Of wolves, caribou and the past
By JOHN HARRIGAN
I've written about this book several times. It's not widely available but can be found in some libraries. It is Helenette Silver's famous (among wildlife aficionados) tome "New Hampshire Game and Furbearers."From this book, I learned things not taught in schools. History was dominated by European conflicts. There was little about local history -- and nothing about wildlife or settlement times.
Helenette did wonderful research for her 1957 book, scouring numerous first hand sources and Fish and Game records, many of which were subsequently lost in the disastrous fire that consumed Fish and Game's headquarters. Here are some of the snippets that so caught my imagination when, as a kid growing up in Clarksville, I began truly roaming the woods, and wondering about it all:
--Wolves. "Canis lupus lycaon was extremely common in all parts of New England" when Europeans arrived, she wrote. "They seemed to roam over a vast extent of country, remaining in one place only a short time. Wolves in great numbers came howling from the north in 1744, 1764 and 1784." Settlers consumed much of the wolves' natural prey, and in turn the wolves preyed upon settlers' livestock. Eventually, bounties doomed the wolves. I recall one of the more gripping accounts of persecution, in which people in and around Jaffrey formed a huge circle and advanced on Mount Monadnock, then considered a haven for wolves, and as they got close to the summit set the scrub trees on fire, which surely killed the remaining wolves but left barren the summit we see today.
--Caribou. Few people today seem to know that we had caribou in New Hampshire. They were woodland caribou, and they migrated north and south just as do their cousins today in Alaska, Yukon and Labrador.Helenette devotes only two pages to the caribou story. To me, it's one of the more fascinating chapters in this region's wildlife history. These animals require a certain density to maintain the herd instinct and make their migrations. They were only sporadic visitors to the far northern regions of the Connecticut and Androscoggin watersheds. Finally protected in the late 1800s, they still dwindled, and vanished forever around 1905. In the mid-1970s, when I was in the Colebrook hospital getting a varicose vein taken care of, I heard of an old man reposing in a room nearby and went to talk with him. He said he had seen the last herd of caribou as a young boy, taken by his father to see them vanishing in the snow across First Connecticut Lake, never to be seen again.
John Harrigan's column appears weekly. His address is Box 39, Colebrook, N.H. 03576. E-mail him at mailto:%20hooligan@ncia.net.
Helenette did wonderful research for her 1957 book, scouring numerous first hand sources and Fish and Game records, many of which were subsequently lost in the disastrous fire that consumed Fish and Game's headquarters. Here are some of the snippets that so caught my imagination when, as a kid growing up in Clarksville, I began truly roaming the woods, and wondering about it all:
--Wolves. "Canis lupus lycaon was extremely common in all parts of New England" when Europeans arrived, she wrote. "They seemed to roam over a vast extent of country, remaining in one place only a short time. Wolves in great numbers came howling from the north in 1744, 1764 and 1784." Settlers consumed much of the wolves' natural prey, and in turn the wolves preyed upon settlers' livestock. Eventually, bounties doomed the wolves. I recall one of the more gripping accounts of persecution, in which people in and around Jaffrey formed a huge circle and advanced on Mount Monadnock, then considered a haven for wolves, and as they got close to the summit set the scrub trees on fire, which surely killed the remaining wolves but left barren the summit we see today.
--Caribou. Few people today seem to know that we had caribou in New Hampshire. They were woodland caribou, and they migrated north and south just as do their cousins today in Alaska, Yukon and Labrador.Helenette devotes only two pages to the caribou story. To me, it's one of the more fascinating chapters in this region's wildlife history. These animals require a certain density to maintain the herd instinct and make their migrations. They were only sporadic visitors to the far northern regions of the Connecticut and Androscoggin watersheds. Finally protected in the late 1800s, they still dwindled, and vanished forever around 1905. In the mid-1970s, when I was in the Colebrook hospital getting a varicose vein taken care of, I heard of an old man reposing in a room nearby and went to talk with him. He said he had seen the last herd of caribou as a young boy, taken by his father to see them vanishing in the snow across First Connecticut Lake, never to be seen again.
John Harrigan's column appears weekly. His address is Box 39, Colebrook, N.H. 03576. E-mail him at mailto:%20hooligan@ncia.net.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment