The Ever Changing Landscape

If you love wildlife, you probably consider yourself lucky to live in the Granite State. We’re rich in a wide variety of birds, mammals, and other animals because we are rich in a wide variety of habitats.

Ideally, these habitats will be allowed to cycle naturally through their ecological ebbs and flows. For example, the old beaver dam near my home blew out two years ago during a big storm. The pond is now becoming more of a wet meadow and will probably turn into a swamp someday. The types of birds and frogs and other wildlife we see down there has changed along with the landscape — but that’s what supposed to happen. Eventually, beavers will probably move back in, cut down all the swamp maples, and turn it back into a pond again. And the wildlife will adapt once more.

Forests go through these cycles too, of course. Anyone who has tried to keep a field open in New Hampshire knows that it’s hard to keep up with all the shrubs and saplings trying to take over. In fact, because they turn to forests so fast, fields and meadows are probably the rarest habitat in our state. And they support the rarest types of wildlife as a consequence.

A newly re-grown forest will eventually mature into a completely new habitat-type, if left undisturbed. That’s neither good or bad, it’s simply natural. That forest, now old growth, typically has less diversity of wildlife, when compared to a woodland with trees of all ages. But they do provide homes for a very specific group of animals.

Still, if all of our forests became old-growth, the animals that live in meadows would not be able to find a home. Besides, if all our forests looked alike, it’d get rather monotonous.