The population and technology of the Amerindians had little long-term effect upon wildlife in North America. Despite some current anti-hunting arguments that the appearance of homo sapiens in North America coincides with the disappearance of the large mammals, there is no evidence to show that paleo-extinctions were the result of hunting. There is far more evidence that these extinctions were the result of climate changes. Amerindians did, however, hunt animals and did alter their local environment. There is archaeological evidence of very large kills of buffalo that probably exceeded the current food needs of the hunters, but generally there was a close balance between habitat, wildlife, and human beings.
Great changes in both habitat and wildlife began to occur in North America consequent to European settlement in the 1500's. These changes are reflected in alterations to forest, land, and waters as the result of building villages and clearing fields, but they are also reflected in the direct usage of wildlife for both food and economic purposes. Initial European occupation of North America had little more impact than Amerindian presence had, but as the numbers of Europeans increased and as European organizational structures were successfully projected into North America, European capacity to affect both the species list, numbers of animals, and habitat increased rapidly.
The earliest impact was felt in the fur trade. This complex and extensive trade was associated not only with the northeast corner of North America but with the southeast as well. Both Charleston and New Orleans had significant economic eras related to fur trade along with cities much further to the north. The rudiments of an active fur trade, probably using a network more Spanish than English in structure, was in place across much of the South by 1690. European trade goods exchanged for hides had made it across Tennessee from the Atlantic coast and were observed by travelers on the Mississippi River around Memphis in 1690. Within fifty years, the fur trade would become a major southern industry. Tennessee shipped 50,000 deerskins annually to Charleston by 1750. In addition to deerskins, the hides of buffalo, beaver, and elk were shipped. A specialty trade was the feathered skin of the Ruby Throated Hummingbird. These skins were sent to Barbados where they were reassembled into a bird-like form and were packed with scented sand for sale and use in Europe.
From 1500 to 1800, the land area most affected by European settlement was the Atlantic corridors of the tidewater and piedmont. In this long strip reaching a hundred miles inland from the coast, fields were cleared for agriculture. A particularly destructive pattern of field use to grow tobacco developed early in the colonial era: little fertilizer was initially needed in the undisturbed rich top soil of the virgin fields. As the fields eroded and as intensive tobacco farming removed nutrients, the productive capacity of the fields diminished. Rather than protect or improve fields, the common colonial practice was to abandon unproductive fields and open new areas of the forest. At the same time the great timber reserves were exploited for lumber for the rapidly expanding wooden fleets of England and Spain. The double economic forces of tobacco and lumber drove a severe exploitation of the original soils of the Virginia and Carolina piedmonts. Rice production in the lower Carolinas affected the coastal marshes.
A combination of economic and technological trends in the nineteenth century accelerated the pace and character of the alteration of the land. It was not until after 1795 and the invention of the Whitney cotton gin that the economic potential of cotton could be realized. The gin made ended the labor intensive manual de-seeding of cotton and released large numbers of slave workers back to the fields for the more lucrative work of producing cotton acreage. The increasing profitability of cotton production combined with rapidly increasing world demand sustained an increase in the slave trade and the clearing of more land for cotton fields. By the 1830's the effects of cotton economy were felt across the Appalachians and up the Mississippi valley, reaching up the tributaries of the Tennessee River into lower Franklin County.
The 1800's saw the increasing use of steam power in shipping and industry and eventually in railroading and agriculture. Steam power allowed for more efficient mills and could be utilized in large pieces of equipment that could transfer enormous power to a task. Steam powered hoists and drag lines, for instance, enable large areas of southern forests to be logged where no other means of extracting logs was feasible. Steam requires a boiler and boilers require fireboxes which require fuel. The common fuel for producing steam in the first half of the nineteenth century was wood. Steam power had a double effect upon forests: it was used to extract timbers but the forests were also consumed to produce the steam power that consumed them. The application of steam power in sawmills meant that forest products could be processed much more quickly than by water power.
In the form of the power hoist or railway engine, steam power could be delivered directly to a site where no other form of power was practicable. Railroads, for instance, could be laid directly to the center of a logging site and the cars loaded with little additional transport needed. With steam power, forests could be quickly logged and much larger areas cut over. As logging proceeded through the nineteenth century, critical habitat integrity was lost. The species most affected by this loss was the Passenger Pigeon whose numbers began to plummet by the last quarter of the century and which became extinct just after World War I. Other animals such as the eastern cougar and wolves were also affected by the fragmentation of the forest and either disappeared in the East or were driven into very restricted ranges.
Logging and fragmentation of the forests had another effect upon wildlife: logging produced ruinous erosion and siltation in watersheds, particularly in the Appalachian mountains. Although over-fishing was perhaps a local factor on some streams, the reduction of the southern brook trout from typical to endangered or extinct status over more than 80% of its range is attributable more to forest and watershed alteration than to harvesting. The silt smothered the waters, and the lost canopy of shade caused the waters to warm to intolerable levels for the brook trout.
In the cases of animals such as white-tailed deer and wild turkey, forest reduction and loss of habitat accelerated their declines. A critical factor, however, was the harvesting of these animals for food. Despite early colonial recognition that Amerindians did not observe appropriate seasons in their killing of deer, deer hunting was not effectively regulated until well into the twentieth century. During much of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries deer were a favored food of both Amerindians and colonists. Deer continues to be a staple in the diets of mountain and cove folk from the western Carolinas into Middle Tennessee. Subsistence hunting of deer by increasing numbers of settlers led to sharp reductions in herd numbers by World War I. Despite substantial hunter lore, deer have not been common throughout most of this century in the South. Only in the last thirty years has a rebound been seen in the deer population to lift herd size back to or above early colonial levels.
In the twentieth century, particularly in the last fifty years, our capacity to alter the natural world by mechanical and chemical means accelerated beyond anything in previous human history. In this period the logging of forests becomes more efficient by the introduction of powered "chain" saws which enable a single lumberman to fell more trees in an hour than a half dozen loggers could previously fell in a day. More recent technology for log handling has replaced the traditional ox or mule team for dragging logs, and in pulp forests entire trees including the root system are now extracted in one operation by large harvest machines. This period also sees the generalization of powered farm equipment ranging from simple tractors to marvelously efficient hay bale stackers. In addition, powered graders, bulldozers, and ditching equipment have become so common that on large farms these may occur as owned rather than as rented equipment.
The mechanical technology has given contemporary American farmers greater capacity for land utilization than ever before. Larger areas can be farmed by a single farmer, and more intensive and precise cultivation can be practiced. It is also the case that more destructive practices can occur as well. An old fencerow or lane now can be cleared and graded to road department specifications with ease. With a small bulldozer scrub areas and thickets can be reduced to burn piles in very little time. It is easily within the capacity of a bulldozer operator to clear three or four acres of scrub growth as a morning's work. To the bulldozer must be added the wide usage of the "bush hog." This farm-scale adaptation of the rotary lawn mower has enabled farmers to exercise close to ground control over thousands of acres that formerly would have been lost to pasturage or hay production by the natural succession in old fields.
Perhaps more important than the mechanical capacities of saws and farm machinery is the use and effect of farm chemicals. It is a truism, of course, to observe that contemporary American agri-business is impossible without modern chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and no one can seriously entertain the consequences of a total ban on these materials in American farming. We must note, however, that--apart from the acid rain deposits of industry--agri-chemicals have affected more species of wildlife than any other aspect of land utilization except the clear-cutting of forests. Most of these species are not either mammals or birds but are invertebrates and vertebrates such as reptiles and amphibians. These species typically have little favored standing in press or policy, and the long-term effects of loss are not as dramatic as in the case of media species such as the Spotted Owl or American Bald Eagle.
A couple of other effects of settlement and development in the twentieth century must be noted. As the RUTZ phenomenon continues, we note the generalized fragmentation of the landscape as a macro-habitat in a local area. In a one mile square tract shared by two farms on either side and divided into several hundred mixed acres of pasture, cropland, and woodlot an animal such as a deer or bobcat or fox would have in that tract a relatively large area to roam. There is enough area to buffer the scents and noise of human presence and the presence of domestic animals such as cats and dogs. A single house placed in the center of this tract, however, radically alters the habitat configuration--especially for range sensitive animals. A dozen houses in a mile square tract do not much alter the visible appearance of the landscape, but their habitat impact on certain animals is critical. Any golf course pond will attract Canada Geese; an isolated farm pond will attract migrating ducks. But farm ponds surrounded by houses, moving cars, dogs, and teenagers on bikes will not attract these same ducks. The geese are protected by particular social behaviors that are less powerful among ducks. The ducks pass on to seek out the dwindling number of isolated marshes and ponds.
White-tailed deer and coyotes are remarkably adaptive. Deer in fact have become nuisance animals across much of America because of their expansion into niche areas of the fragmented landscape. Large carnivores such as bear, wolves, and large cats fare much worse in the fragmented but developed landscape. These animals require both large ranges and relative freedom from intrusion to maintain themselves in the wild. While the eastern black bear shows some signs of recovery in developed areas--several have been spotted in recent years in Franklin County--hunting pressure and pursuit by domestic or feral dogs seriously disturb quality habitat for these animals.
A final area of impact of settlement and development must be noted. Houses in the countryside not only mean more people they mean something else that is of great ecological concern: lawns. Well-kept lawns are so normative in the suburban imagination of America that any comment upon their ecological effects and their effects upon wildlife will inevitably be construed as hyper-environmentalism. It is hard for us to recognize or accept that manicured lawns are a very recent phenomenon. Most old photographs of the South show very rough yards and little that by contemporary standards would be considered a lawn. Until the advent of power mowers it was simply too difficult to maintain any but a nominal lawn. In the RUTZ areas of the county today we see new houses constructed that are specifically placed for the creation of not merely a few hundred square feet but for acres of lawn surface.
Across America, the domestic lawn along with the chemicals and fertilizers used to maintain it are a major environmental problem. In the pollution of the Chesapeake Bay, lawns rival farms in their effect in the watersheds of the bay. Lawns neither make hay nor shelter wildlife. In the propensity for ultra-neatness in lawns, grass may be cut weekly or more often in periods of rapid growth. Such large areas of lawn could have a beneficial effect if they were seeded in white clover and the clover allowed to bloom before cutting, but the presence of clover in lawns is seldom allowed to have beneficial effect. Tennessee [along with the rest of the nation] is currently experiencing a deficit of honey bees. The honey bee is critical in the pollination of many economically important plants, and in 1996 the loss to farmers from inadequate pollination has amounted to millions of dollars. The critical factor in honey bee losses is infestation by a bee mite, but larger areas of clover could sustain larger bee populations. Lawns, if allowed to mature, could be a positive rather than negative factor in the landscape.
As residential development of farm land and rural areas proceeds in Franklin County, habitat for many forms of wildlife will continue to degrade. Deer are likely to continue to increase in numbers, but effective culling will become increasingly problematic because hunting will become less and less possible in the settled landscape. Opossums, raccoons, and skunks by most measures seem to be faring well in the domesticated areas. The adaptive and aggressive gray fox seems to have the capacity to survive in the transformed landscape while the red fox is less successful. Greatest effect of generalized development will probably be felt most by species such as venomous reptiles, waterfowl, and bobcats. As the population of the county approaches fifty thousand and the county is uniformly settled with houses, wildlife encounter will shift more and more away from hunting toward "appreciation." Deer and small mammals such as rabbits and squirrels will continue to be common, but the "wildness" of wildlife will become marginal.
