Sendraks wrote:The_Piper wrote:I'd have to see a citation for that. I live in the Appalachian mountains, and any formerly cleared lands that are unused revert back to forest in a lot less than 200 years. I think it's more like 40 years. Plus it's not like there's a lot of virgin forest left. The majority of it in this region is above 2500 feet, but I suspect the hilltop farming you read about occurred at lower, flatter, less rocky locations. Certainly that's the case here in Maine. There was essentially no farming that high, it would be a losing proposition. (Plus nobody lives up there. )
I live at the base of hills that were cleared and have since grown back into forest.
From what I can recall, it was further south than Maine. Much further south. You're pretty much the start/end point of the Appalachian trail at that point yes?
And I wouldn't want to treat such a vast expanse of land as covered by the Appalachians as homogenous. Obviously land management practises across the mountains would've varied considerably state by state, county by county. All I can say is that at the time Bryson wrote his book, the hilltop meadows I refer to were still in existence and that was in the mid 90s. He mentioned them, partly because he found them delightful, and partly because at that time policy was shifting from preserving those sites as meadows to allowing the forest to regrow there because it was "more natural."
That's happened up here too, a sizable percentage of vacated farmland and hay fields have been allowed to revert back to forest. Many of the fields were used for hay to feed the horses and oxen used to log back in the day. I saw a nice comparison in an old magazine of aerial photos between 1940 and 1991 and you could see all of the new forest that had grown in since then. Young forest is valuable to a whole slew of life, itself.
Yes I live near the end of the Appalachian trail, and just a mile from the International Appalachian trail which winds it's way through northern Maine and well into Canada.
To "preserve" our fields/meadows as such they need to be mowed at least every few years, or the forest regrows on it's own.
I'd think that's the case for clearings up and down the heavily forested Appalachians, and most of the eastern third of the US which was originally forest.
There are plenty of shrubs and wildflowers in the meadows (we call them fields), with insects eating the pollen, birds of prey hunting over the open land, various rodents, deer, etc that utilize the meadows. Great place to look for neat insects without too much hassle. But the peat bogs, heaths and other wetlands are also open like that and have lots of insects, shrubs, wildflowers, etc. too. Probably many of the same species of insects, and in similar numbers as the fields. Plenty of birds of prey hunt there. Wetlands are also a treasure trove of wildlife, as you probably know. Some of those short trees and shrubs are very old and long-lived.
Where I live is a great place to look at all of this in action, where it's much less developed and traveled than the rest of the Appalachians. It's a time warp up here.
by 
