Can't See The Maritime Forest for the Trees

My eyes were opened a bit yesterday as I spent the afternoon on a tour given by a naturalist in False Cape State Park. The park is in Virginia but it is adjacent to the portion of the North Carolina Outer Banks where the wild Corolla herd lives. I have been in the woods at Corolla on several occasions. Each time I was looking for wild horses, not wild horse forage. Yesterday was different. I was in the woods looking at the woods.

I was in a completely different ecosystem than the woods of my horse lot although we were only about fifty miles from home in a straight line. Here in Smithfield we are just beginning to get out of the worst season in the woods. We are leaveing the hungry times of early January through early March. the woods are devoid of most of their plenty and deer, turkey, squirrel and even rabbits have to work hard for what they can find to eat. As they do so they spend more time moving , searching for food and exposing themselves to predators from hawks and foxes all the way up to our burgeoning population of coyotes.

Coyotes moved into my area in the early 1990's. I spend more time in the woods than anyone else that I know and as a result I saw the first wild canine immigrants here years before anyone else that I knew saw them. For years after that the skeptics worked hard to convince themselves that we were only seeing large foxes.

The coyote population skyrocketed in my area. By the late 1990's the coyotes were so heavy in our area that I could find fresh sign on a given day within an hour of entering the woods. Within a few seasons that changed. It certainly did not change as a result of hunting pressure. Coyotes are exceedingly wary and local hunters rarely glimpse them, much less get off a shot at one. Very few are killed by hunters.

Something hard hit them. My guess is that it was a super contagious sickness along the lines of parvo. Their numbers have sprung back. Coyotes can freely inter breed with dogs. The resulting offspring is not sterile. Often that offspring is large. There were two grown coyotes not far from the horse lot that were very obviously half rottweiler. This is not a cross that one will find at the New York Kennel Club Show. However, I suspect that they look a bit like the lap dogs in Hell.

The impact of the coyotes on local fauna has been dramatic. Our most common predator up until about the year 2000 was the feral house cat. He is now nearly completely gone. Coyote food. Gone are the ground hogs. The fox population is down. Musk rats are nearly gone from the marshes. Small game like raccoons, possums, and rabbits used to litter the back roads in a flattened state. Not now. Their populations are reduced to the degree that they do not provide constant targets for fast moving vehicles. This is the first year that I have seen the turkey population take a big hit and now even the deer are actually reducing in numbers in my area.

In short, the coyotes have brought change, big change.

But, as I find myself saying more and more as I get older, I digress. The maritime forest of False Cape was teeming with life yesterday, March 10, at a time when the woods at home are cold, barren, stark and muddy. The difference is the vegetation. The woods was filled with live oaks, bay plants, wax berry, wild blueberry stems, infant pines, and an array of green brier. It was green. Not every plant was potential horse forage, but more of it was than we realize. Live oak acorns have so little acid in them that they can be eaten by humans without going through a lengthy leaching process as with other acorns. The wild horses of Corolla love to eat those acorns.

I do not know how they chew green brier as well as they do, but they love it.

I have never found evidence of significant worm infestation in a wild Corolla and that is one of the reasons that they are so healthy in the wild. The other reason is simply that they thrive on plants that we do not even notice.

Oat's don't grow on trees.