Brief-Form Post #50: Field to Forest in a WNWR Bottomland — Armed with a 1937 Aerial Photograph
I am pleased to add the 50th of my GBH Brief-Form Posts (Less than five minutes to read!) to my website. I don’t want my enthusiasm for thoroughness and detail to discourage readers. So, I will occasionally publish these brief Posts.
I’ve rambled through the bottomland forests of the Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge (WNWR) south of HGH Road routinely since my 2018 retirement to northern Alabama. Fellow retired forester Chris Stuhlinger recently secured 1937 aerial photographs of the area. The images confirm some of my suppositions of forest history and contradict others. I focus this brief-form post on the forest west of Jolly B Road and south of HGH Road, where the 88-year-old image validates my supposition that this area of mature forest was open farmland when engineers completed Wheeler Dam. I captured photographs and videos for this Brief-Form Post on August 30, 2025.
The red line on this 1937 aerial image depicts the location of today’s gravel HGH Road, separating private land to the north from WNWR south of the road. The aerial photo, even though of poor resolution, clearly shows open land where I captured the photographs and two brief videos, a few hundred feet east of the copse of trees north of the road. Today, everything south of HGH is a mature forest.
This is the mid-morning view to the east where I parked along HGH Road. To all appearances, a shady forest road.
I recorded this 59-second video at the same location with the former open land to the south (right).
I turned my camera to the south, where a mature forest stands in the once open field.
Pointing my camera to the west, I again captured a shady forest lane.
I recorded this 54-second video looking west with the former open land to the south (left).
The two images below look into the towering mature forest where fields once grew agricultural crops.
Nothing in Nature is static. A century ago, these rich bottomlands, tended by farmers and mules, produced crops of corn, beans, and cotton. Priot to those years of sweat, anxiety, good years, and bad, other generations cleared the luxurious old growth forests to enable agriculture.
Nature always stands at the ready. The process is simple and long-practiced. Stop plowing, discing, and sowing. Nature fills the void with wind- and critter-born seeds. Bare land transitions to herbs, shrubs, seedlings, and eventually to vibrant stands of maturing trees.
This coming dormant season Chris and I will return to this old field mature forest for a deeper examination, without the company of mosquitoes, chiggers, ticks, and leafy poison ivy!
Closing
I accept the challenge of distilling these Brief-Form Posts into a single distinct reflection, a task far more elusive than assembling a dozen pithy statements. The great philosophers and physicists are attributed with exploring the notion of nature’s insistence on eliminating nothingness or emptiness. I say so be it; let them ponder the esoteric and say what they wish.
I adopt a simpler view, having learned through observation and experience that Nature hungrily fills every element and feature of any ecosystem I have observed. Vaporize 96,000 acres of forest on the footslopes of Mt. St. Helens in May of 1980; see the verdant slopes 45 years later. Scorch nearly 800,000 acres of Yellowstone National Park in 1988; see the wounds healing 37 years hence. My simpler view:
Nature abhors a vacuum.
I suppose I could attribute the wisdom to Henry David Thoreau:
Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.
