by Daniel B. Botkin, originally published by Perigee Books, a division of Penguin/Putnam, 1999.

This book, originally published as “Passage of Discovery“, is an ecologist’s guide to the first half of the Lewis and Clark trail, their travels up the Missouri River from St. Louis to Three Forks, MT.  I have decided to share this book with the readers of my website, and I am going to present the entire book here, one chapter at a time, with a new chapter appearing each week.  There are more than 40 chapters.  If you follow along and read all of them, you will learn about the entire Missouri River as seen by Lewis and Clark at the beginning of the 19th century, and as I visited it during the 1990s to see what they had seen, and to learn how the countryside had changed.  Comparing what Lewis and Clark saw with what we see today is one of the best insights we can get of how nature and environment in American has changed since European settlement.   I hope you enjoy it and find it rewarding.

- Daniel B. Botkin

All of the chapters published thus far can be found in the Passage of Discovery category. Please note that they are listed in reverse order of date posted.

More books by Daniel Botkin are available for purchase from the Center For the Study Of the Environment bookstore.

15.  Fontenelle Forest Preserve: Killing Nature with Kindness

Fontenelle Forest and Neale Woods are two segments owned by the same non-profit organization.  The larger and main facility, Fontenelle Forest, is in Bellevue, a suburb south of Omaha, at 1111 Bellevue Blvd., North, Bellevue Nebraska 68005, (402) 731-3140.  Neale Woods Nature Center is to the north of Omaha, at 14323 Edith Marie Ave., Omaha, Nebraska 68112, (402) 453-5615.

To get to Fontenelle Forest go south on 13th Street in Omaha (an exit off of Interstate 80); drive to Bellevue (a short distance); look for signs that direct you to the left onto Camp Brewster Road which ends at a T intersection. Turn right, following a sign to the forest, and the entrance is on your left within a city block.

On July 22, 1804 the expedition reached the vicinity of modern Bellevue, Nebraska, just south of Omaha, on Papillion Creek. Lewis and Clark decided to camp here on the Iowa side of the river for several days, to dry out some of their provisions that had gotten wet and to see if they could find Indian chiefs and set up the meeting they would have soon afterwards at the place they called Council Bluffs.

The eastern white-tailed deer was common here as it had been on the journey, and was a common source of meat for the expedition.  On this day they brought in five deer, five the next, two on the 25th.  Deer were so common and readily taken that Clark noted on July 26th that “only 1 Deer Killed to day.” On July 27th, the expedition moved on upriver and Clark observed that on the Nebraska side there was “high land covered with timber.”

Today the Nebraska side of this location is the setting for Fontenelle Forest, the premier conservation organization of Nebraska.  It is one of the best places to see the upland woods and forests along this section of the Missouri.   I had been there several times and enjoyed the well maintained paths through the woodlands and down into hollows, the view of the river through the trees, and the  knowledgeable staff.  It is also one of the few places directly on the lower Missouri River where you can take natural history field courses and participate in guided hiking trips.

Fontenelle Forest has 368 species of flowering plants including 38 species of native trees, 17 species of shrubs, and 13 woody vines.   The woodlands are good habitat for birds, and more than 300 species have been observed in Fontenelle Forest and the surroundings.  Just as it was good deer habitat when Lewis and Clark were here, so it continues to be today.  In fact, it has become too good a deer habitat.

At Fontenelle Forest the latest scientific approaches to conservation and management of wild living resources are attempted.  So it was ironic and intriguing that the forest would be subjected in recent years to a problem with deer not of the staff’s own making.  In the 1980s the deer population increased noticeably within the preserve, both on the upland loess bluffs and the large wooded bottomland.  The problem continued into the 1990s where the feeding of the deer on young trees reduced saplings by 70 percent, a potentially serious decline in the ability of the forest to regenerate.  Deer, so much loved by people, were becoming a serious problem.

The rapid rise in deer appeared to be in part the result of the suburbanization of the land adjacent to Fontenelle Forest.  The surrounding high bluff was becoming an attractive place to build homes.  And with the best of intentions and the desire to have a pleasant setting, homeowners planted gardens and put in trees.  Many of the plants they grew were typical of young woodlands — low shrubs and small trees — just the kind of vegetation that deer loved to eat.

From a distance the Fontenelle woodlands resemble the wooded riverside seen by Lewis and Clark, but up close the forest has become denser and shadier.  Deer are animals of young woodlands.  They cannot reach very high and in a very old, very shady forests there are few leaves they can reach.  The kinds of trees and shrubs they prefer grow primarily in open areas or young forests, and this is what the suburban landscape was providing in abundance. The human neighborhood created a cafeteria of great interest and benefit to the deer, and the deer population soared.

The staff at Fontenelle Nature Preserve thought the problem over.  The first important point is to understand that deer depend on certain kinds of changes in nature, contrary to the usual assumptions that nature left alone by people remains constant.  Although a local 1959 publication by the Omaha Botany Club called the woodlands a “virgin forest,” the forest is not so.   Photographs from the turn of the twentieth century revealed much more open woodlands with oak and hickories scattered among prairie grasses, than occur now.  These oak openings are a product of frequent fires that occur naturally on prairies.  Oak openings develop on the wetter sites.  On the drier sites, prairie grasses return after fires.  Deer prefer acorns and require leaves and twigs of shrubs and trees; they need young forests and therefore are adapted to and require a landscape that changes, subjected to natural fires.

So deer depend on changes occurring in forests.  Nature does not paint the landscape once, but continuously revises the canvas.  If there were never any disturbance, never fire, then the forests would develop into closed woodlands of large trees, dense shade, and little that the deer could reach and eat.  The deer themselves are a force of change.  Given young forests and a high density of deer, these animals can convert woodlands to grasslands.

A deer hunt was organized in the early 1990s.  The hunt was restricted initially to where the deer seemed to congregate most, on Gifford Point, the bottomlands within the preserve.  The assumption was that the deer herd moved about freely and removing the deer from one part of the preserve would reduce the population density everywhere.    This seemed obvious, I thought, remembering the three deer I had seen swim the Missouri River on a cold April not far from this location.  It seemed obvious that the deer moved rather freely about the countryside as their need for food, habitat, cover, and breeding required.  But often the obvious, the plausible, isn’t true about wildlife.

These first efforts had some effects, but not as much as was expected.  In 1994 Fontenelle Forest began a cooperative research program with faculty at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.  As part of the study, 51 deer were tagged to learn about their movements within and outside the preserve. To everybody’s surprise, the deer maintained very small home ranges – often less than ½ square mile.  So the deer “do not act like gas molecules,” said Gary Garabrandt, Chief Ranger of the Fontenelle Forest Association . They do not fill a vacuum of deer.  They are not completely interchangeable gears in a machine.  Removing deer from one location does not result in immediate replacement from deer from elsewhere.

So the practice of harvesting deer from one part of the preserve was not having the desired effect.  Deer were not moving in at the rate expected from areas of high density to those that had been lowered by hunting.  In 1995 there were 495 deer in the seven square miles of the preserve, a density of 70 deer per square mile.  The staff at the forest determined that there should be no more than 20 deer per square mile. At this density or lower, the forest could withstand deer browsing and regenerate.

Taking this new finding into account, the Association adjusted the allowed hunting so that it could occur in more locations but remain carefully managed.  Along with the new hunting policy, the staff encouraged local homeowners to plant less palatable plants and provided information about these. In 1997 the overwintering population of deer in the preserve had been reduced to 316 or 45 deer in a square mile, and by 1998 to 256 or 36 per square mile.  The program appeared to be working towards the desired level.

The approach to deer management at Fontenelle Forest, with changes in policy made as new information develops, is known as adaptive management.  Scientific research is integrated into the management and conservation practices.  As part of adaptive management, nature was monitored and experiments were set up.  Part of this process was the establishment of exclosures within the preserve.  Four of these, each almost a quarter of an acre in area with eight-foot high fences to keep out the deer, have been set up.  These serve as controls to compare growth of young trees where deer cannot reach with growth of young trees on land subjected to deer browsing. The exclosures are part of a guide to whether the population of deer has been sufficiently reduced.

The experiences at Fontenelle Forest reveal the naturalness of certain changes but also help us separate desirable from undesirable changes.  For the purposes of Fontenelle Forest, whose goal is to have representatives of these forests much as Lewis and Clark saw them, desirable changes include frequent light fires and some browsing by deer, but not too much.  The experiences at Fontenelle forest also reinforced for me that we had to look beyond what seemed obvious and plausible, and continually test our knowledge against observations.  Here at Fontenelle Forest people are learning to refine general concept of natural change into practices of adaptive management that will maintain the countryside in ways that people want to see it.  When you visit the forest you can see another kind of countryside that is reminiscent of landscapes of the Lewis and Clark expedition.  And while you are there you can look at the forest for signs of deer, their browsing, and fires past and present.