Michigan deer, a returned forest hunter, and what to do if you meet a black bear or a timber rattlesnake on the trail.
Stop for a second and listen. You're walking through a place Pennsylvania has named both an Important Mammal Area and an Important Bird Area, with seventy-five kinds of birds recorded across the park and North Mountain. And some of the residents have a surprising back story.
Take the white-tailed deer. You'd figure they've been here forever. They haven't. By nineteen twelve, deer were gone from the Ricketts lands altogether. The Colonel brought some back in nineteen fourteen, and the state shipped in nearly twelve hundred deer from Michigan over those same years. So if a doe looks up at you this afternoon, there's a fair chance she's got Michigan in the family tree.
Then there's the fisher, a dark, long-bodied cousin of the weasel, about the size of a big house cat. In the mid nineteen nineties, thirty-nine of them were released on the state game lands right next door. You'd be lucky to see one, but they're out here.
Two neighbors deserve your respect. This is black bear country. If you meet one, stay calm, back away slowly, and make yourself look big. Do not run. And Pennsylvania's mountains hold timber rattlesnakes, which want nothing to do with you. Just look before you sit on a rock or reach under a ledge, and never pick one up, even if it looks dead. Give them room and they'll give you the same.
Keep on up the creek. Boone wants a word before the first falls.
Photo: Thomas Quine · CC BY 2.0
