The Steward of the Zuni Pine Barrens

The early naturalists who explored the American South marveled at the longleaf-pine forests that covered vast stretches of the coastal plain. In his 1791 account of his travels, William Bartram described "open, airy" tracts, "the stately trees scatteringly planted by nature, arising straight and erect from the green carpet, embellished with various grasses and flowering plants."

In Bartram's time, those forests covered as many as 90 million acres from Virginia to Texas, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that today only three million acres remain and that, of those, only 3 percent are in anything like their undisturbed state.

The 319-acre remnant of those towering forests that Lytton John Musselman manages is not part of the undisturbed 3 percent. Located in what are known as the Zuni Pine Barrens, some 25 miles west of Norfolk, Va., the tract has suffered a series of insults to the ecosystem over the 400 years since Europeans first arrived in Tidewater Virginia. Musselman, a professor and chairman of the biology department at Old Dominion University, wants to learn as much as he can about the presettlement forest and to restore as much of it as is feasible.

The remnant, known as the Blackwater Ecologic Preserve because it abuts the Blackwater River, was donated to the university in 1985 by Union Camp Corporation -- now part of the International Paper Company. (Union Camp actually gave the land to the Nature Conservancy, which then transferred it to the university, so thatif the university ever wants to relinquish management of the preserve -- ownership will revert to the conservancy, not the company.)

Musselman has been the preserve's only manager, and he oversees it with minimal resources. The university provides no funds for it other than his salary, and he uses the good offices of two state agencies -- the division of forests and the department of natural resources -- and of the Nature Conservancy to protect and restore the preserve.

The restoration is a daunting task, and, Musselman acknowledges, not one that will be accomplished in his lifetime. Nonetheless, the opportunity to observe and catalog the ways an ecosystem recovers as the natural processes that shaped its evolution are reinstituted, fills him with an enthusiasm that he happily shares with visitors.

While some early naturalists botanized in this part of Virginia, few of their accounts survive, so Musselman cannot describe in detail the predisturbance vegetation of the preserve, which is at the northern limit of the longleaf-pine community. But he is clear on what caused its degradation. In a 1987 article on the preserve, he and Cecil C. Frost, then of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, attribute the virtual destruction of the plant community to the cumulative effects of a series of human interventions since Europeans first arrived in Virginia. (The site is fewer than 30 miles from the 1607 Jamestown settlement.)

The alteration and destruction began with the introduction into the forests of domestic animals, chiefly pigs, by the colonists. Rather than pen them and have to provide feed for them, the settlers let the animals forage in the wild and rounded them up when necessary. By 1750, feral pigs had saturated the longleaf-pine forests of southeastern Virginia, and their meal of choice was pine seedling. As a result, fewer and fewer trees reached maturity.

The colonists also began removing mature trees for lumber, and beginning in the mid-18th century, they began "boxing" the trees for turpentine. The process, which involved gouging out large areas in the tree trunks to collect resin, continued "with increasing intensity, until exhaustion of the pine orchards of the state in the 1840s," Musselman and Frost write. Musselman adds that because of its high resin content, "longleaf was the only species of pine regularly used for naval stores" -- the turpentine and tar that were used to caulk wooden ships. Because the mature trees had exceptionally long boles, the distance from the ground to the first branches, they were also widely used as masts for sailing vessels.

By the late 19th century, most of the remaining trees had been removed for timber. Then came a brief period when the land was left alone. Too few trees remained to make their harvesting commercially viable. But in the 20th century, a new threat arose: the era of fire suppression that began around 1920.

Fire suppression became more important as humans moved closer and closer to areas that burned regularly in fires caused by lightning. Longleaf-pine communities are what are known as fire-maintained ecosystems: They require regular fires to keep the ground from becoming so covered with litter and the understory so clogged with bushes that the pine seeds cannot germinate or grow to maturity if they do manage to take hold.

Today, feral pigs no longer prowl the Zuni Pine Barrens, and fires are no longer suppressed. Musselman oversees a program of controlled burning designed to simulate the natural fires that shaped the longleaf-pine ecosystem. The goal, he says, "is to burn each tract in the preserve on roughly a five-year cycle, and to burn at least one tract each year."

The role of fire, he points out, is crucial not only for the pines, but for many other species in the ecosystem. He notes, for instance, that in the 1930s, M.L. Fernald, a Harvard University botanist, led a series of collecting expeditions to the Zuni Pine Barrens. That was after the widespread harvesting of commercially valuable trees and before the era of fire suppression significantly altered the ecosystem. Many of the species that Fernald and his colleagues collected had disappeared by the time the university acquired the preserve, because it had not experienced any natural fires for more than 50 years. Some, like the white-fringed orchid, reappeared once the program of prescribed burning began in the 1980s.

With many of the historic threats to the ecosystem under control, Musselman says, suburban encroachment has become the biggest threat to its survival. "Everybody wants his own little farmette," he says. "They want to move to the ecosystem they love, but they destroy it by moving to it."

While Musselman is deeply immersed in the history and the ecology of the preserve, it's hard to carry on an extended conversation about it with him when he's escorting a visitor on a tour. He will start a discussion of, say, the importance of the resin-rich longleaf pines as naval stores, but interrupt himself repeatedly as he finds a patch of pixie moss or a longleaf-pine seedling. Unlike those of many other pines, the longleaf seedlings do not shoot straight up; rather, long needles arch out from a central core so that they seem more like a clump of grass than an incipient pine tree. Musselman describes them as having a fountainlike appearance, and when he finds one, he marvels at its beauty and its very existence.

He points out shadbush, so named because it blooms when the shad start their run, in early spring; huckleberries; and dwarf blueberry. He describes how slight changes in elevation can produce significant changes in the flora. "Two feet lower than where we're standing," he says, "you'll find a completely different ecotone." In the lower, wetter area, he lets out a cry of delight as he finds cane grass, in flower. But mostly, he admires the tracts where the controlled burns have removed much of the underbrush and opened the canopy, creating conditions most suitable for the regeneration of the longleaf pines.

Ecologists frequently point out how long it has taken evolutionary processes to create the intricate interactions and interdependencies of the species in an ecosystem, and how quickly human modifications can undo those interactions. Nowhere is that more evident than in the preserve Musselman has spent much of almost two decades trying to understand.

The past 400 years in southeastern Virginia demonstrate, he says, how closely linked the environment and human history are, which means that he must try to understand not only the botanical and zoological makeup of the longleaf-pine community, but also the complex relationship between human social and economic activity and the health of ecosystems.

Given the complexity and the uncertainties, the task of recreating a healthy longleaf-pine forest becomes all the more challenging. When it comes to restoring ecosystems, he says, "we are amateurs." Only one thing is certain, he adds: "Fire works."

"Remember, only you can promote prescribed burns."

Malcolm G. Scully is The Chronicle's editor at large.