Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/391

Rh and barn. The robin nests within handreach of the door-sill, and the wren and martin, leaving their old homes in the forest to some woodpecker more lazy than his fellows, scold and quarrel for the possession of any hole or box so long as it is near the dwelling places of men.

The effect of forest clearing and settlement on the larger wild animals of the region was even more striking, since it caused their rapid disappearance from the vicinity of cultivated land. The wild animal life of the larger sort is always in inverse proportion to the increase of an agricultural population. The indigenous fauna increases in a land of aboriginal hunting folk of low culture, but decreases swiftly and surely in contact with civilized men. Aboriginal man is part of the fauna of a region. As a species he has struck a balance with other indigenous species of animals and as such is a "natural race." Like the lower animals the native man also vanishes from the region of settlement. Of the lower mammals which inhabited the Atlantic forest region in aboriginal times the gray timber wolf was conspicuous, as all early records relate. It has not entirely disappeared from the wilder tracts, especially in the remote northern forest, even at this late day. The bear still lingers in more or less security on the outskirts of settlement, his vegetarian tendencies rendering him a far less formidable animal than some of his former neighbors. Of these last the cougar, variously known as puma, panther or "painter," was a desperate character and has been hunted out even from the more remote wilderness. His relative, the bay lynx or wild cat, may still be met with in deep mountain woods. Of the deer tribe, the common or Virginian deer ("buck" in the colloquial tongue) is fairly numerous in many parts of the wild country, largely as a result of protection. The case of the wapiti or "elk," however, is different. This great deer at one time dwelt along the wooded ranges of the Appalachians, probably in some parts extending its migrations to tide-water (upper Chesapeake Rivers) as witnessed by various local place names. The deep wilderness of coniferous forest to the north, remote and little disturbed by European invasion, is inhabited by two species of deer—the moose and the caribou—which are still fairly numerous. A difference in habits, as well as in aboriginal distribution, may account for the persistence of these two deer, as compared with the elk, in the Atlantic region. The elk is gregarious by nature and in the early history of the country was found in large herds, sometimes a hundred or more individuals, frequenting the open beaver meadows and the timber of river bottoms throughout the Appalachians. The moose and the caribou, on the other hand, rarely associate in any considerable numbers and frequent more inaccessible places, as tamarack thickets and the heavy growth of spruce and birch woods.

At the time of the discovery, and possibly long before, the bison