A naturalist celebrates the paradise of the Pinelands

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Inside Out | A naturalist celebrates the paradise of the Pinelands

By Art Carey

Inquirer Columnist




The river that is Howard Boyd - scientist, naturalist, lover of the Pine Barrens - has been flowing for 89 years. It still runs clear and deep, but memory must reach back far to list all the tributaries.


There were the animal stories by Thornton W. Burgess. As soon as he could read, Boyd devoured every volume, delighting in the adventures of Reddy Fox, Bobby Coon and Jimmy Skunk.


There was his pastoral boyhood on small farms in northeastern Massachusetts, where he was surrounded by plant and animal life.


There was Mrs. Hazel Ramer, the eighth-grade teacher who challenged her class to collect and identify the most wildflowers. Boyd won the contest handily. "I was a gung-ho eager beaver," he says.


There were his years as a Boy Scout, when he earned every nature merit badge in the handbook.


At Boston University, Boyd had no hesitation declaring a major: biological sciences. After taking a course in entomology, he began collecting insects.


When his job as a Boy Scout executive brought him to Philadelphia, he met an amateur entomologist who led him on field trips to the New Jersey Pine Barrens. At night with flashlights, they picked insects off blueberry bushes. By day, they looked for deer scat, hoping to find scarab beetles. They were assisted by Pineys such as Asa Pitman, a.k.a. "Rattlesnake Ace," who lit lanterns at night to attract weird bugs.


For Boyd, the Pinelands were a revelation and a naturalist's paradise. Thirty-five years ago he moved to Tabernacle, Burlington County, and with the Pine Barrens in his backyard, he set out to know this wild and strange place intimately. When he retired, he began a second career, teaching the ecology of the Pinelands at the Conservation and Environmental Studies Center at Whitesbog.


Depending on how you define it, the Pine Barrens comprises 1.25 million to 1.4 million acres. Boyd hasn't seen it all, but you'd be hard-put to find anyone who's hiked more trails, canoed more streams, and knows more about the flora and fauna. It's all there in his three books: A Field Guide to the Pine Barrens; A Pine Barrens Odyssey: A Naturalist's Year in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, and Wild Flowers of the Pine Barrens.


The Pine Barrens is the largest semi-wilderness between Boston and Virginia, with a unique mix of plants from the north (thanks to ancient glaciers) and the south (thanks to global warming). "It's like having a botanical workshop at your fingertips," says Boyd, who still explores the Barrens once or twice a month.


Its tea-colored streams are fed by mammoth aquifers, layers of sand saturated with 17 trillion gallons of water. Animal residents include deer, fox, wild turkey, beaver and black bear.


But the ecology is changing. Oaks are muscling out pines, which need periodic fires to proliferate. Says Boyd: "It may become the Oak Barrens."


Another threat: fragmentation. "Instead of an expanse of forest land," he rues, "we have segments broken up by retirement villages."
 
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