Prairies
were the first areas to be settled by Europeans, since they had good
grazing and weren't as dank, wet, and gloomy as the adjacent forests.
The Woodland/Prairies only occupied a small part of the west side,
however, so they were quickly covered by farms and ranches.

Kelly Cassidy
>
> 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
>
>
>
>