I make no excuses.
I am a forest person.
Most of West Virginia is nothing more than a continuous expanse of woodland.
This is not primordial forest from the days before Europeans came.It’s nothing more than what happens when land that was once intensely grazed by livestock is left to return to its own devices.
Forest is the natural condition of the land. Pasture is not.
It’s really feral land.
But these forests aren’t like the ones of yore. Introduced species prevail. Most of the thickets here are made up of autumn olive, a native of Northeast Asia that tends to do well in this climate. Another native of Northeast Asia that has done well here is the multiflora rose, which was actually introduced in the vain attempt to give North Americans natural fencing.
All of this vegetation is grazed by white-tailed deer.
They are the only large ungulate in this area, but they were only of secondary importance when Europeans came.
When Europeans came, there were vast herds of Eastern bison and elk.
The game trails here are just little cuts through the undergrowth that are big enough to accommodate white-tailed deer and maybe the odd passing black bear.
But in those days, I bet the trails had a much larger cut. A huge bison would need much more room to maneuver through the brush than a white-tailed deer does, and as a browser, I be they kept much of the lower understory much more pared back than it currently is.
The land is now feral.
It’s not a pristine wilderness, but it something different.
As rural America has died, the ecosystem slowly comes back.
Not restored.
But with a new life of sorts.
Have you read 1491 I was fairly convinced by his thesis that when the europeans arrived it was not a pristine wilderness either but a very managed forest system controlled by frequent use of fire to keep the understory clear and maximize productiveness. The accounts from the time of open park like forests are quite striking.
I’ve not read the book, but I do know that there is evidence that people who lived without large domestic animals and relied upon wild herds to feed them did manage the land so it would produce the right habitat for those species. That’s why so much of Australia burned away.
“Slash and burn” they called it.
And about a quarter of the canopy where you live probably would have been Castanea dentata, the American Chestnut, now nearly all gone. I wish I could have seen the woods back then.
And it would have hosted huge flocks of passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets as well.
It’s amazing how quickly nature takes back land, even if it’s with introduced flora and fauna. With a little help from humans in the case of old mining land local to me. Though nowadays, managing forests and resident animals is because we have the luxury of leisure time rather than literally keeping the wolf from the door. I doubt there’s much primordial forest left anywhere in the world that humans have settled for a while. Even hunter gatherers were/are aggressive land managers.
Adding to Rafe Kelly’s comment, Yellowstone was far from the pristine wilderness it was lauded as. Before the several Native American tribes were evicted to make it a national park, it was widely utilized in many sophisticated ways by their ancestors for at least 10,000 years and the landscape was shaped by them in ways we’ve hardly grasped 200 years on.