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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Neel, Leon, 1927–
The art of managing longleaf : a personal history of the StoddardNeel Approach / Leon Neel with Paul S. Sutter and Albert G. Way. p. cm.
1. Longleaf pine—Southern States—History. 2. Forest management—Southern States—History. I. Sutter, Paul. II. Way, Albert G. III. Title.
sd397.p59n44 2010
634.9'751—dc22
2009029173
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
To my wife, Julia Greene Neel, and our daughters, Julie and Susan
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The Art of Managing Longleaf
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Forestry beyond One Generation
by Paul S. Sutter and Albert G. Way
We first met Leon Neel in, of all places, a parking lot. It was a radiant morning in downtown Thomasville, Georgia, in the spring of 2004. Just two miles west of us lay some of the most beautiful land in the southern coastal plain, land that we knew contained prime examples of an endangered longleaf-grassland biome that once stretched for tens of millions of acres in all directions. We had been invited by the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center at Ichauway to discuss undertaking an oral history project centered on Leon’s life and work with the southern longleaf pine. Our liaison, Kevin McIntyre, had carefully described what they had in mind as we drove from the Jones Center, located in Baker County south of Albany, to Thomasville, about
an hour to the southeast. Kevin also made clear that several other candidates were vying for the project and that gaining Leon’s trust would be critical to our chances. So we were eager to meet Leon and make a good impression. We were also keen on seeing those magnificent longleaf woodlands.
As we chatted with Kevin in the parking lot, Leon drove up in an old long-bed Chevy, its cab littered with the debris of doing business in the woods. He sprang from the truck, greeted each of us with a firm handshake, and after a bit of small talk, suggested we head out of town. We were clearly not the first people to be interested in his work, but Leon is a gracious man, and he will talk eagerly to almost anyone about the landscape to which he has devoted his life. And as we listened, we quickly realized that this project, if we were lucky enough to get the assignment, would be a special opportunity.
You do not have to spend much time with Leon Neel in the longleaf woodlands that he has managed to learn that they are filled not only with ecological diversity and a potentially sustainable supply of timber but also with stories. While Kevin had made it plain that the Jones Center hoped such an oral history project would capture a detailed rendering of Leon’s forestry practices in his own words, he also intimated that the stories Leon had to tell about the woods and their inhabitants were as rich as his applied ecological insights. After several years of working with Leon on this project, we are now convinced that those stories are in fact part and parcel of his ecological management approach. Leon has taught us many things, but one of the most important is that if you do not have stories to tell about the lands you work and love, how can you hope to protect them? This book, then, is about the history and tenets of Leon Neel’s approach to land management and the stories that inform it.
Our first stop that morning was Greenwood Plantation. It was, in a word, breathtaking. Leon refers to Greenwood often in this book, and from a longleaf conservation standpoint it is arguably the best known of the Thomasville-Tallahassee properties. Like
so many former antebellum plantations in the Red Hills, as the surrounding region is known, Greenwood passed from southern patrimony to northern money after the Civil War and eventually landed in the hands of Oliver Hazard Payne, a Cleveland businessman with Standard Oil connections. At his death in 1917 Payne left Greenwood to his nephew Payne Whitney, who in turn left it to his son, John Hay “Jock” Whitney, in 1927. It has been in the Whitney family ever since. The “Home Place” of Greenwood, as the plantation’s central property is called, is about four thousand acres, a quarter of which is aptly referred to as the “Big Woods.”
There are many patches of forest called the Big Woods in the South, and they are all special, even those mythical big woods of William Faulkner’s fiction. The Big Woods of Greenwood, however, bear little resemblance to the once-prodigious bottomland forests of Faulkner’s Mississippi Delta. For one thing, these Big Woods still exist. For another, they are upland pine savanna rather than river and swamp hardwood. Frequently called “the best of the last,” Greenwood’s thousand-acre Big Woods is arguably the most remarkable stand of longleaf pine grassland remaining in the southern coastal plain. It is an old-growth, multiaged woodland with some longleaf trees more than four hundred years old, their flattened crowns betraying their age. The understory of the Big Woods is burned frequently—at least every two years—and once grown back, its diverse mix of native warm-season grasses, legumes, forbs, and shrubs sparkles when the sun hits it right. The Big Woods is a full-color specter of the vast and legendary coastal plain forests now preserved mostly in old sepia-toned photographs. For its existence we can partly thank Leon Neel and his mentor, Herbert Stoddard. Leon has helped to manage Greenwood for over fifty years, and Stoddard worked it for twenty-five years before that. It was their primary laboratory and show place, and Leon is justifiably proud of it.
Herbert Stoddard developed, and Leon Neel perfected, an ecological approach to forestry practice before anyone had coined the phrase “ecological forestry.” Much like present-day ecological
foresters, Stoddard and Neel sought to mimic natural-disturbance events and other ecological processes through controlled burning and sustainable timber harvests, while simultaneously maintaining and enhancing the longleaf woodlands’ biological function and diversity. The Stoddard-Neel Approach, as their method came to be called, is more a set of principles than a textbook forestry method. As a result, those who like their forestry methods rendered in neat, abstract formulas have often expressed frustration with the approach. Nonetheless, when carefully practiced over the long term, Stoddard-Neel is one of the few forest management techniques that ensures the survival of ecological integrity and function from generation to generation while still allowing for substantial timber harvests. Continuity, then, is at the core of the Stoddard-Neel Approach—continuity of diverse biological life, continuity of timber resources, and continuity of human pleasure in the aesthetic beauty of places such as Greenwood. Although neither of us knew that much about longleaf woodlands back in 2004, we had done some preparatory reading for our first meeting with Leon. We knew a little about how the longleafgrassland system worked, about its history, and about the various scientific arguments for why it needed to be preserved. But neither of us was quite prepared to make sense of the unusual beauty of Greenwood. Yet that aesthetic reaction is the foundation of the Stoddard-Neel Approach. Many foresters are quick to dismiss aesthetics as a proper measure of good forestry, or they are uncomfortable with a set of values that seems not only far removed from the efficient production of timber but sometimes even hostile to it. Leon Neel, and Herbert Stoddard before him, however, used the look of the woods as a gauge to measure their health. Indeed, we were not long into our initial tour of Greenwood when Leon educated us on the way a longleaf woodland should look. First, he instructed, a healthy longleaf woodland allows one to see a great distance through the trees but also always to see trees. As he makes clear in the memoir that follows, that long look through the forest, which early quail hunters in the region prized, is an important
metric of several critical functional aspects of longleaf ecology and management. Second, Leon was quick to point to the many small patches, or “domes,” of regeneration that dotted the understory. Those were the future of the forest, he insisted, as important as the gnarled flattops to his practice of forestry beyond one generation. When inspecting the woodlands he manages, Leon is quick to admire good, thick patches of regeneration in the small openings made by his careful forestry practice, and we have come to take joy in them too. Third was the diversity of the understory as it existed across a landscape gradient defined by altitude and moisture. We stopped frequently to admire the seasonal blooms of orchids and other wildflowers and to note how the dry uplands gave way to thicker growth in the hardwood drains that ran through the Big Woods. While Leon insists that you can gauge the health of a longleaf woodland by how it looks, he also has taught us that no two healthy longleaf woodlands look exactly alike. Indeed, part of the aesthetic joy to be taken from these landscapes comes precisely in recognizing how geology, soils, microclimates, moisture gradients, and disturbance histories sculpted them into a once-vast mosaic. Many of Stoddard’s and Neel’s most important ecological and management insights came from plumbing their sense of the diverse beauty of these woodlands. This is one reason why Leon has consistently insisted that the Stoddard-Neel Approach is an art, not an exact science.
The Stoddard-Neel Approach took shape in what was once one of North America’s signature biomes: the longleaf pine savannas and woodlands of the southeastern coastal plain. Its original range extended from southern Virginia through the Deep South to east Texas, forming a ninety-million-acre bow of land staggering in its biological diversity. Like the prairies of the American Midwest, it is a historic plant association that now exists only in small patches and fragments. Within this vast bioregion, the specific area surrounding Thomasville, Georgia, and Tallahassee, Florida, loomed large for Stoddard and Neel. Known as the Red
Hills, this section mostly escaped the wave of industrial timbering that swept through the coastal plain at the turn of the twentieth century. As a result, when Herbert Stoddard first came to the Red Hills in 1924, he encountered large contiguous blocks of functioning longleaf woodlands that few other parts of the coastal plain could match. Within these woodlands, he developed an innovative model of conservation management.
Many of the stories Leon told us, both as we toured Greenwood that first day of our acquaintance and over the subsequent years of working with him, were about Herbert Stoddard and his pioneering work. Indeed, to know Leon Neel is to know about “Mr. Stoddard,” as Leon still respectfully refers to his former boss and mentor. Herbert Stoddard can justifiably be called the Aldo Leopold of the Southeast. While he never produced a volume as elegant as Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, he reached many of the same conclusions about the need to think ecologically and act ethically in relation to the land. Indeed, Stoddard and Leopold were good friends and mutual influences, and Leopold was quick to give credit to Stoddard for land management innovations often ascribed to Leopold. But compared with trained conservation experts such as Leopold, Stoddard’s background was striking in what it lacked. Raised in a family of modest means, he had no formal education beyond primary school. Even so, by the end of his career, he was widely recognized as the “father” of wildlife management and as a pioneering if controversial figure in the nascent field of fire ecology. To those legacies we hope to add “ecological forester.”
Herbert Stoddard was born in 1889, the second child of a working-class family in Rockford, Illinois. In 1893 Stoddard’s stepfather gambled on the central Florida land boom, moving the family south to have a go at growing oranges. Stoddard’s memories of his early childhood years spent wandering and working in Florida’s inland longleaf forests stayed with him for a lifetime. When the family’s immature orange grove succumbed to a big freeze in 1895, young Herbert started spending time with local
cattlemen and gained a nascent understanding of how fire worked in the longleaf system. He would continuously draw on that early experience in the Florida backwoods in his later wildlife work.
After seven hard years on the Florida frontier, his family moved back to Rockford in 1900, where Stoddard soon tired of school and took off to work on his uncle’s farm in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin. There he met a local taxidermist named Ed Ochsner, and he began an apprenticeship that eventually led to taxidermy jobs at the Milwaukee Public Museum and the Field Museum in Chicago. Stoddard’s specialty was birds, and he soon made the necessary connections through ornithological fieldwork to land an unusual position with the U.S. Bureau of the Biological Survey (bbs) in 1924. Landowners in the Red Hills had been negotiating with the bbs about launching a field investigation of the life history of the bobwhite quail in their area. They promised to fund the study if the bbs would handle the administrative work and appoint a suitable investigator. After a nationwide search, the bbs offered the job to Stoddard. The venture became known as the Cooperative Quail Investigation (cqi), a name that reflected the public-private nature of the initiative. Stoddard was charged with establishing a research station in the Red Hills to study the population dynamics of bobwhite quail and to implement strategies to ensure their increase, largely for the purposes of recreational hunting. The results of his pioneering study, however, would extend far beyond the fate of that one bird and its usefulness to wealthy hunters.1
When Stoddard arrived in the Red Hills, he entered a social landscape of astonishing wealth and undeniable poverty. As in the rest of the South, tenantry and sharecropping were staples of the agricultural economy in the Red Hills, and the crop-lien system was a firmly entrenched economic reality, keeping landless farmers in a cycle of debt. Landowners rented out land, implements, and fertilizer in exchange for a portion of a crop that rarely made, and the debt piled high for most tenants. Economic and social disparities between the races were defining features of the Red Hills, as they were throughout the South. White sharecroppers were
present, as were black landowners, but the converse was far more common. This was the social landscape of the Red Hills in 1924, though there was one important distinction between it and much of the rest of the South.2
Over the previous several decades, the Red Hills had become the winter home of some of the nation’s wealthiest industrialists and the birthplace of the southern quail preserve. In the closing days of Reconstruction, Thomasville’s leadership began positioning the town to capture part of a growing market of health-seeking tourists from the North. Soon, the Red Hills became known for its well-drained rolling hills and its large expanses of open longleaf pine woodlands. This was just the sort of place recommended by physicians of the day to combat tuberculosis and many other socalled urban diseases. The resinous needles of pine trees, in particular, were thought to filter air in ways that made it particularly salubrious, and vigorous activity among these trees was a familiar prescription for remedying poor health. In the South, the longleaf pine was supreme among the pine species, and few places could match the quality of the Red Hills’ longleaf woodlands. During the 1880s and 1890s, then, northerners in growing numbers wintered in Thomasville, occupying grand new hotels like the Piney Woods and Mitchell House, and they increasingly took to the fields and forests in search of healthy recreation.
Sport hunting bobwhite quail became especially popular among this wintering set, as quail make for an exciting hunt. Hunted over the point of well-trained dogs (usually pointers or setters), a quail covey usually lies still until flushed, when a dramatic eruption of birds tests the accuracy of even the finest shooters. Much of the rural South harbored ideal environmental conditions for bobwhite quail in the years following the Civil War. Sharecropping and tenantry may have been economically degrading for the human inhabitants of the South, but the resulting land-use patterns provided an ecological bounty for such wildlife as quail. The bobwhite quail is a ground-nesting bird that thrives in the patchy early successional habitats found in small-scale, preindustrial agricultural
landscapes. The field edges and hedgerows of the tenant landscape provided perfect nesting sites and escape cover from predators, and the laid-by and abandoned fields produced a similar mix of food-producing vegetation. In the Red Hills the remaining longleaf forest and its open understory of early successional plant life, the result of regular local burning, extended the quail range into the woodlands. It also produced an open pine woodland aesthetic that many prized as an environment in which to hunt. While locals hunted quail with little more than a dog and gun, northern visitors developed an elaborate hunt with specially designed offroad carriages, dog pens, gun boxes, and a platoon of dog handlers and servants.3 They grew so enamored with the sport and the place that many returning visitors began to purchase land outright, converting former plantations into a series of exclusive winter retreats. Between 1880 and 1920 northerners bought nearly three hundred thousand acres of land in the Red Hills, and they established the area as the center of a new trend in regional land use—the southern hunting preserve. But after several decades of heavy shooting and changing land-use patterns, winter residents noticed quail numbers declining by the early 1920s, and, with little idea of the cause, they turned to the Biological Survey for answers. The bbs fatefully hired Stoddard—the young taxidermist, amateur ornithologist, and museum field scientist—to study the situation and provide these wealthy landowners with some answers. The field of wildlife management was all but nonexistent when Herbert Stoddard came to the Red Hills. Beyond the anecdotal knowledge of hunters, some of it accurate and some fanciful, little was known about the life history of bobwhite quail and other game species. Stoddard’s study would change that. In the four-year lifespan of the cqi, he developed many of the field techniques that wildlife scientists would use for decades, and he placed the anecdotal knowledge of hunters under the scrutiny of the scientific method. He monitored and described typical quail behavior and social structure throughout the seasons, determined their favored foods, experimented with seed collecting and methods for planting
their favorite food plants, and distinguished between their perceived and actual predators. One of Stoddard’s major conclusions was that the fate of quail and other wildlife rested with the quality of their habitat rather than strict bag limits. He linked quail with the landscape components of small-scale agriculture, and he encouraged landowners to maintain the field edges, hedgerows, and weedy fields that made the Red Hills such a haven for quail in the first place. The book that resulted from his study, The Bobwhite Quail: Its Habits, Preservation, and Increase (1931), became a foundational text for the field of wildlife management, and it is still often referred to as “The Quail Bible.” Much of Stoddard’s study focused on quail biology in agricultural landscapes, but actively farmed lands covered only a small portion of the Red Hills. He also ventured into the longleaf woodlands, and it was there that he pieced together the early tenets of the Stoddard-Neel Approach to forestry. In the process, he helped to shake up the forestry establishment.4
If the world of science knew little about wildlife population dynamics in the 1920s, it knew even less about the mechanics of the longleaf-grassland system. Some suspected fire was an important influence in its evolutionary past, but no scientist had yet ventured much further than to guess what that influence was. Stoddard’s work on the bobwhite quail, though, helped to usher in a new understanding of the ecology of the upland coastal plain. He, along with a few botanists, foresters, and land managers scattered across the region, came to see longleaf woodlands as dependent on frequent fire for their perpetuation. This realization deflected conservation science in the region onto a new trajectory, one that led to our current appreciation of longleaf as a “fire forest.”5
The ecology of the longleaf pine–grassland system is a product not only of the elements—earth, air, water, and fire—acting across deep time, but it is also the product of human interventions across millennia. The once-vast longleaf woodlands of the Holocene era coastal plain have never been a wilderness, if we mean by wilderness a landscape unmarked by the workings of human culture, and
the Stoddard-Neel Approach does not treat them as such. Rather, sna is a new iteration on a long tradition of human management with nature.
First, there was water. The southern coastal plain has been submerged—partially or wholly—many times since the Cretaceous period, and the long geological fall line that today divides it from the hilly Piedmont once marked the shores of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. During the last glacial period about eighteen thousand years ago, the shoreline extended hundreds of miles beyond our current shores, and only receded to its present position when a warming trend released glacial water to flow back into the seas. Water, then, gave the coastal plain its flat topographical character. Once the coastal plain assumed the boundaries we recognize today, water continued to shape the structure of its plant communities, often in tandem with fire.
Then there was earth. The soils that emerged on the coastal plain varied as a result of this long depositional history, though most areas were made up of coarse, acidic, well-drained sandy soils.6 In the Red Hills, however, as the name would suggest, the soil formed as fertile red clays of nonmarine deposits and rolled from hill to dale as a result of fluctuating sea levels. These red clays held water and grew lush, diverse plant life, and they would distinguish the longleaf-woodlands of the Red Hills from those of other regions with differing soil profiles.7
Wind, too, has had an important influence on the coastal plain and its longleaf woodlands. When we first visited Greenwood with Leon, we enjoyed a gentle breeze that made the pines sway and whisper, one of the signature aesthetic experiences of being in a healthy longleaf woodland. But this landscape has been historically shaped by violent winds as well, in the form of hurricanes and sometimes tornadoes. Winds of such force can create largescale disturbances with long-term ecological legacies, and, as we will see, the management challenges of such disturbances proved to be powerful catalysts in the emergence of the Stoddard-Neel Approach.
These natural elements—waters, soils, winds—gave shape to the southern coastal plain, but fire, more than any other force, determined the composition of the upland longleaf pine–grassland system. At times a catastrophic force, but more often a low-level and replenishing one, fire has been the single most important factor in the evolutionary history of the region’s woodlands. Fire’s long history on the coastal plain begins with lightning. The South experiences an average of sixty to eighty thunderstorms per year, most of which are concentrated in the summer months. When coupled with the right fuel on the ground, a single thunderstorm could start multiple fires across the coastal plain landscape. Prior to the landscape fragmentation caused by extensive deforestation and agricultural settlement, those fires often moved across tens of thousands, or sometimes even millions, of acres. The southern coastal plain developed into what ecologists sometimes call a fire climax, a landscape that not only supported natural fires but also increasingly needed them.8
Considerable debate exists in the scientific community about whether or not lightning alone can explain the longleaf-grassland system’s dependence on fire. It was undoubtedly a formative force, but humans too have been carriers and spreaders of fire since arriving in the coastal plain over ten thousand years ago. Native Americans used fire for a variety of reasons, most often to attract game animals, to control pests, and to make the forests more manageable for everyday life. Early European and African settlers also recognized the advantages of fire in the longleaf forests, and their rural descendents continued burning the woods for generations. Indeed, some authorities argue that the longleaf-grassland system as we know it is little more than five thousand years old, which would suggest that human-set fire had as much influence on its development as lightning. In contrast, others point to fossil pollen evidence that shows the existence of pine and oak savanna long before humans appeared on the coastal plain, or to a prehuman faunal record that contains a number of creatures with morphological adaptations indicative of a savanna landscape in
the region during previous interglacial periods. There has been, in other words, a long and vigorous debate about the age of this particular ecological system and its most active evolutionary agents. We do not seek to resolve this debate here. What we can say for sure, though, is that both natural and anthropogenic fire eventually converged as pine-grassland environments came to dominate the coastal plain during the Holocene period, and that the longleaf pine–grassland system adapted to frequent fire as a result. This historical frequency of fire, in turn, is now only duplicated in active management systems such as the Stoddard-Neel Approach.9
This mix of natural and human-set fires shaped a forest in which virtually all native plant and animal species have some adaptation to fire, and many are entirely dependent on it for their survival. Longleaf pines are the dominant tree species on the upland coastal plain. While they do not have serotinous cones (cones that require fire in order to open up and release seed) like some other fireadapted pine species, they do require bare mineral soil of the sort exposed by fire in order for their seeds to germinate. Moreover, longleaf pines have adaptive strategies for surviving fires during the early stages of their development. After germination, while the longleaf establishes its long tap root below ground, up above it spends anywhere from three to fifteen years in a grass stage with long needles that protect the terminal bud from fire. During this grass stage, longleaf are often, for the novice at least, indistinguishable from the bunch grasses that populate the understory. This ability to survive fire in the seedling stage gave longleaf pines a distinct advantage over other tree species in such a fire-prone region. Other southern pines such as loblolly, slash, and shortleaf can tolerate a cool fire after several years of growth, but not while they are seedlings. Nor can most hardwood species survive frequent fire. Frequent fires, then, kept the spread of longleaf’s competitors in check. But without frequent fire, the understory of a longleaf forest grows up into a thick rough, and, depending on local conditions, successional hardwoods such as blackjack oak, bluejack oak, red oak, and sweetgum encroach on the uplands,
eventually crowding out the longleaf and understory grasses and setting the landscape on a different developmental trajectory. The longleaf-grassland system that dominated much of the coastal plain for thousands of years, then, was an artifact of fire.10
One of the defining grasses of the longleaf system, wiregrass, is also heavily dependent on fire for its existence. A highly combustible species, wiregrass—in combination with resinous longleaf needles—plays an important part in the longleaf woodlands of the Red Hills region. It is a dry, fibrous grass, and even when it greens up during the summer, it actually has as many dead as living blades, making it an ideal carrier of fire. Today, wiregrass is increasingly rare, a marker of unplowed and otherwise undisturbed land. When agriculture spread across the coastal plain, much of the region’s wiregrass was plowed up, and because wiregrass requires a growing-season fire to germinate, it can be very difficult to reestablish after tillage. As a carrier of fire, wiregrass is highly desirable from a management standpoint, though it is not essential for the maintenance or restoration of longleaf forests; indeed, there were parts of the historical longleaf belt in which wiregrass was not a common understory component, and today a considerable amount of longleaf restoration proceeds on lands without a functional wiregrass understory.
Wiregrass and other understory plant species were so important to the integrity of the original longleaf range that many observers have described the system as more of a savanna ecosystem or forested grassland. Indeed, if we use current vegetative classifications as our guide, most longleaf landscapes would not have sufficient tree density to be considered forests. They are more accurately called woodlands, a term that we have tried to use consistently in this introduction. While we use terms such as forest, woodland, savanna, and grassland interchangeably throughout the rest of this book, we do recognize that there are important technical distinctions between them. The important point regarding the historical aesthetic of the longleaf system is its relative openness. With frequent fire arresting most of the midlevel vegetation, this
openness permitted sunlight to stream through the canopy to encourage vigorous understory growth. Gaps in the canopy, caused by natural tree mortality or disturbance events, allowed regenerating longleaf saplings to replace older trees, resulting in a multiaged forest at various stages of growth and maturity. The density of the canopy was important to the maintenance of the system. An overly dense canopy deprived the grassland of necessary sunlight. An area sparsely populated with longleaf, on the other hand, lacked the pine-needle fuel necessary to carry ground fires and thus maintain the system. Despite the observations of some early coastal plain travelers who found forests so dense that they had to watch their shins while on horseback, these places were likely rare. The spatial density of these forests more often provided a large field of view, an aesthetic that Stoddard, Neel, and many of the region’s residents and visitors came to value as distinctive—even if many early visitors found the forests to be barren.
The longleaf itself reigns supreme among tree species in this system and is essential to its integrity, but the system’s floral and faunal diversity lies in the understory. In fact, longleaf pine woodlands may well be the most diverse North American ecosystem north of the tropics. Its small-scale diversity—the number of different understory species found in particular small-scale plots—rivals the most diverse systems on earth, and there is a high degree of endemism—plants found only in the region—as well.11 On remnant longleaf lands that retain their historic ecological integrity, the understory typically contains 150 to 300 species of ground cover plants per acre, about 60 percent of the amphibian and reptile species found in the Southeast—many of which are endemic to the longleaf forest—and at least 122 endangered or threatened plant species. Habitat loss and fragmentation have placed keystone species like the red-cockaded woodpecker on the federal endangered species list and in places made the gopher tortoise threatened. Other important markers of forest health that are in peril are the flatwoods salamander, the eastern indigo snake, the striped newt, and the Florida pine snake.12 All of this diversity hangs on in
places like Greenwood Plantation’s Big Woods. And had Herbert Stoddard and Leon Neel not actively burned these lands as part of their management, much of that diversity would likely be gone.
Into this remarkable region came Herbert Stoddard in 1924, and he remained actively engaged with this landscape until his death in 1970. In that time span, he became a longleaf polymath. He was expert at the so-called applied sciences of wildlife management, agriculture, and forestry, and despite not having any formal education he never shied away from the theoretical questions of ecology. We likely would call him a conservation biologist today, but Stoddard himself preferred the title of land manager. On the Red Hills quail preserves, he could shape a piece of land to his liking, usually with a nod to the bobwhite quail, but almost always with a larger concern for the overall biological integrity of the system. After the initial quail investigation ended in 1929, some preserve owners lured him away from the Biological Survey with the promise of wildlife consulting work in the Red Hills and other hunting preserve regions in the South. In addition, one generous landowner, Lewis Thompson, gave Stoddard Sherwood plantation, the one thousand acres of land he had used as a home base during the quail investigation. Stoddard then established the Cooperative Quail Study Association (cqsa) in 1931, a private group of duespaying landowners who funded Stoddard’s continued research and paid him as a consultant for their quail preserves. Stoddard met Ed and Roy Komarek in 1933, and he hired Ed as an assistant the same year, which would prove to be an important step in sustaining the Red Hills as a center for ecological research.13 Not far away, Leon Neel was growing up on the land in the midst of a deep economic depression.
Stoddard’s turn as a forester began in 1941, after a powerful hurricane felled large volumes of timber in the Red Hills and the U.S. government began to request larger timber harvests for war materiel. Stoddard had advised preserve owners to thin their woodlands for years, and he seized on the hurricane and the war as opportunities to improve the region’s woodlands both economically
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arrested and dragged before the king. Before his entrance there the king had given orders that the murderer should have his head stricken off. As the prince approached the throne he said: “O, most noble and gracious sovereign! My brothers abandoned me in the well; the son of the grand vizier plotted against thy most precious life; and wilt thou now kill me, thy faithful son?”
When the king knew indeed that it was the son whom he had so deeply mourned, he was overjoyed. Falling upon the neck of the young prince, he wept and asked: “My son, what dost thou desire? Shall I command the death of thy two brothers?” But the young man was as noble when victory crowned him as when the bitterness of defeat had taxed his powers. He answered: “My father, since I am so happy as to find thee still unharmed, let us say, Allah be praised! Allah’s will be done! But do thou, I pray thee, give a palace, far away from thine own, unto each of my brothers; command that the elder be married to the first princess, the second to the second princess; then do thou graciously permit [43]me to marry the youngest, whom I deeply love and through whom it has been possible for me thus to rescue thee and preserve unto thee thy kingdom.”
So it all came about as the brave young prince had requested. The two brothers were given palaces at a distance from that of the king; there was feasting and rejoicing upon the part of all the people during forty days; after which the youngest son of the king was married to the most beautiful princess and lived happily ever afterward.
Here endeth this story, with Salaam! which meaneth peace. [44]
[Contents]
THE STORY OF THE BEAUTIFUL GIRL WHO HAD HER WISH
The teller of tales says that, once upon a time, there lived a woman whose only child was a daughter, so beautiful that, of all who saw her, not one had ever beheld her equal. And this daughter not only was fair to look upon, she was gentle and kind to everyone and very loving and obedient to her mother. Indeed, there seemed to be nothing wanting to the happiness of these two.
Her mother had taught the young girl to weave the most delicate lace, and during some portion of every day she sat in her own room and carefully wrought out the pattern. Late one afternoon, as she was engaged thus, a bird flew in at the window. This did not seem strange to one with whom the birds were so friendly that every day they came to eat from her hand. But as she looked upon this little visitor, he seemed unlike those that came to her daily.
Lowering his head three times, he opened his [45]bill and spoke to her. The words that he said were very terrible: “Gentle maiden,” quoth the bird, “during forty nights shalt thou keep watch beside a corpse. After that it shall happen to thee according to thy strongest wish.”
The young girl was so surprised and alarmed that she could not command her tongue to ask the bird why this must come to her. Before she became calm the bird had flown.
Now, because the girl loved her mother very deeply, she delayed to speak of this strange matter. At night she went to bed and slept, and when morning came, took up her accustomed duties. At the
approach of evening the strange bird came again, spoke as before, and flew away.
Sick at heart, the poor girl ran to her mother and confided all that had passed. The mother, greatly alarmed, questioned her daughter closely. “Dost thou fear another visit from the bird, my child?”
“Twice has he come to me. He will surely come once more. Thou knowest well, my mother, that one who has a second warning surely must receive a third.”
“Ai, my daughter!” exclaimed the mother. “And at what time will the bird visit thee?”
“To-morrow, toward evening,” answered the girl. [46]
Accordingly, when the shadows lengthened upon the morrow, the mother hid herself in a closet at one end of her daughter’s room. At the expected time, while the girl sat working upon her lace, the same bird entered, lowered his head three times, and spoke the same words—with this slight difference, that he addressed the maiden as sultana.
After the words were spoken, the bird turned to the window and was soon beyond sight.
The poor mother had overheard all. As the two flew to embrace each other the mother cried: “Ai, my daughter, let us fly! Let us try to escape from the power of this cruel bird.”
And the girl answered, “Let us fly together, mother, come what will!”
They made haste to gather those goods which were light in weight but heavy in worth; after which they closed the doors of their home
and set forth, with all speed, upon a journey which they well knew must be perilous.
They rested but little, one of them always keeping watch. After several days of travel they came to a magnificent palace. Hastening to its walls, they sat down in the shadow and considered what they would better do next. Being weary, they lay down in a hidden spot, and although the mother was firm in her will to remain awake, a strange power [47]took hold upon her that she could not resist. Sleep closed her eyes. She became unconscious.
Upon this the strange bird again made its appearance, and, although it seemed not larger than an ordinary songster, it possessed such strength as to lift the sleeping girl. Gently it bore her over the wall and into a room of the palace, where it laid her upon a beautiful golden divan.
Almost immediately the sleeper opened her eyes, and discovered that she was separated from her mother and within the palace. She arose and looked about her. Lying upon a bier in the middle of the room, under a white, transparent covering, was a corpse.
When her eyes fell upon this the poor girl nearly went out of her senses for terror, and exclaimed: “Evil is upon me! That which the bird foretold was, indeed, very truth.”
Then she sought eagerly to find a way out, in order that she might bring her mother within. The rooms of the palace were very large and magnificent; but no person could be found in them. And whenever she entered one of them and hastened to another door, she found herself, as if by magic, in the one where had been her awakening and beside the stately bier.
Hour after hour she struggled. Every trial ended [48]with the same experience. She found herself, again and again, in the lonely room with only the body upon the bier for company. At last she was exhausted, and began to understand that escape was impossible— that some mighty power had torn her from her beloved mother. In the hope that obedience to fate would make her sentence lighter, she said: “I will bear whatever is allotted to me. Afterward, if Allah will, it may be for the best.”
Let the girl remain here while we return to the mother.
Morning came, and, the strange influence having spent itself, the woman awakened. Turning toward the place where she had last seen her beloved daughter, she reached out her arms for an embrace. But they were empty. The alarmed woman made haste to seek all about the hiding place, in the vain hope that the girl had gone to look about them. But no trace of her child could be found— no footprint in the soft earth, no portion of her clothing.
When this became real to the seeker, her heart was crushed with fear. “Alas!” she cried, “in rescuing my beloved one from the bird I have lost her unto myself!”
Thereupon, with grief so heavy that she was many days in journeying the distance over which [49]they two had sped so swiftly, she returned to her own home, went into mourning for the daughter whom she believed dead, and awaited whatever might be ordered unto herself.
Now let us return to the girl.
During the long nights that followed she slept not, but kept her dreary watch beside the bier. In some mysterious manner, fresh food
appeared every morning upon a golden salver, and whatever remained from the previous day was spirited away. Although the girl endeavored to discover this change, she was unable to do so.
At first, by means of a bit of charred wood which she found upon the floor, she kept the strictest account of the days as they passed. With this she made a mark upon the marble for each day. But as they wore by she forgot to number them. Dreary monotony made her spiritless.
Now, in front of the palace flowed the sea. One window of the room was directly over that portion of the castle walls which were washed by the waves. Long before sunrise, one morning, as the maiden sat beside this window, looking out with heavy eyes, a ship appeared. It came from the direction of Iram. When it was directly before the palace the girl made a sign with her hand. The captain lowered [50]a boat which came to the walls of the palace.
The air was very still, and the voice of the young girl, though not loud, was clear. “Bring me a beautiful slave girl,” she said, “and I will give you these ten thousand piasters.”
The boat returned to the ship. Very soon it came back. In it was another person. The watcher saw that it was a young girl, like herself. Overjoyed, she let down a rope, made from the silken coverings of the divan. At the end of this rope she had fastened the money.
When the men had secured the gold they tied the rope about the body of the slave girl, and with great difficulty she was drawn up far enough to enable her to climb within. Her young mistress greeted her with kindness, and, because of her joy, took the string of gold coins from her own neck and fastened them around the neck of the
newcomer. And she said, “Thanks be to Allah! I have found a companion.”
The slave girl had been cruelly treated by the captain of the ship. But she did not tell her mistress that she was glad to be rescued.
Now, the fortieth night was completed, though the young girl knew not that it was so. After she and the slave had both bathed in an inner chamber, [51]and after they had eaten of the delicate food upon the golden salver, the mistress said to her slave: “Now, do thou watch here a little, while I go to walk through the rooms of the palace. After my return thou canst do likewise.”
Thereupon she went out; and had barely gone when the body upon the bier returned to life. It was that of a young man, very tall and worthy to be looked upon. He threw off the covering, and disclosed the embroidered garments of royalty. He stretched out his hands and opened his eyes. They fell upon the slave girl. After his long torpor she seemed beautiful to him. And the gold coins about her neck were not such as one sees upon a slave.
“Maiden,” he asked, “was it thou who watched beside me through the forty nights?”
“Yes,” answered the slave; “for forty nights have I watched beside thee.”
Now, it so chanced that the person who had been lying upon the bier was a young prince. And before the evil spell was cast upon him by an enemy of his father, he had made a vow, saying, “Whoso watches by me during the forty days of my enchantment, her will I marry immediately upon waking.”
It was because of this vow that he asked the question. And because within his heart he had felt [52]another presence, he called the slave to him and asked whether any other beside herself had been there.
The slave was very quick-witted. She was scheming and wicked of heart. In a moment she knew all that the question might mean to her. Forgetting the kindness of her young mistress in redeeming her from the cruel captain and in making of her a beloved companion, rather than a slave, she quickly made this answer:
“There is my slave girl, whom I bought with much money. Only these gold pieces about my neck have I saved. She is now in another room.”
Then the prince took her by the hand and said, “Before Allah do I take thee for my wife.” And he kissed her upon the cheek.
As these words were spoken there came the sound of light footsteps. The young mistress entered.
“Come, girl!” arrogantly called the slave. “Thy master, my husband, hath wakened. He calleth for thy service. Hasten to do his bidding!”
The gentle maiden saw that matters were not as they had been when she began her promenade through the great rooms. But, being obedient of heart, she said to herself: “This, too, comes from Allah. It must be borne patiently.”
At the first opportunity she made haste to count [53]the marks upon the marble which she had made every day with the bit of charcoal. They numbered forty. Then she felt that there was no hope for her, and meekly put herself in the place of her own slave, doing every service that was required of her. The real slave was bitterly cruel, and asked the most menial offices of this beautiful girl, although
upon the full awakening of the prince the palace had become filled with the usual number of servants.
A little time later on the prince said to the one whom he had taken for his wife: “I am going on a long journey. What is thy wish that I bring thee?”
“Bring me a hundred diamonds and one hundred turquoises,” said the woman.
Then the prince turned to her whom his wife called slave. “And what wouldst thou have, my child?” he asked.
“If it be thy gracious pleasure,” came the low answer, “I would beg thee to bring me a patience stone.”
“A patience stone!” sneered the other. “The prince will never remember that.”
Then the young girl turned to the slave mistress. “Should he permit himself to forget this simple request of one who serves you both faithfully,” was her answer, “may a cloud, black as pitch, form in [54]front of his ship, so that the way of return cannot be seen. And behind them may the sky remain clear!”
The prince was not a little surprised at all this. He had taken note of the perfect manner of the one whom his wife called slave, and had compared the two. But, without comment, he made his adieus and set forth upon his journey toward Yemen.
After his arrival there months passed, while he attended to matters of state. When the time came that he could return, he purchased all that his wife had ordered. So many things had occurred that it was not strange that he should forget the servant’s commission.
While the ship was upon her homeward journey, suddenly it became dark as pitch before the vessel, while behind it the skies were quite clear. This made it impossible to navigate the ship. Fear came upon everyone.
Thereupon the captain summoned all who were on board. “If there be anyone among you,” he said, solemnly, “who has forgotten a promise or forgotten a vow, let him stand forth!”
When the prince heard this command, he remembered the commission of his wife’s servant and her low-spoken prediction, when the scornful words had [55]been uttered. He believed that the danger had come upon them because of those words.
To the great surprise of all, their prince stepped forward. “I am the one in fault,” he said. “This evil has come upon us because I have broken a promise made to a slave. Turn the ship about. Let us return to port, while I fulfill that which became a duty as soon as I had given my word.”
Immediately upon the ship’s turning, the cloud began to follow them. Soon they were back at Yemen, where the prince made haste to purchase the patience stone. Afterward, by the grace of Allah (the Just One) the ship flew so fast on its homeward voyage that it seemed like a bird, and the palace was reached in an incredibly short space of time.
When the prince entered the palace, his wife, followed by her servant, came down the broad staircase to meet him. Afterward they escorted him up the stairs and into the pleasantest room of the castle. The wife asked eagerly for the precious gems, and was wild with delight when they were spread before her.
“Come, hither, slave!” she commanded, “and deck thy mistress in a manner fitting to her station!”
The young girl obeyed without a murmur, although her heart was very sore. When the task [56]was finished, and the vain and wicked one sat before a polished steel mirror admiring herself, the seeming slave turned to the prince.
“My gracious master,” she said, very gently, “is it permitted me to ask if thou rememberedst my humble request?”
The prince then delivered the stone, which was received with becoming gratitude. “May Allah bless thee!” were her words.
Now, the only room in the entire palace which was at all mean had been given to her, and everything that could add to her comfort had been removed by command of her mistress. When the night came on she went to this room and sat down to deliberate.
Grief at the loss of her mother tore her heart. The injustice of her own slave was more than she could endure longer. It seemed as if Allah, in whom she had hoped, must have forgotten her. Tears fell from her beautiful eyes and sighs shook her frame. Long she sat there after the hour for retiring.
When the palace became still and the prince was in his bed, he bethought him of his wife’s supposed slave and wondered what she would do with the patience stone. There was a mystery about her which he fain would solve. More than once had he checked his wife in her heavy demands upon the [57]frail young girl; more than once had he been stirred with the thought that she and not the one he had married should be the princess. So, after his wife had fallen asleep, he arose lightly and went to the door of the servant’s room, taking
with him his faithful Ahmed to bear witness to what he should discover.
The gift, that had been brought her, was about the size of a pea. As the prince came to the door he saw the young girl wash the stone with her tears. Afterward she placed it upon the broken table before her and thus addressed it:
“Ai, patience stone! I was my mother’s only and precious child. One day, as I, innocent and happy in her affection, sat in my room weaving the lace that she had taught me to make, a bird came through the window and spoke to me, saying: ‘During forty days shalt thou keep watch beside a corpse. But upon the morning of the fortieth day it shall happen to thee according to thy strongest desire.’
“The bird appeared to me three days and uttered the same message. Upon the third day my mother, concealed within a closet, heard all that was said. She, as well as I, was terrified. She determined to save me by flight. But, while we slept, some mysterious power took me from her side and placed me in this palace. [58]
“I have not seen my mother since, and do not know whether she is dead from the grief of our separation. As for myself, during forty days and nights I watched beside the bier of this prince who is now my master. Hadst thou been in my place, O stone! couldst thou have been utterly patient?”
As she thus spoke, the patience stone began to swell with sympathy. As it did so, it whispered, “Bravo! bravo!”
“With the first streak of light upon the fortieth morning,” continued the speaker, “a ship passed the palace. Loneliness was heavy upon me.
I signaled it and asked that I might buy a slave girl. For her I offered ten thousand piasters of the money my mother had put upon me.
“They sent me this slave who is now my mistress. I received her gladly. I kissed her and put my own gold coins about her neck. I was kind to her and felt that it was good to have companionship other than a stiff and silent corpse.
“When the morning had fully dawned I, being restless, left my slave to watch for a little while beside the bier while I wandered through the beautiful rooms of the palace.
“Scarcely had I left his presence, when the spell was broken and the noble prince was restored to life. I returned to find that he had made my slave his [59]princess. Immediately upon my return this false princess spoke roughly to me, calling out that I was her slave.
“Since then she has required bitter things of me. Often in the absence of the prince she beats me. Now she threatens my life. O, thou wise stone, couldst thou have had patience to endure all this?”
When this pitiful question was sobbed forth, the patience stone cried “Bravo!” once again, then it burst into a thousand pieces.
“O, patience stone,” cried the girl, “if thou couldst not bear this that has been put upon me, how can I longer do so? Let me rather hang myself, before my cruel slave mistress tortures me to death.”
Thereupon she took her sash, wound it about her throat, stepped upon a wretched stool, and threw the other end of the sash over a beam in the roof. She was upon the point of being strangled when the prince and his faithful Ahmed broke into the room, caught her in their arms, and brought her to the floor
“Ah, my sultana!” said the prince, very tenderly, “so it was thou who watched beside me during those bitter days! Why hast thou kept this long silence?”
“Because I believed in Allah,” was the reply. [60]“If he so willed my life, I must not try to change it But I was unable longer to bear it.”
“Henceforth art thou my beloved,” said the prince. And he kissed her three times upon the forehead. “This other, who won thy place through falsehood, shall receive her just deserts.”
He then conducted the real sultana from the wretched room into a most beautiful chamber, seated her upon a divan rich with cloth of gold, then commanded very tenderly—for his heart was touched with her suffering, “Remain here, my beloved, until I return to thee.”
He then went to the bedside of the false one, struck her with his stick, and called fiercely: “Haste thee! Arise to receive thy just punishment for the evil which thou hast brought upon thy innocent mistress.”
The slave fell upon her face before him and besought his pardon. But he would not listen. “Wilt thou have forty blows or shall forty crows be summoned to bear thee out into the night?” he demanded.
“O!” cried she, “let the forty blows fall upon the heads of my enemies! I ask that forty crows come. Perchance they will bear me back to my home.”
Thereupon, at the prince’s command, slaves brought a basket, lifted and placed her within it, [61]then opened a window overlooking the sea. Forty giant crows came, seized upon the basket with their beaks, and flew so far away that neither the prince nor his beautiful sultana ever heard of her again.
Then the young girl, who had been rescued from death by the prince, begged that messengers be sent to relate her good fortune to her mother—if haply she were yet alive—and that a camel might also be taken to fetch her to their marriage feast.
This request was readily granted. And the mother, who had mourned her daughter as dead, came hastily and with joy to greet her again. The wedding feast lasted forty days and forty nights. Throughout it all everything happened according to the wish of the kind and beautiful girl. Salaam! [62]
[Contents]
THE STORY OF THE BEAUTIFUL ONE WHO DID NOT HAVE
HER DESIRE
The narrator of tales relates that, once upon a time, there lived a man and his wife who were so poor that they had no home. So the woman begged of her husband to seek a place for her in the bamam, or bath house. Now, the bamam was a large building, with many rooms. When the bamamjy, or keeper, had listened to the tale of the poor man he answered: “There will be room for your wife tomorrow. Let her come then.”
The husband returned with joy, and, on the morrow, accompanied his wife to the bamam, where the keeper made her quite welcome. In a few days there was born to the poor woman a little girl child, who was like a ray of light for beauty and sweetness. As the mother sat gazing upon her child, the wall of the bamam opened and three dervishes made their appearance. Gifts were in their hands of those things that would add to the woman’s comfort. [63]
The first dervish approached with a great roll of very soft clothing. “Thou shalt name this child,” said the dervish, “The Beautiful One Who Does Not Obtain Her Desire.” Thereupon he withdrew, and the second dervish came near, with a gift of sweet perfumes and ointments, and said: “Whenever water shall touch the crown of this child’s head, it shall turn into pieces of gold and roll to the ground. Roses shall fall from about her cheeks whenever she laughs; and if, unhappily, she shall weep, the tears will become pearls. When she is grown strong enough to walk upon the earth, green grass shall spring up in her footsteps.”
Having spoken thus, the second dervish disappeared. The third then drew near. His present consisted of a bracelet of gold. “Let this,” said the third dervish, “be fastened about her arm. And if thou wouldst keep thy child alive, then must thou guard well this amulet; for as long as it remains upon her arm she shall live, but when once it is removed, then death shall claim her.” Thus saying, the third dervish disappeared, as had the others, and the walls of the bamam became as if they had not been opened.
When the mother had recovered from her astonishment, she fastened the amulet upon the infant’s arm; after which she began to bathe the little one. [64]All went as is usual, until she poured water from the basin upon the child’s head, when, as the second dervish had predicted, the water turned into gold pieces and fell to the ground in a shower.
The mother gathered the money and hid it; after which she made haste to dress her child. When the little one had fallen asleep she called the keeper of the bamam, and, giving him a handful of the coins, bade him send for her husband. The keeper was surprised at receiving such an amount from one who had seemed so poor, but, being a wise man, he asked no questions and did as he had been requested.
When the husband came he greeted his wife and their newborn beautiful infant; after which his wife told him of the visit from the three dervishes and the wonderful things they had each foretold. The poor man was nearly beside himself for joy that now he would be able fitly to provide for his beloved little family. Tenderly he lifted the child in his arms, and together they two set out to seek an abiding place.
They ordered a fine large house built and completely furnished. Back of the house they caused a beautiful garden to be planted. In the
middle of this garden the fortunate parents ordered a kiosk builded; and when it was finished they called the goldsmith and bade him cover it with gold. This [65]he did; and when the work was completed, its beauty could not be described, it was so great. Thus did these happy parents prepare a worthy place for the child whose coming had brought them such great and good fortune.
The kiosk was made the immediate dwelling place of the little one, who was guarded most tenderly. And, as the years went by, it continued unto them as the second dervish had said; until they grew to possess such wealth that they lost all idea of its value.
Time came and went until fifteen years had passed; and never in all the world had there been so beautiful a blue-eyed, golden-haired, rosy-cheeked damsel. To one who looked at her, it was as if a sun had arisen.
We will now leave these people and go far away, unto the son of the king at Yemen.
It must have been that Allah intended the beautiful girl to be the wife of the young prince; for, one night, a dream was sent to him in which she appeared. He was told her name, her father’s name, and the exact country in which was her dwelling. So very real was her presence and so clear the picture of her home that, upon waking, his heart was torn with sorrow that it was only a dream. He [66]called for a piece of parchment and made a chart of the way through which they must pass who should go to bring her unto him.
When the morning dawned, the young prince went directly to his queen mother and, coming to speech, said: “My honored mother, may Allah give happiness unto you! Last night, whether sleeping or waking, I know not, but a marvelous vision passed before my eyes. I
