Every time I am at the kitchen sink doing dishes, I think back to growing up in the Southern Catskills in New York. Why? Because of a tree. A young Eastern hemlock is directly in view while standing there.
Hemlocks were about 25 percent of the trees on the 200 acres that I spent countless hours exploring in my youth. They were the center of all wildlife activity: deer bedded under them during snowstorms, porcupines clipped the ends of branches in winter, barred and great horned owls roosted in them, gray squirrels built nests in their upper limbs, and they were intertwined with every facet of the black-capped chickadees’ life. The local brook trout stream which winded through a deep ravine nearby was always in deep shade as hemlocks lined its banks. That shade kept the water cool and provided my young self with endless fishing memories.
For the couple of local sawmills hemlock was the wood of choice for rough cut lumber from 1 inch thick boards to barn beams. When I started archery hunting in my earlier teens, every stand I placed was always in the shadowy confines of a hemlock. All those hours tucked into those sheltering limbs watching and waiting provided so many remarkable wildlife observations.
Why have I been using the past tense when talking about these hemlocks? Because they are all gone. Those 200 acres are still undeveloped, the brook trout stream still flows, but the hemlocks are standing dead or now more often falling down.
The loss of this single tree species is the result of human activities which allowed for the import and movement of a tiny invasive pest, the hemlock wooly adelgid. My younger self would never have thought that all those hemlocks would be gone less than 25 years later. And the impacts on the wildlife have been tremendous: winter deer cover – gone, porcupine numbers – extremely reduced, the brook trout stream – warmer, and black-capped chickadees – nearly non-existent.
So, every time I stand at the sink I treasure the memories of my youth and shed a tear for what was lost . . .
— Joe Dembeck, Somerset SWCD Executive Director, text and photo