Humans find beauty in order, even in our natural environment. Consider the cookie cutter yards of suburban America. These are neatly mowed and landscaped with clean lines. Brush piles that are hiding places for small animals are removed. Even the forbs (weeds), which are choice wildlife food sources, are tediously killed leaving the non-nutritious grass.

A similar story can be told about farmland. Once the ring-neck pheasant thrived in Midwestern farmlands. These faux grasslands were replete with overgrown fence rows, creek banks, ditches, and fallow fields. These days, farmlands are intensively farmed, pesticides are thoroughly applied, and, almost to add insult to injury, even the roadside ditches are mowed. Wild pheasants are now rare.

Fact is, what humans want to see outdoors is frequently terrible habitat for plants and wildlife. Quality habitat is chaotic, unruly, and sometimes unsightly. It’s a mix of many things.

Human also oversimplify everything. For instance, what should we call a pine forest? There’s several patches of thinned red pine around my cabin. Once I sought them out based on a map because when I had previously seen ‘thinned forest’ in the Croatan forest of North Carolina these areas had heavy undergrowth. Not here. Instead, you have monoculture red pines growing tall with any other trees (and even competing red pines) thinned between. The forest floor and intermediary forest levels are barren.

I want to be clear about one thing: I am not criticizing the land managers of Northern Michigan public lands for their thinned red pine projects. I accept the fact that forests actively managed by humans are not going to be realistic and some will be managed to maximize timber yield. I also understand that mature red pines are a good thing to have in some quantity in our forests. I’m just concerned about how far we could take this.

I’m concerned that people have the wrong idea of what Northern Michigan should look like. It’s commonly said that ‘much’ of this area was once covered by mature red and white pine forests. What that means to me is that most of it wasn’t. In fact, much of the area around my cabin was covered with jack pine and hardwoods (and still is).

What could be misperceived is that we need to cover our land with mature pines so things can be like they used to be. There’s a reason that the timber companies in the 1800’s employed cruisers. These men scouted far into the forests locating choice stands of pines for the lumber industry. Now if the entirety of Northern Michigan was actually covered with ancient old growth pines, would the timber cruisers have been needed to locate them?

Further if we want to know what a red pine forest should look like, a more natural red pine forest is found along a trail near the community college in Keno, Michigan. Keno is a non-town located near public land and the Roscommon Red Pine Natural Area Preserve. In this natural area, you’ll see red pines. But you’ll find them randomly intermixed with a dozen other tree species.

I have another example. I ran across a beaver pond this year I like to take my family. Alders line the pond. Slightly up the bank are tamarack, firs, and red pine. Swans and amphibians feed in the muck along the edge. Jack pine are on the hills above. Woodcock frequent the aspen. But there at the intersection of the trails is a giant white pine, the state tree of Michigan. I believe by measuring the circumference it is 200 years old. If so, it was a seedling about the time the Native Americans ceded its home to the United States in the Treaty of Saginaw in 1819. The tree was less than 20 when Michigan became a state. It was 40 years old during the Civil War when so many Michiganders didn’t return. Shortly after, this area was logged and settled. Why this tree was spared I don’t know. Either this area wasn’t logged or the jog 2/3 up the trunk made the tree undesirable.

Thereafter, so many small farms in the area came and went. At some point, the mighty tree’s home ended up as public property. Perhaps before then, when the tree was around 80 years old, Henry Ford established his first automotive plant in Detroit. At 120 years old, Michigan fed the arsenal of democracy during the Second World War. Around 150, the only U.S. President from Michigan was sworn into office. The entire span of the Soviet Union was about 1/3 of this tree’s life when Northern Michigan was home to strategic bombers.

Now lining the banks near this grand tree are several other giant white pines, perhaps its progeny, that are probably also at least 100 years old. They watch hundreds of outdoorpeople ride by each year who mostly don’t notice these trees. These people will probably be gone before they are. By recognizing this grove of trees with no name, marking the little known intersection of a forest road and an atv trail and shading the home of countless wildlife of Northern Michigan, I open this blog.