Dynamic Woodland

The secret to understanding the ancient woodland cover in northern Europe and America is to appreciate the relationship between meat on the hoof, and deciduous woodland. Shortly after the last ice age, enormous herds of steak rampaged their way across the countryside, ripping, munching and felling the vegetation in the countryside.

Vinney Ridge. A large beech tree in New Forest woodland
    dominated by beech

Although European rainfall is higher, as they do in modern Africa, the northern equivalent of elephants, woolly mammoths, would have torn down trees, and brought down branches for food. All this dynamic activity would have had a profound effect on the ecology of those days. Native Americans saw the importance of this balance, and did not treat the huge herds of bison that roamed as an unlimited resource that would continue without some sort of management. Not so the stone age human equivalent in Europe. Here, bison and grazing animals were brought to the verge of extinction in prehistoric times through uncontrolled hunting and lack of management.

It was Franz Vera who, in his ground breaking book Grazing Ecology and Forest History, brought to the attention of ecologists the importance of the balance between grazing and woodland in the northern hemisphere. An understanding and appreciation of the finest, most natural non man managed woodland moved from forests in Poland to the British New Forest. The New Forest consists of a mosaic of habitats which have been created by herds of grazing animals. These animals create areas of grassland known locally as lawns. The ancient New Forest woodland contains little regeneration, a more open shrub layer and a particularly impoverished ground flora. The tradition in medieval Britain for deer hunting by the king and his nobles created the New Forest, and the English medieval deer parks. Since William the Conqueror, the New Forest has been managed, one way and another primarily as a food resource for grazing animals.