May 21, 2002
OPEN SEASON...ON HUMANS :
As Forests Reclaim the East, Man Struggles With Nature (JAMES P. STERBA, The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2002)It's not just an out-of-control white-tailed deer population that people increasingly love to hate. The wildlife wars are escalating as other wild animal populations soar and damage complaints mount. Nowhere are the battles as rancorous as in the eastern third of the United States, a region whose image of end-to-end
metropolises ringed with industrial belts, malls and traffic jams belies the comeback over many decades of the Eastern forest."Most Easterners don't realize it, but they live in a huge forest," says Gordon Batcheller, a New York State wildlife biologist. "I flew from Albany to Boston recently, and it's woods from one downtown to the other. But when you get down into it, you see it's full of people."
And wild animals. Indeed, it's probable, say some biologists and foresters, that more people live in closer proximity to more wild animals in the Eastern U.S. today than at any time in history anywhere on the planet.
"Certainly for North America it's hard to imagine a situation in which more people and more animals live in closer contact," says David R. Foster, a Harvard University biologist and director of the Harvard Forest, a 3,000-acre research preserve near Petersham, Mass.
While many smaller animals such as squirrels, raccoons and opossums never left, Dr. Foster says that large animals and birds are now making big comebacks: bear, moose, coyotes, beavers, turkeys, eagles, osprey and the ubiquitous deer. One reason is that the comeback of the forest has afforded them habitat and protection. At
the same time, people who live in sprawling leafy suburbs offer them safety and lots of food.
This is a particularly scary time of year up here in God's country (NH). The moose mothers have given their yearlings the heave-ho and they're now blundering around lost, stopping by the sides of roads to lick up the rock salt left over from the Winter. I was nearly killed when I hit a deer some years ago, and would have died if it had been a moose instead. The problem is that your car takes out their spindly legs and then their mammoth bodies come crashing through your windshield, decapitating the folks in the front seat or at least causing them a significant amount of head trauma. You can't thin the herd enough to suit me.
UPDATE :
WAIT, THERE'S HOPE! :
Almost a quarter of the world's mammals face extinction within 30 years, according to a United Nations report on the state of the global environment. (CORINNE PODGER BBC)