586 



ACTION ON THE BLUE RIDGE 



THEODORE C. FEARNOW, I. T. QUINN 



Two persons met by chance on the 

 banks of a Blue Ridge Mountain 

 stream in the George Washington Na- 

 tional Forest one day in the early 

 1930's. One was the new forest ranger; 

 the other was a local resident. They 

 paused for a friendly exchange of words, 

 as is the custom in the Blue Ridge coun- 

 try, and tarried on the banks of the 

 clear trout stream to eat their lunches. 



As they sat there, a squirrel frisked 

 nervously in a nearby hickory tree and 

 finally dodged into a hollow limb. The 

 Virginian, obviously a man interested 

 in wildlife, turned to the ranger and 

 asked, "You foresters look after the 

 trees, but why don't you also look after 

 the squirrel that lives in them, the tur- 

 key that roosts in them, and the deer 

 that browses under them?" 



The ranger explained that wildlife 

 in the national forest was "primarily 

 the responsibility of the State" and that 

 consequently a Federal employee could 

 not do much about it. That was a right 

 bad state of affairs, the Virginian re- 

 marked, pointing out that the squirrel 

 "belonged" to the State, but the tree 

 that gave it both food and shelter was 

 the "property of the Federal Govern- 

 ment," and that the poor squirrel was 

 like the man without a country. 



The ranger and the Virginian pon- 

 dered the situation carefully, then and 

 later. The ranger, A. R. Cochran, be- 

 came supervisor at Roanoke of the 

 Jefferson National Forest. The Vir- 

 ginian, Justus H. Cline, of Stuarts 

 Draft, later became a director in the 

 American Wildlife Federation and a 

 leader in the Virginia Academy of 

 Science. During the years that fol- 

 lowed, both men became active in 

 shaping a plan for cooperative wild- 

 life management. The plan was de- 

 signed to bring "the squirrel, the den 

 tree, and the hickory nut crop" under 

 a coordinated program of manage- 

 ment. The meeting of those two men 



has come to be generally recognized as 

 the starting point for the widely known 

 Virginia Plan for State-Forest Service 

 cooperation in handling the wildlife 

 resources on l/ 2 million acres of na- 

 tional forest land in Virginia. 



UP TO THEN, the management of 

 wildlife in the Blue Ridge had been 

 confined mostly to a few game refuges, 

 and the history of wildlife there was 

 monotonously like the history of wild- 

 life in most parts of the United States. 

 In three centuries, from the settlement 

 of Jamestown in 1607, the wildlife had 

 gone from abundance to depletion. 



In the haze-shrouded Blue Ridge 

 forests of oaks, hickories, and pines, 

 chestnut, yellow-poplar, and hemlock, 

 sassafras, the persimmon, chinquapin, 

 pawpaw, and wild grape lived the 

 white-tailed deer, a staple item of food 

 for the early Virginia settlers ; it is often 

 said that the shooting eyes that won the 

 American Revolution owed much of 

 their skill to experience gained in hunt- 

 ing this fleet-footed animal. As settlers 

 occupied the land, the buffalo, elk, 

 puma, and wolf were gradually exter- 

 minated. Later, mountain farming in 

 the Blue Ridge hastened soil erosion 

 and depletion of fertility. The strug- 

 gling population, existing at a hard- 

 ship level, created (as it always does) 

 a serious threat to wildlife; hunting 

 and fishing, relentlessly pursued with 

 little regard to season or other restric- 

 tions, left the Blue Ridge an impover- 

 ished wildlife province by the turn of 

 the present century. Exhaustion of the 

 wildlife resource was in many ways in- 

 dicative of the general debility brought 

 on by abusive occupancy of the land. 



When the national forest program 

 was launched in Virginia in 1912, the 

 Blue Ridge was known as a region of 

 low economic status. Erosion had ex- 

 posed bare red soil in many places. For- 

 ests had been logged off and burned. 



