Albert G. Way

burned to be wild: HERBERT STODDARD AND THE ROOTS OF ECOLOGICAL CONSERVATION IN THE SOUTHERN LONGLEAF PINE FOREST

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the work of wildlife biologist Herbert Stoddard, who came to the longleaf pine-grassland forests of south Georgia in 1924 to study the bobwhite quail, and stayed to develop a method of land management that stressed ecological habitat over the dominant production-oriented model. Stoddard's major early accomplishments were threefold: He helped to create the new profession of wildlife management, he fought for the reintroduction of fire in the longleaf-grassland system, and he was among the first to advocate for ecological diversity in cultural landscapes. His work offers new insight on how conservation played out regionally, suggesting that we rethink the local elements of national conservation policy.

AS HE DID most every day while visiting the Red Hills region of south Georgia and north Florida, Henry Beadel—the son of a northern industrialist—was out quail hunting with his brother, Gerald, and their African American driver, Charley. It was a chilly afternoon in February, late 1890s. Upon reaching their shooting grounds, Beadel witnessed the unthinkable: "we saw the whole country on fire, which within a few minutes left the ground black and bare except for scattered clumps of bushes." An area that only the day before stood as an idyllic scene of grand pine woodlands interspersed with small, almost meadow-like agricultural fields, now appeared before them as a fire-blackened hell-on-earth. Unbeknownst to Beadel, the local African American sharecroppers had "put the fire out" that afternoon, ridding field and forest of a year's worth of accumulated growth. Beadel was not amused. "The country looked to us irretrievably ruined, and the quail doomed."¹

Charley soon set Beadel's mind at ease. He "informed us that this burning took place regularly every spring as far back as his great-grandpapa could remember." Relieved, yet still a bit incredulous, Beadel took "a few calmer squints through the smoke [to see] all the trees still standing, and we even found that we could walk behind the flames without scorching our boots." After a little sleuthing, he discovered that locals "took the practice as much for granted that it had not occurred to them to mention it to us."² Setting fires was one of the many local land management practices that mimicked historical ecological disturbance in the South's longleaf-grassland environment—practices that would soon be repeatedly attacked and defended by a bevy of scientific experts.

Almost three decades later, it did not take such a revelatory experience for Herbert Stoddard to realize fire had an essential place in the South's coastal plain ecology. Despite the anti-fire dogma that infused the region in the 1920s, he already understood before arriving in the Red Hills that the stability of the region's longleaf pine-grassland system depended on routine fire. Stoddard came to the Red Hills in 1924 as the leader of a study, sponsored by wealthy landowners and carried out through the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, to examine the life history and preferred habitat of the bobwhite quail, and develop a management scheme to reverse population declines. He had no formal education, but his experience as a young boy in the flatwoods of central Florida, his professional growth in the Midwest, and his profound respect for local people who had long experience with their environment, gave him the confidence to proclaim early in the study that "fire is unquestionably a controlling factor in determining the types of woodland in any given area in this region, as well as in the regulation of the ground vegetation."³ Innocuous as it may seem at first glance, this statement would have enormous implications for the conservation of the longleaf system, and for the now decades-long reconsideration of fire's ecological role. But Stoddard's recommendation came at a time when the prevailing, and practically unwavering, thought on the issue of fire in the South was clear: It should be suppressed at all costs.

Environmental historians have been slow to appreciate the conservation work of Herbert Stoddard.⁴ Some recognize his study of the bobwhite quail as the first real field study in wildlife management, but usually defer to Aldo Leopold on matters of intellectual heft. Indeed, like most conservationists of the day, Stoddard deferred to Leopold as well. They were close friends and intellectual kin, but Stoddard recognized Leopold's superiority with the pen. Leopold was the voice for countless conservation professionals, and his writings provided many of the intellectual underpinnings for a future environmental movement.⁵ Stoddard's influence was a bit more pedestrian, though in many ways just as important. His writings were extensive, and they remain a crucial resource for understanding his legacy, but his real influence can be gauged in the land he worked. Quite simply, his management was responsible for the survival of the most ecologically sound longleaf-grassland environments remaining.

This essay assesses Herbert Stoddard's early professional work in the context of a regional and national conservation movement. It is part of a larger study on the Red Hills that will probe how this landscape of both wealth and poverty came to be what many now see as a template for conservation in the longleaf-grassland region. As a federal employee, Stoddard struggled to correct deeply misinformed ecological knowledge about the southern coastal plain, especially the role of fire. When the opportunity arose, he fled the federal government's departmental bureaucracy. As a private consultant and researcher, he combined forestry, agriculture, and wildlife management to arrive at a system of land management that stressed the importance of healthy ecological habitat, instead of the dominant production-oriented model so common to the twentieth-century South's fields and forests. His early work was informed and supported by a newly centralized conservation bureaucracy, but he was best known for using his practical experience in the field to challenge accepted conservation wisdom.

Figure 1. Herbert L. Stoddard, Circa 1950.

Photo by Wallace B. Grange. Courtesy of Leon and Julie Neel.

Herbert Stoddard's work in the Red Hills resulted in a landscape mosaic that included some of the most ecologically diverse longleaf-grassland forests on the southern coastal plain. In preparing to guide Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher through the region's forests in 1953, he wrote "they are the finest of their kind remaining in the entire southeast. And as I have had charge of the timber management on most of the places for many years, I am naturally as proud of them as a father." (Herbert Stoddard to Roger Tory Peterson, April 22, 1953. Herbert L. Stoddard Papers, Peterson Correspondence, Archives of Tall Timbers Research Station, Tallahassee, Florida.)

Stoddard's most prolific years on the national level were 1924–1941. While the rest of the South underwent a dramatic transformation toward industrialized agriculture and forestry, Stoddard attempted to push those fields in a different direction through a concern for wildlife habitat. He drew on his early experience in ornithological fieldwork, as well as an older body of local knowledge embedded in the South's system of tenantry. He realized that, as a landscape historically shaped by both natural and human disturbance, the longleaf-grassland environment was distinctly suited to the low-level disturbance patterns of tenantry. The small scale, non-mechanized agriculture, the large blocks of open woodland, and the connecting thread of fire all worked together to maintain the system's historical ecological diversity. Within this landscape of disturbance, Stoddard achieved three major accomplishments during these years in the natural resources field: he helped to create the new profession of wildlife management with his landmark publication, The Bobwhite Quail; he reinserted fire into the landscape, beginning a management revolution that is still playing out; and he was among the first to advocate the preservation of working, cultural landscapes as vital reservoirs of ecological diversity. All of these accomplishments foreshadow Stoddard's post-WWII efforts to develop an integrated land management system that mirrors what we call today ecosystem management.

Another purpose here is to place the South within the broader context of environmental history. The West's role in the national conservation movement is beyond reproach, and the Northeast has recently received more attention, but we usually view the South as a conservation backwater.⁶ Mart A. Stewart has done much to explain the South's blip on the environmental historian's radar. He argues there was no southern wilderness in the classical sense—that wide open, uninhabited space of frontier legend. The South was an agrarian land, and even in the wilder areas, it never developed "an indigenous notion of 'wilderness' as unoccupied or relatively undisturbed nature."⁷ What, then, did southern conservation look like in the first half of the twentieth-century, when most of the nation's attention turned toward the public lands of the West? Herbert Stoddard provides a clue. Stoddard was well-connected to the national conservation establishment. More important, his work exemplified the public-private cooperation and conflict that was so common to many aspects of life in the South. In a region deeply entrenched in the values of private landownership and dominated by the geography of agriculture, there was little reason, or possibility, for a state preservation intervention, except in some scenic areas of the mountains and coasts.⁸ Stoddard, whose own experience limited notions about pristine nature, was more interested in working within the context that he lived than setting aside wild areas to let nature take its course. In so doing, he was among the first to recognize the potential ecological value of a southern landscape that contained a good deal of agriculture.

Unlike the large federal and state projects of the West and Northeast, this effort was not seen on public maps. The preserve owners used state capacity and expertise to develop local policy, but expertise on the quail preserves developed far from the centralized control of a federal bureaucracy; it was not imposed by a centralized directive, but instead came from knowledge gained in the field, on the local level. Shortly after his arrival, Stoddard, and eventually his followers, began to couch the management choices of private landowners in ecological terms, and they did so largely from outside of the state and academic apparatus. In a region where agricultural and timber interests continued to transform native longleaf ecosystems wholesale, this private network created a land ethic that nourished the historical environment. This southern story not only offers a new variation on how conservation played out locally and regionally, but it also forces us to acknowledge more fully the local elements of national conservation policy.

BEADEL'S REVELATION ILLUSTRATES that Stoddard could not practice conservation in a vacuum. This was a working landscape, and it is impossible to separate the results of Stoddard's career path from the historical and ecological context of the longleaf-grassland ecoregion, and of the Red Hills in particular. Historically, the Red Hills area was part of a 90-million-acre fire-dependent longleaf-grassland ecoregion that stretched across the southern coastal plain from southern Virginia to east Texas. It was one of North America's largest pre-contact natural communities, and today there is little of it left. The longleaf-grassland community, though it dominated the coastal plain, was not an ecological monolith; it was part of a diverse mosaic of hardwood bottomlands, upland forests, and transitional areas, all overlapping and intermingling, gradually giving way from one to the other. The well-drained upland longleaf forest—which usually contained an understory of highly combustible wiregrass (Aristida stricta)—was the region's most prominent ecological feature, but even its compositional make-up varied across space and time as a result of soil quality, fire patterns, disturbance histories, human land use practices, and other factors. The most prominent disturbance event, and the single most important natural element that held the longleaf-grassland system together was, and still is, fire. Though forest ecologists have long moved beyond the climax ecology of Frederic Clements, they still call this system a fire-climax community; not only are the species in this ecosystem resistant to fire, but their very existence is dependent on it.⁹

That such a naturally diverse, dynamic landscape was a product of both natural and human history is also crucial to this account. Though on the surface this looks like a familiar conservation story—decline, recognition, preservation—in some important ways it bucks the traditional conservation narrative. This was no static system in a state of climax at the time of human contact. In fact, most agree it was a system of Holocene origin that never existed absent a human presence. Native Americans had arrived in the coastal plain region while the system was taking shape, and considerable evidence indicates that their land use practices shaped the forests that Europeans and Africans found thousands of years later.¹⁰ When those latter groups did move in, between 1600 and the late 1800s, they coexisted tenuously with the longleaf-grassland ecosystem, altering it and substantially degrading it in places, but never threatening its existence. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was a system in various stages of ecological development that was simultaneously threatened to the point of destruction by human action and dependent on human maintenance in order to survive.

After many millennia of low-level if accelerating human interaction with the longleaf forests, its two greatest threats emerged at the same moment in time—the late-nineteenth century—and they were intimately connected. One threat, the increasing interest in fire suppression among a growing community of professional foresters, arose from the ashes of the other, the turn of the century timber boom. In the 1880s, large timber companies turned their focus from the Great Lakes states to the South, where there remained a substantial amount of timber in the public domain. When Congress retreated from the lofty goals of Reconstruction and repealed the Southern Homestead Act—designed to offer small plots from the public domain to both freedmen and poor whites—public land sales were no longer limited to eighty acres.¹¹ Timber companies and other speculators proceeded to amass huge tracts of land and construct rail lines into the coastal plain's interior; by the 1920s they had cut the high-grade timber out of millions of acres of longleaf forest and left much of the land in ruins.¹²

Across the upland coastal plain, less fire-tolerant pine species such as loblolly and slash replaced the cutover longleaf, and when foresters saw debris-fueled fires sweep through the region, killing these early successional pines, they assumed fire made all pine propagation impossible. As it turned out, they were wrong, at least if their goal was to regenerate longleaf forests. Most timber companies operated a high-grade cut; that is, they sought the oldest, straightest trees and left many smaller trees behind, effectively providing the seed stock for the next longleaf forest. In these disturbed longleaf landscapes, fire was necessary to expose the bare mineral soil needed for seeds to germinate, and to suppress early successional pines such as loblolly and slash pine, as well as hardwoods, so the longleaf seed stock could establish its dominance. But without fire these seeds rarely had a chance. Through its destructive cutting, the timber industry deeply wounded the original longleaf forest, and fire suppression deprived this dominant southern ecosystem of a critical source of life support.

Although this environmental transformation occurred across the southern coastal plain, there were pockets of territory that escaped both the timber industry and state-sponsored fire suppression. The Red Hills was such a place, thanks in no small part to the work of Herbert Stoddard and the historical factors that brought him there. The region in which Stoddard landed was, and still is, unique.¹³ Topographically, the area consists of gently rolling upland hills, transitional bogs, streams, sinks, and bottomlands around the larger rivers. The soils of the uplands are of the Orangeburg-Dothan-Faceville series, a well-drained, clayey type that is rich in fertility. Undisturbed, these rich soils grow a complex mix of plant communities. One study counts as many as twenty-four natural communities within a portion of the Red Hills, with the fire-maintained upland pine forest as the most common.¹⁴

But this distinct environment did not act alone to make the Red Hills that Herbert Stoddard entered unique. Several important historical trends following the Civil War set the scene for the development of Stoddard's land management system. Unlike many other longleaf areas on the coastal plain, the Red Hills was a large plantation district. In one respect, the region followed the lead of most other plantation districts throughout the postbellum South: Landowners and former slaves adopted the crop-lien system and former slave families dispersed over the land as tenants and sharecroppers. Planters struggled to come to economic terms with losing their major source of wealth—slave labor—and croppers entered a crushing debt cycle that required an increasing reliance on cash crops. Left there, the Red Hills might have continued along the path of other plantation districts. The cotton economy would have increased its stranglehold on planters and tenants; landowners would have turned to other economic interests, selling out to industrial timber or agricultural interests, or subdividing and selling plantations in smaller tracts; tenants might have hung on for a while until New Deal programs, World War II, or the Sunbelt boom made them look to the cities to fill the need for industrial labor.¹⁵ To a certain extent, these things did happen in the counties of Thomas, Grady, Leon, and Jefferson. But another trend complicated that narrative.

The flowering of the health and tourist trade following the Civil War pointed much of the region in a different direction. During the late 1800s, health seekers headed into many natural environments in search of cures for all sorts of physical and psychological maladies, including tuberculosis, hay fever, and what was then called neurasthenia. Along with hot springs and mountainous regions, physicians and health seekers set upon the piney woods of the South as particularly salubrious. Northerners began visiting Thomasville in the 1870s as a layover stop on their way to winter in Florida, and it gained therapeutic legitimacy when Dr. Thomas S. Hopkins, founder of the South Georgia Medical Association, wrote widely on the restorative qualities of the piney woods, especially for lung disorders such as tuberculosis. As happened in many places that dealt in the health trade, the local commercial elite expanded their publicity efforts beyond the sick, and soon began attracting wealthy northerners who were seeking healthful outdoor exercise and a respite from cold northern winters.¹⁶ In this former landscape of production, wealthy northerners found a landscape of health. Like historian Gregg Mitman's hay-fever tourists in the White Mountains, these visitors to the Red Hills "may have been outsiders to the local community, but their wealth, patronage, and illness combined to make them a powerful force in regional development and land use."¹⁷ The elixir offered up by the Red Hills came in the form of natural beauty and the bobwhite quail—two things that would soon require a conservation intervention for their maintenance.

This convergence of events—the transformation of plantation agriculture and the burgeoning tourist trade—re-created much of the Red Hills into something new altogether. Between 1870 and 1900 the number of individual farms (not landholdings) increased from just over six hundred to more than three thousand in Thomas County alone.¹⁸ This type of small-scale agriculture created a diverse habitat for all sorts of wildlife, the bobwhite quail being the most important to this story. There were small, working fields that were usually just a few acres in size and others of similar size in various stages of old-field succession; there were brushy edge environments; and, perhaps most importantly, there remained substantial, fire-maintained longleaf pine woodlands. The rolling terrain of the Red Hills prevented planters from completely clearing the land for agriculture, and the timber industry stayed away because the region's good soils made it a firmly entrenched plantation district with land prices higher than those in the public domain. The resulting mosaic of open pine forests interspersed with small agricultural fields, reverting old fields, and brushy margins created habitat conditions that were ideal for quail and quail hunting. Herbert Stoddard came to recognize that early twentieth-century quail abundance—a big part of what made this landscape attractive to wealthy northerners seeking recreation in nature—was as much a cultural phenomenon as it was an environmental one.

Soon, northerners not only visited the Red Hills, they started purchasing large plantations and piecing together smaller ones to use as seasonal hunting lands and residences. As modern medical theories challenged claims about the landscape's curative power, quail hunting became a greater lure to upper-class urbanites looking for a rugged, masculine experience in the outdoors. By 1930, non-resident northerners held well over 250,000 acres as hunting preserves in the Red Hills, with other regions scattered across the South also absorbing this new seasonal migration and system of land tenure. The Red Hills contained the oldest game preserves, but as the Depression tightened its grip on southern farmers, real estate agents and insurance companies also began to piece together farms in the Dougherty Plain region surrounding Albany, Georgia, as well as in the coastal and piedmont areas of the Carolinas and old farming districts of Alabama and Mississippi. In assembling large landholdings as game preserves, these people of privilege—in many cases the beneficiaries of the same industries that made the destruction of longleaf forests possible—stepped in at a crucial moment and set the table for modern longleaf conservation.¹⁹ But they also disrupted a complex tapestry of ecological processes and human land uses in ways that ended up threatening their very interests in the region.

As Henry Beadel's remarks indicate, these wealthy new landowners were not accustomed to setting the woods and fields on fire, and most were not as trusting of the locals and their traditions as Beadel came to be. When presented with a choice of whom to trust, they invariably went with the new cadre of professional foresters who moved into the region to deal with the problem of cutover lands, and who pathologized such folk burning practices. As preserve owners curtailed traditional burning over the first two decades of the twentieth century, they soon noticed a drastic decline in quail numbers. As Stoddard put it, this "ecological upset, caused largely by the efforts of well-meaning but uninformed professional foresters, had brought about serious conditions, among them a decline in quail."²⁰ It became clear to the preserve owners that the question of wildlife habitat was not a pressing issue for state and federal foresters, so they turned to another government organization for help—the Bureau of Biological Survey. With preserve owners Arthur Lapsley, Charles Chapin, and L. S. Thompson in the lead, they approached the bureau about the possibility of conducting a systematic study of the bobwhite quail, and they soon welcomed Herbert Stoddard as the lead investigator of a jointly funded venture between the bureau and a private group of preserve owners.

Herbert Stoddard's appointment to the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1924 marked the culmination of an informal training in natural history that began when he was a youngster in the piney woods of central Florida, and continued in Illinois and Wisconsin when he was an apprentice taxidermist, trapper, and ornithologist. Stoddard was born and lived the first few years of his life in the upper Midwest, a region to which he would return as an adolescent, but it was during the seven years that he spent in Florida that he came of age. He experienced Florida's longleaf forests before the timber industry arrived; he worked for cattlemen, who routinely set fire to the woods; and upon reflection was "convinced that no schooling or advantages could have been more valuable to me ... in my later years as ornithologist, ecologist, and wildlife researcher and manager."²¹ These early years gave him a body of informal knowledge about the longleaf-grassland forest to fall back on years later, but his return to the Midwest—one of the cradles of the modern conservation movement—got his foot through the professional door.

Upon his family's return to Rockford, Illinois, in 1900, young Herb continued to cultivate an interest in natural history, but a lack of patience with formal education led him to quit high school and move to his Uncle's farm in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin, to work as a farm hand. There he met Ed Ochsner, a local taxidermist, woodsman, and field contact for the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM), who came to be an important influence. Over the next several years, Stoddard worked on the farm during the growing season and with Ochsner during the winter, learning taxidermy as well as trapping and collecting methods. Like the cattlemen with whom he ran in Florida, Ochsner was a prototype for the knowledgeable land manager that Stoddard would become, but the perquisite of this apprenticeship was that Ochsner had contacts. Stoddard's professional break came in 1910 on a trip with Ochsner, to Baraboo, Wisconsin, the winter home of the Ringling Brothers Circus. Alfred Ringling had a dead hippopotamus on his hands. He summoned Ochsner, who decided it should go to the MPM if they could skin and pack it for travel. The head taxidermist for the museum, George Shrosbree, came to Baraboo immediately, and Stoddard stayed on to assist in preparing the skin. Seeing the skills of an enthusiastic young Stoddard, Shrosbree offered him the job of assistant taxidermist in March 1910. In a professional world that was still taking shape, the informality of such an offer was not all that unusual. But it did give a budding amateur naturalist entrée into the newly developed, insular world of expert-driven, scientific conservation.²² For the next fourteen years, Stoddard worked in the museum field, for both the Milwaukee Public Museum and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, as taxidermist, field collector, and ornithologist.²³

Stoddard's experience as a museum field man and taxidermist led to a deepening involvement in the ornithological community, where he made connections critical to his return to the southeast. He first heard of a possible southern quail investigation at the 1922 meeting of the American Ornithologist's Union, where he helped to found the Inland Bird Banding Association along with legendary bird-bander, S. Prentiss Baldwin. Baldwin had banded thousands of birds at his summer home outside of Cleveland and at his winter get-away in Thomasville, Georgia, and was an early promoter of the technique for tracking bird movements.²⁴ Stoddard was among the first to follow Baldwin's lead into banding. In 1923, he wrote in the Yearbook of the Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee that bird banding "bids fair to revolutionize bird study."²⁵ He banded birds throughout his travels for the MPM and began publishing accounts of his field experience in journals such as The Auk and The Wilson Bulletin, drawing the attention of a wider audience.²⁶ Baldwin, along with W. L. McAtee, head of food habits research in the Biological Survey, soon took note of Stoddard's field work for the Museum and the Inland Bird Banding Association, and kept him in mind for a possible job in the Red Hills.

Meanwhile, on April 25, 1923, a small group of preserve owners from the Red Hills met with a representative of the Biological Survey at the exclusive Links Club in New York City. There, they discussed the possibility of an investigation into the life history of the bobwhite quail in the southeast. It was not unusual for sportsmen to call on the Biological Survey for help with game management problems, but this particular request was typically the domain of ornithology. The "life history" concept arose from ornithologists frustrated with simply collecting specimens or tracking movements, and not actually recording the habits of birds in the wild. Several researchers in the egg-collecting branch of ornithology (oology) attempted life history studies around the turn of the century, but not until the 1910s did they gain wider acceptance.²⁷ Prentiss Baldwin was among the earliest voices calling for a life history of the bobwhite. With a foot in the worlds of both sportsmen and ornithologists, he recognized the two interests could converge to push the concept beyond its limited role as a descriptive addition to ornithological taxonomy. The life history could be a prescriptive conservation tool designed to produce applicable results, i.e. practical solutions for land managers in the field. The major thrust of the proposed quail study was to explain the recent quail decline, to discover what natural conditions best suited quail, and then to make management recommendations based on such discoveries. Ultimately, the preserve owners and the Biological Survey would create the framework for the most thorough and innovative life history of an animal species up to that point.

Within a year of the Links Club meeting an agreement was signed between the preserve owners and the Biological Survey. Baldwin and McAtee quickly agreed that Stoddard had "the qualities we think are desirable for the position combined in one man."²⁸ Those qualities apparently did not include a high school diploma, or any real experience conducting what promised to be a thorough scientific study. But more than a trained and educated scientist, the Cooperative Quail Investigation needed a self-starter who would be able to improvise in the field and work efficiently under a mere skeleton of centralized directives, qualities that S. A. Barrett, Director of the MPM, had already instilled in Stoddard: "The conditions which you encounter in the field must govern your actions and your own judgment is about the only thing that can count for much when it comes to field work ... we do not wish to dictate from the office just what you shall do."²⁹ It was just such ability to handle the intangibles that ultimately recommended Stoddard to the Biological Survey. As in so many early federal projects in the field, no one really knew what this one would look like; as Biological Survey chief E. W. Nelson put it to Stoddard in the job offer, "the success or failure of the investigation will rest in your hands, and the initiative will rest largely with you as to how the work is carried on and the results obtained." Stoddard immediately accepted the challenge.³⁰

The Red Hills landscape allayed any reluctance Stoddard may have felt about leaving the Midwest. Early in 1924, he embarked on a week-long surveillance trip to Thomasville, where he "was delighted to see blocks of virgin longleaf pine that had been preserved on some of the plantations, and the impressive stands of second-growth pine that covered well over half the total preserve acreage."³¹ He returned in March 1924 to begin the quail work in earnest. He and his wife, Ada—whom he had married in Milwaukee in 1915—set up residence at L. S. Thompson's one-thousand-acre satellite plantation in Grady County, Georgia. Known as "The Hall," and later called Sherwood Plantation, this piece of land served as the investigation's research base along with Thompson's fifteen-thousand-acre Sunny Hill Plantation. Stoddard hired an assistant, Charles O. Handley, and began examining the Red Hills environment, trapping and banding quail; observing breeding behavior, nest sites, and daily behavior; examining anatomy; and observing predator-prey relations. These early stages of the study also allowed him to cultivate respect from both locals and preserve owners. His own status as a field agent of the Biological Survey gave him ready legitimacy in the eyes of preserve owners, and unlike many agents of the nascent conservation state, he was not seen as an outsider by locals. Stoddard's rearing more closely approximated that of the local preserve managers and laborers, and his practical approach to research readily co-opted local land management traditions. Instead of forcing an unwieldy cultural landscape to fit an abstract set of scientific principles, he set out to mold a system of management from the region's cultural and environmental past.

For the science of game management, the Cooperative Quail Investigation was a landmark study. It helped to propagate and define the field of game management—later renamed wildlife management to reflect a growing interest in non-game species—and helped make it one of the most important among a growing number of natural resource professions. The book that resulted from Stoddard's investigations, The Bobwhite Quail: Its Habits, Preservation and Increase (1931), is often overlooked by environmental historians today, but conservation advocates of the day regarded it as the premier document on wildlife management of any species in any region. Indeed, while Aldo Leopold is often considered the founder of game management as a field, Leopold himself considered that honor to be Stoddard's. Leopold's biographer, Curt Meine, notes that Stoddard was "the first to examine a game species in detail and to utilize that information in a restoration effort. While Leopold was evolving an abstract framework for the science, Stoddard was providing its first concrete example."³² And Leopold himself later noted that "Herbert Stoddard, in Georgia, started the first management of wildlife based on research."³³The Bobwhite Quail was thus a seminal text, and Stoddard a pioneering figure, in the growth of wildlife ecology and management.³⁴

Whereas previous efforts at wildlife management meant little more than setting state hunting regulations, eradicating predators, or artificially propagating game birds, this was one of the first attempts to understand and regulate natural processes. Stoddard's primary concern in The Bobwhite Quail was the creation and maintenance of wildlife habitat, a proposition that would bridge several professional fields, including agriculture and forestry. His management ran counter to the progressive science underway in both fields in the 1920s and 1930s. His recommendations to maintain a cultural landscape rooted in the past ignored the new teachings of progressive agriculturalists who felt the only sure path for southern farming was intensive, "clean" agriculture. For foresters, his maintenance of old-growth forests seemed decadent and his insistence on fire downright destructive. Both foresters and agriculturalists were out to produce the maximum of one product. Stoddard and his peers in wildlife management were after that same goal, but through their focus on a single game species, they came to see the wisdom of restrained productivity, which in turn opened up the study of all natural ecological processes.

The use of fire as a strategy to restore quail numbers was perhaps the most significant, and certainly the most controversial, result of the quail study. Trumpeting the use of fire would ultimately help to define Stoddard's legacy in the southeastern forests, but when reports filtered out of the South in 1925 that fire might benefit wildlife, the nation's foresters grew uneasy. As government and industrial forestry organizations attempted to secure administrative control over local resources, practices like woodsburning became anathema to good management. The U. S. Forest Service and the American Forestry Association (AFA), with the cooperation of newly formed state forestry commissions and industry-oriented associations, carried out a propaganda project that reached far and wide into the southern woods. The most effective effort was the AFA's "Dixie Crusader" campaign. Beginning in 1928, they sent scores of young foresters into the South to preach against the sins of woodsburners. By the time The Bobwhite Quail hit the market in 1931, fire was by far the most common topic of conversation in land management circles, and few dared to speak of its propriety.³⁵

It is a wonder The Bobwhite Quail saw the light of day as a government-sponsored monograph. As an agent of the Biological Survey, Stoddard had to measure his enthusiasm for fire so as not to cause undue strain with the Forest Service. As early as June 1926, the chief of the Forest Service, William Greeley, questioned the legitimacy of the Biological Survey in matters of the forest, in terms both biological and sylvan. He asked E. W. Nelson, to rein in his charge, writing, "It is to be hoped that ... Mr. Stoddard will be very guarded in the matter of fire and woods burning so as to guard as fully as possible against any possibility of the public misconstruing his statements to make it appear that the Federal Government advocates burning the woods in order to improve conditions for quail." On the contrary, Greeley contended that the "common practice of yearly burning the woods is effective in large measure in the depletion of game animals and birds. This is one of the standard reasons advanced by State and Federal foresters for preventing woods fires."³⁶ In other words, the Forest Service had ultimate authority in the woods, and it didn't need a rogue federal agent instilling doubt in the minds of locals. Nelson was quick to defend Stoddard, making it clear that fire suppression "renders great areas absolutely worthless for quail."³⁷ But he also urged Stoddard to make plain "in your letters talks, or publications" that the need for fire "is due wholly to local conditions and not for general application."³⁸

To a certain extent, Nelson was right in his caution. The subtleties of burning depend almost entirely on local conditions, and locals were not always subtle in their practices. But the Forest Service was not one for subtleties either; it had waged a strong and indiscriminate campaign against any sort of forest fires, and Stoddard's recommendations clearly threatened to challenge that orthodoxy. In the end, Stoddard had to qualify his recommendations. He tempered the chapter on fire in The Bobwhite Quail with many remarks on the dangers of uncontrolled fire and the localized nature of his own study. Shortly after the book's publication, he confided to one friend that "as this had to go through the Survey editorial office ... it is by no means as strong as I feel on the subject."³⁹ Nevertheless, the chapter's opening line remained, leaving little room for misinterpretation of Stoddard's view: "The bobwhite of the Southeastern United States was undoubtedly evolved in an environment that was always subject to occasional burning over."⁴⁰ This statement alone shows a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the region's evolutionary ecology, but, Stoddard had to make clear, it was not to be "used to embarrass the forester in his attempts to protect forest growth over the region at large."⁴¹ Despite being watered-down, Stoddard's ideas on fire turned heads throughout the natural resource professions, and helped to spark a thorough reconsideration of fire.

The region at large, of course, was full of pyrophobic professional foresters, and immediately after the book's publication Stoddard was no longer much concerned with their feelings. He left the confines of the Biological Survey and became a private consultant to hunting preserves throughout the South, where he hoped to spread the word about the beneficial role of fire.⁴² The forestry interests, however, ratcheted up their calls for woodsburning to be criminalized. Such appeals caused Stoddard to worry that "landowners would not be permitted to do necessary burning, even when every precaution was taken to confine the fires to their own property, and when they had very definite ideas as to just what they wanted to accomplish."⁴³ The long-term goal was to reestablish fire across the coastal plain, but his immediate concern was over the legal right to burn. Fortunately, he was not alone.

As early as 1913, botanist Roland Harper recognized the longleaf forest to be fire-dependent.⁴⁴ In 1918, Henry Hardtner, head of Urania Lumber Company in Louisiana, suggested "'controlled burnings' should be practiced in every forest as an aid to successful forestry."⁴⁵ The year before, Hardtner had offered the use of the Urania Experimental Forest to H. H. Chapman, an influential forester at Yale. Chapman conducted fire experiments at Urania and published a series of important articles in the 1920s and 1930s on the role of fire in the longleaf ecosystem.⁴⁶ At about the same time, a USDA Animal Industry Division field agent, S. W. Greene of the McNeill Experiment Station in Mississippi, declared burned-over lands to yield more nutritious cattle feed than lands kept in the rough. The master link in all of this research was the southern coastal plain's longleaf-grassland environment. In later years, the fire research that came from the South would deeply influence a national, and even global, reexamination of fire as a natural ecosystem process, as well as a tool of ecological management.⁴⁷

In the early 1930s, however, these voices came together with Stoddard's simply to counter the prevailing notions about fire in their own region. Of interest here is the actual lack of consensus among these renegades on how they might use fire on the ground level. These internal spats reveal the developmental nature of a new field of science that bridges many biological disciplines. Fire did not respect the disciplinary boundaries of wildlife management, forestry, range management, or agriculture, and those who wanted to harness it wanted fire to work expressly for their interests, which created a certain amount of volatility even among such an agreeable group. Greene was the most vocal of the bunch. He fired off a volley of letters to the AFA's publication, American Forests, in 1931, lambasting the "travesties in truth published in AMERICAN FORESTS for a number of years."⁴⁸ His caustic tone got the attention of Ovid Butler, executive secretary of the AFA and editor of American Forests, who, to his credit, allowed Greene a voice in the October 1931 issue of the magazine. "The Forests that Fire Made" was probably the first article for popular publication that redressed the South's anti-fire propaganda. In it he drew on natural history, Native American land use, and his own research to show the natural range of the longleaf depended entirely on fire.

Stoddard was enthusiastic in his support of Greene's efforts, but Hardtner and Chapman had reservations. They agreed with Greene's general arguments, but were in no hurry to broadcast them to the public. Before the publication, Chapman wrote Greene, saying, "Unless we can properly control and hedge the propaganda regarding fire so that an average southern white farmer can understand what we are talking about ... I would prefer to have very little said about the use of fire ... Personally I have no intention of bursting into print until the conclusion of certain experiments."⁴⁹ Chapman's longleaf research did reach print, and it was indeed groundbreaking. His academic outlets, however, were not likely to reach many southerners.⁵⁰ In Chapman's mind, Greene was engaging in a dangerous campaign. Discussions on controlled burning among the experts were all well and good, but Greene wanted to broadcast generalizations about fire that would reinforce generations of "miscreant" behavior in the South. Chapman told Hardtner that he would be "exceedingly sorry if Mr. Greene or any other agency became responsible through their statements for the publication of misleading, false, and mischievous statements regarding the promiscuous use of fire."⁵¹

Figure 2. Herbert Stoddard Burning the Longleaf Pine Forest of Sherwood, 1941.

Photograph by Lorene Squire. Courtesy of Leon and Julie Neel.

The annual burning of the South's piney woods was a major point of contention among the various interests that managed the region's forests. Stoddard was among the first to suggest that the longleaf forests of the southern coastal plain depended on routinefire.

Greene's American Forests piece did, in fact, lack the usual cautionary statements about uncontrolled fire, and even implied that local woodsburners were the true experts in the field, a proposition that made Chapman recoil. As a scientist firmly rooted in the forestry establishment, Chapman wanted to route a resolution through the scientific apparatus. He felt "much sympathy with the state foresters and the American Forestry Association in their warfare against the habit of indiscriminate and uncontrolled burning," and a public airing threatened to "cause confusion and loss in their effort to create a fire consciousness in the minds of the southern people."⁵² There's little doubt that southerners had a fire consciousness, just not in the way Chapman wanted. His professional concern was with growing trees, and if fire might aid in that goal, he thought, then we should subject it to the scrutiny of the scientific method. Indeed, Stoddard and Greene were establishing a science of fire as well, only from a different perspective. The understory was foremost in their minds, regardless of the forest type it harbored. Stoddard attempted to ease Chapman's mind about burning in different forest types, writing in a friendly, but pointed letter that "we do a great deal of burning both of loblolly and long-leaf lands ... We have found that if the burning is carried on carefully at night when the dew is falling we can run fires through loblolly after it is a few years of age with little damage to the trees ... We have found that there are all kinds of fire and that a person can use any kind he desires, from extremely light to very severe."⁵³ This raises an important distinction in Stoddard's experience with fire. First, he recognized "the rural populations ... know a great deal [about fire] and are not the ignoramuses" they were made out to be.⁵⁴ Second, as a wildlife manager, he was concerned with more than trees. He understood that fire could take on certain characteristics depending on environmental conditions, and a low-level fire in a loblolly, shortleaf, or mixed forest could create an understory habitat beneficial to a variety of wildlife, and still not harm the trees. He, too, was interested in creating a science of fire, but it was one based on what we would call today applied ecology, not forestry. Indeed, Stoddard would go on later to develop an informal fire taxonomy that was crucial to its application in the field.⁵⁵

The 1935 meeting of the Society of American Foresters was the real coming-out party for prescribed fire. Stoddard, Hardtner, Chapman, and Greene, along with long-time southern foresters Austin Cary and Inman Eldridge, put aside their differences to hold a panel on the beneficial role of fire that was largely greeted with acceptance. As happened in other conservation circles, long-time assumptions were being turned on their head in the forestry profession as well.⁵⁶ There was still a concern "of the public not understanding our methods or plans," but Hardtner conceded that "the people who live in the forest ... gare forest minded and are actually acquainted with the very problems" of controlled fire.⁵⁷ When Stoddard returned from the conference, he wrote to Aldo Leopold, expressing a deep sense of relief: "If you are interested in the Southeastern fire question, you will find the papers and discussions of the last afternoon well worth careful perusal, as much of a revolutionary nature was brought out. For the first time in ten years I had a feeling that perhaps I was not a 'public enemy' after all."⁵⁸ Although the costs and benefits of fire continued to be debated for years (and still are today), at least it was a subject recognized as being worthy of debate.

AGAIN, THE PRIMARY difference between Stoddard and the other panelists was their professional proclivities. Wildlife management and forestry were intimately connected from the beginning, but being concerned with wildlife habitat meant dabbling in many pools of expertise. A quail covey's range, after all, was not cordoned off at the forest's edge. They went where their habitat took them, which included the many fields and edge environments that covered the South. With that in mind, Stoddard had to look beyond the questions of forest and fire to examine the history and management of the South's peculiar system of agriculture. The Bobwhite Quail, then, not only helps us understand the forestry profession's reconsideration of fire in the longleaf, it also provides indispensable documentation of the region's early twentieth-century eco-cultural landscape. His study was rooted in quantitative science, but some of the most important findings were based on the assumption that the environment could not be treated outside of its social, cultural, and economic context. Of quail and their living conditions, Stoddard wrote, "it is becoming a difficult matter in the Eastern United States to find areas where quail are living under natural conditions, unaffected by man and his works."⁵⁹ Indeed, quail and their habitat were contingent on the qualitative actions of humans on the land, and Stoddard's book sought to direct those actions as much as possible. Stoddard, in other words, was not simply advocating the conservation of a natural environment; he was among the first to call for the preservation and maintenance of the biological diversity found in a cultural landscape.

During and after the years of the quail study, American agriculture, and southern agriculture in particular, was experiencing dramatic changes. Across the country, mechanization and consolidation allowed farmers to do a more thorough job of clearing and cultivating fields with less labor. In the South, the threat of the boll weevil kept farmers in a constant state of anxiety, and encouraged a cleaner, more manicured farmscape. Boll weevils over-wintered in the protective brush at field edges, and many agricultural experts argued that the elimination of such habitat was crucial to boll weevil control. At the same time, sharecropping and tenancy were on the wane, to be replaced with a more efficient tractor-driven agriculture, with the landowner becoming more directly involved in daily farm operations through the direction of a handful of wage laborers. As a result, the southern plantation environment underwent a massive transformation throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Farmers abandoned many of their less productive fields, allowing them to move through successional stages from broomsedge to old field pine and eventually to a dense tangle of hardwood and pine. Meanwhile, the region's best soils were farmed with increasing intensity, leaving few of the edge habitats upon which quail relied.⁶⁰

Many saw these as progressive steps toward a more modern agriculture. Stoddard, somewhat aloof to the social dimensions of this transformation, was mainly wary of its ecological effects: "As the 'red hills' are mostly good agricultural ground, cultivation in some sections here, as elsewhere, has become too intensive for quail. If more cover were left between the fields, even the most intensively farmed sections could continue to produce surplus quail. The tendency, however, to clean up all sheltering thicket cover with a view to destroying possible hibernating places of the cotton boll weevil and creating an appearance of neatness is proving disastrous to quail. Thousands of acres are classed as 'shot out' by the misinformed, where bobwhites could not exist under any system of protection or restocking, simply because the environment no longer suits their requirements."⁶¹ For Stoddard, agriculture did not necessarily mean ecological barrenness; in fact, if farms were managed in certain ways, they could promote diverse plant and animal species. Indeed, Stoddard joined with Aldo Leopold in pointing out that some of the gravest threats to wildlife and biological diversity during the 1930s were occurring on the nation's agricultural lands, this at a moment when most conservation attention was focused on the nation's public domain and its various management regimes. Of Leopold's 1939 essay "The Farmer as a Conservationist," which encouraged farmers to rehabilitate depleted wildlife habitat, Stoddard thought it "one of the best articles I ever read & I wish every American with brains could read and ponder it."⁶² Stoddard shared with Leopold the hope that, with a bit more attention to the details of wildlife habitat and a bit less enthusiasm for modernization at all costs, the nation's farmers might continue to protect vital biotic reservoirs from becoming monocultural barrens.⁶³

The South's landscape of tenantry offered the ideal biotic reservoir. For quail to thrive, Stoddard revealed, they needed two essentials: food and cover. Successional seed plants—more likely known as weeds to progressive farmers—grew vigorously in the highly disturbed tenant landscape. Ragweed, beggarweed, pigweed, rough button-weed, Mexican clover, and bull grass, among many others sprouted after a field was "laid by," and occupied field edges and open woodlands throughout the growing season. A variety of tree and shrub masts also contributed to make the landscape a quail haven. Stoddard advised farmers that "quail are fond of, and more or less dependent upon a wide variety of small wild fruits, and the 'mast' from trees for their living," especially wild black cherry, dewberries, sassafras, blackberries, wild plum, huckleberries, and mulberries, "which are often abundant on not too intensively cultivated farm lands." He added that "it is well to remember their value to quail, wild turkeys and other birds when considering the cutting of wild cherry for fence posts, and brushing out around fields and along fence lines, roadsides and so forth, for the destruction of such food and shelter producing vegetation may be the means of reducing the number of quail on the farm."⁶⁴

The other key to the functional quail landscape was cover. Many of the same plants that provided food also gave quick cover from predators; "thickets and vine tangles around field borders, on fence lines and roadsides, and here and there in open woodlands" were essential requirements for quail. Stoddard identified the "blue-darter" hawks (Cooper's and Sharp-shinned) as the only troublesome winged predators, and unlike many land managers of the day, recommended leaving these coverts as a substitute to predator eradication.⁶⁵ Again, the older landscape of tenantry had all of these measures built-in, but "where farmers cut out such refuge cover to give their farms an air of 'neatness,' ... a decline in the numbers of quail and other thicket-loving birds is inevitable."⁶⁶ Such neatness threatened the traditional wildness of southern farms, and on lands outside of his control, there was little Stoddard could do about the trend beyond recommending otherwise. On the quail preserves, however, his word carried a great deal of weight and much of his advice was carried out to the letter.

In the nomenclature of the time, Stoddard called tenantry a "primitive" or "crude" system of agriculture, but he was unequivocal about its ecological superiority to modern systems. In his chapter in The Bobwhite Quail titled "Preserve Development and Management," he advised that the best "situations in which to establish new preserves, consist of ground of medium or low price, land that is, or has recently been, under a system of crude agriculture." "Where fields are small and well distributed," he continued, "with small open woodlands between, and thicket cover is plentiful, the all-important matter of environment is favorable to start with and the food supply in most cases can be built up quickly."⁶⁷ His preference for small-scale agriculture was practical; it had little to do with a romantic primitivism in the face of modernization. Nor did it have much to do with the preservation of untouched nature. Stoddard's advocacy was for the wealth of plant and animal diversity found in working, cultural landscapes—a diversity that would likely disappear if left to nature.

Stoddard was not particularly keen to the social and racial injustices of the tenant system, but he did recognize one of its environmental paradoxes. It could create a wealth of ecological diversity, but it also created a very real potential for ecological destructiveness. Tenantry, especially on hilly land, has long been associated with soil erosion and infertility.⁶⁸ Much like the Piedmont sections to the north, the soil of the Red Hills gave way on countless hillsides, and was leached out on others. One of many consequences was a detrimental effect on wildlife habitat. Indeed, he used part of the quail study to rail against cotton monoculture and its leaching of the soil. "The methods used in cotton raising are highly detrimental to quail," Stoddard argued. "Not only are cotton fields an unfavorable quail environment, but the planting of the crop year after year in the same fields, without rotation, has put hundreds of thousands of acres into an unproductive condition."⁶⁹ He cautioned those interested in developing lands for quail to consider closely past land use, for worn out lands would take time to replenish. Land where "the fertility of the soil has been exhausted to a point where it can not produce a vigorous growth of weeds and leguminous plants will not support quail in abundance."⁷⁰ It is this attention to habitat in an eco-cultural landscape, and not merely his innovative thinking on fire, that gave Stoddard's monograph such ecological breadth. Quail were undoubtedly its main concern, but this life history of a single species led Stoddard to a broader interrogation of coastal plain ecology in all of its diversity.

Like the birth of many conservation regimes, this early history of southern quail management was rife with social inequality.⁷¹ In Leopold's midwestern context, it was relatively uncomplicated to celebrate traditional non-intensive agriculture as protective of biological diversity. In Herbert Stoddard's region of interest, however, the farm and forest habitats of the coastal plain came packaged within a socioeconomic system that made such retrospective claims of ecological beneficence tricky at best. Stoddard was not particularly interested in critically assessing the region's attachment to tenantry, but he was interested in directing the actions of those tenants who remained on quail lands. There was no shortage of potentially good quail land in the Depression-era South, and virtually all of it purchased for quail management had tenants spread throughout. On land with tenants, Stoddard wrote, "it is undoubtedly best to keep all who respond to fair treatment and cooperate with the owner in special matters."⁷² Tenants continued most of their traditional patterns of land use, like cultivating small fields and gardens, and hunting small mammals, but the "special matters" to which Stoddard referred were not inconsequential. He made it clear that managing this environment would also involve managing the tenants remaining on it. The most significant management change recommended by the quail report was the elimination of free-ranging cattle, poultry, cats, and dogs. Cattle competed for quail food plants, and trampled much of the nesting range, while free-ranging chickens may have transferred diseases to quail. Stoddard recognized that controlling tenants' domestic animals was a ticklish matter, and he provided special counsel on dealing with roaming cats and dogs: "As the greater portion of these animals belong to the tenants living on the land, tact and diplomacy rather than force have to be relied upon in handling the delicate problem of the restriction in number, control or disposal of these pests."⁷³ Clearly, not all tenant behavior was beneficial from an ecological standpoint. Stoddard celebrated the unruliness of the tenant landscape, but he also sought to manage the very tenants whose behavior had helped produce it.

Beyond his hope for tact and diplomacy, Stoddard left little record of what he personally thought of the region's economic and racial disparities, but it is apparent that neither he nor the preserve owners sought to overturn deeply entrenched patterns of power in the South. Racial patronage and concerns over a dwindling labor supply were as common among the preserve-owning industrialists as they were among the southern planter classes.⁷⁴ It is significant, though, that conservation on the quail preserves did not mean general expulsion from the land as it did in so many other contexts. Contrary to what happened on other conservation landscapes, the partition and control of the quail preserves actually created a local, or more precisely, a private commons for the residents of the properties. The lands were posted to outsiders from early on, to be sure; but, outside of the "special matters," those who lived and worked on the preserves had free range over the preserve environment.⁷⁵ In other words, conservation on the quail preserves did not entail the imposition of a simplified version of non-human nature. Instead, it involved the discovery and regulation of what made the longleaf-grassland environment in the first place: a mixture of natural and human disturbance. Stoddard borrowed from the region's cultural and environmental past to build a system that managed land to be wild.

WORLD WAR II signified a loss of momentum for Stoddard's wildlife work. With wealthy landowners cutting back on non-essential services and expanding government wildlife programs offering free management advice before and after the war, the privately funded Cooperative Quail Study Association fast became an anachronism. Stoddard turned his energies to preserve development and forestry work, and began to work out an even more complex system of ecological management. As the cultural and environmental landscapes of agriculture and forestry continued to change dramatically, Stoddard took an even more active role on the quail preserves by directly managing timber resources to produce a conservative return from the forests while maintaining and enhancing overall landscape diversity. His system came to be known as the Stoddard/Neel method of land management when his young apprentice, Leon Neel, took over the work in the 1950s and 1960s to let Stoddard focus on his first love of ornithology. Stoddard died in 1970, but his system of ecological management continues as a vital link to the region's environmental and cultural past.⁷⁶

In the end, perhaps the best qualified voice to speak to the broad applicability of Stoddard's land ethic, besides Stoddard himself, is Aldo Leopold. When asked for his opinion of Stoddard's work by a large timberland owner in south Georgia, Leopold was emphatic in his praise: "I have just spent several days with Stoddard and came away with a conviction that he has been too modest about the conservation methods he has worked out for the Southeast. They are commonly regarded as applicable only to game preserves, but in my opinion he has developed principles which are equally applicable to lumber company holdings, national forests, and all other owners of coastal plain longleaf ... I of course am biased, for he is one of my closest personal friends. I am lecturing to my students Monday on the Stoddard method of handling Southeastern pine lands."⁷⁷

The lessons that Leopold shared in his midwestern classroom are still useful today. At its root, this story is about a system of land management that was responsible for the most ecologically diverse pockets of the longleaf-grassland environments remaining on the southern coastal plain today. Stoddard accomplished so much by responding to the region's environmental, cultural, and historical context. First, he understood the ecological problems caused by fire suppression in the longleaf-grassland system. In the face of heavy opposition, he helped to make legitimate the centuries-old practice of burning the South's fields and forests. Second, he suggested that working landscapes could have ecological value. This was a historically peopled landscape, and there was not much chance of changing that. Human land use helped to create the preserve environment, and with guidance, it would help maintain it. Furthermore, this disturbance-prone, fragmented landscape required close management of human and environmental resources; management was not only possible, but necessary, for the maintenance of the natural system. In this private, and distinctly southern, world, the wilderness model of preservation—setting land aside to let nature take its course—simply never made sense. Stoddard's model is a useful reminder that the creation of wild land often has as much to do with culture as it does nature.

Albert G. Way is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Georgia, and a research assistant at the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center at Ichauway. He is currently working toward completion of his dissertation, which takes as its working title that of the present essay.

NOTES

First, I would like to thank Paul Sutter for reading and commenting on numerous drafts of this essay; he has contributed untold time and energy toward the project. Leon and Julie Neel continue to welcome me into their home to share their memories of Herbert Stoddard, for which I am grateful. I would also like to thank Tim Silver, Mart Stewart, James Pritchard, Ichiro Miyata, Chris Manganiello, the participants in the 2005 Workshop for the History of Environment, Agriculture, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia, and two anonymous reviewers for their critical readings of this essay. I would be remiss not to thank Juanita Whiddon at Tall Timbers Research Station, who offered unrivalled assistance in their archival collections. Finally, thanks to Kevin McIntyre, Lindsay Boring, and the entire staff at the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Station at Ichauway for funding and institutional support.

^1. Henry Beadel, "Fire Impressions," Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference, Proceedings, 1962, Vol. 1 (Tallahassee: Tall Timbers Research Station, 1962), 2–3.

^2. Ibid.

^3. Herbert Stoddard, "Report on Cooperative Quail Investigation: 1925–1926" (Committee of the Quail Study Fund For Southern Georgia and Northern Florida; U.S. Biological Survey), 56.

^4. Stoddard has received some attention from environmental historians, but he has not been the subject of extensive research. It is an understandable scholarly gap. The full range of his work and accomplishments needs to be understood within his regional, social, and environmental context, a difficult proposition when it's not the real subject of one's research. For good work with reference to Stoddard, but different centers of focus, see Ashley Schiff, Fire and Water: Scientific Heresy in the Forest Service (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); Susan Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude Toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974); Steven J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Thomas R. Dunlap, Saving America's Wildlife (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Joshua Blu Buhs, The Fire Ant Wars: Nature, Science and Public Policy in Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

^5. The scholarship on Leopold is vast. See Meine, Aldo Leopold; Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain; Aldo Leopold, The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott, eds., (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1991); and Paul S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).

^6. There is too much scholarship on the West to cite here. For an older overview, see Richard White, "American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field," Pacific Historical Review (August, 1985): 297–335; on the Northeast, see Richard Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). On the South, see Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, This South: An Environmental History (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983); Tim Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Jack Temple Kirby, Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1995); and Mart A. Stewart, 'What Nature Suffers to Groe': Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920. (Athens: University of Georgia, 1996).

^7. Mart Stewart has done more than anyone to situate the South within the historiography of environmental history. See "If John Muir Had Been an Agrarian: American Environmental History West and South," Environment and History 11 (2005): 139–62, quote on 147; "Re-Greening the South and Southernizing the Rest," Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (Summer, 2004): 242–251; "Southern Environmental History," in A Companion to The American South, ed. John Boles (Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 409–23; and the Prologue to 'What Nature Suffers to Groe,' 1–20.

^8. On the importation of western notions about wildland preservation into the South, see Margaret Lynn Brown, The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000).

^9. On the ecology of the longleaf-grassland system, see Bruce Means, "Longleaf Pine: Going, Going...," in Eastern Old-Growth Forest: Prospects for Rediscovery and Recovery, ed. Mary Byrd Davis (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996), 210–29; Lawrence S. Early, Looking For Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); W. G. Wahlenberg, Longleaf Pine: Its Use, Ecology, Regeneration, Protection, Growth, and Management (Washington D. C.: U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1946). For a brilliant set of reflections on the longleaf forest, see all of Janisse Ray's writings, especially Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Minneapolis: Milkweed Press, 1999).

^10. On Native American and colonial land use in the longleaf, see Silver, New Face on the Countryside; Sheperd Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999); and Robbie Etheridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

^11. Michael L. Lanza, Agrarianism and Reconstruction Politics: The Southern Homestead Act (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).

^12. Tycho de Boer, "The Corporate Forest: Capitalism and Environmental Change in Southeastern North Carolina's Longleaf Pine Belt, 1790–1940," (PhD Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 2002). This dissertation offers a much more nuanced version of the industrial cut than I attempt here.

^13. The Red Hills region makes up portions of four counties: Thomas and Grady in Georgia, and Jefferson and Leon in Florida. Thomasville, Georgia, and Tallahassee, Florida, are the urban centers. William Warren Rogers and Clifton Paisley have written most extensively about the region. See William Warren Rogers, Thomas County 1865–1900 (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1973); William Warren Rogers, Transition to the Twentieth Century: Thomas County, Georgia, 1900–1920 (Tallahassee: Sentry Press, 2002); Clifton Paisley, From Cotton to Quail: An Agricultural Chronicle of Leon County, Florida, 1860–1967 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1968); and Clifton Paisley, The Red Hills of Florida: 1528–1865 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989); also see Edward E. Baptist, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

^14. Steve Gatewood et al., A Comprehensive Study of a Portion of the Red Hills Region of Georgia (Thomasville: The Thomas College Press, 1994).

^15. See Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures Since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); and James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

^16. In recent years environmental historians have begun to explore the links between health and the environment, and of particular interest here is the contention that we can trace the growth of conservation to concerns about health in the late nineteenth century. The Red Hills provides a particularly compelling case study of this phenomenon in action, which I will explore in my dissertation. The literature on health and the environment has grown considerably in recent years. See Conevery Bolten Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Linda Nash, "Finishing Nature: Harmonizing Bodies and Environments in Late-Nineteenth Century California," Environmental History 8 (January 2003): 25–52; Gregg Mitman, "Hay Fever Holiday: Health, Leisure, and Place in Glided-Age America," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77 (2003): 600–635; Gregg Mitman, "In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History," Environmental History 10 (April 2005): 184–210; Kenneth Thompson, "Trees as a Theme in Medical Geography and Public Health," Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 54 (1978): 517–31.

^17. Mitman, "In Search of Health," 198. For full treatment of the White Mountains, see Mitman, "Hay Fever Holiday."

^18. Rogers, Thomas County, 27.

^19. Among the northern cities represented by preserve owners were New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, but Cleveland supplied most of the capital infusion by far. Most amassed their wealth through Standard Oil connections. Among the most prominent of which were Oliver Hazard Payne, William Thompson, John D. Archbold, Walter C. Teagle, Clement C. Griscom, and several members of the Hanna family. By 1976, descendents of Mark and Herman Hanna, Hanna Company executives, and Cleveland friends of the family owned forty-one separate plantations encompassing 150,000 acres. See William R. Brueckheimer, "The Quail Plantations of the Thomasville-Tallahassee-Albany Regions," Proceedings, Tall Timbers Ecology and Management Conference, February 22–24, 1979, 141–65; and Brueckheimer, "Leon County Hunting Plantations: An Historical and Architectural Survey, Volume I," (Tallahassee: The Historic Tallahassee Preservation Board, 1988).

^20. Herbert Stoddard, Memoirs of a Naturalist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969), 194.

^21. Ibid., 58.

^22. See Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); and Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). For a nuanced view of how personal connections led to the formation of the conservation state, see Brian Balogh, "Scientific Forestry and the Roots of the Modern American State: Gifford Pinchot's Path to Progressive Reform," Environmental History 7 (April 2002): 198–225.

^23. By this time, natural history museums had become a major outlet for urbanites seeking nature, and taxidermy was the natural world's primary form of representation in the urban core. Significantly, Stoddard spent his time trapping and mounting native bird species, thus reinforcing his awareness of local environments. On taxidermy, see Donna Jeanne Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 26–58.

^24. Baldwin was married to Lillian Converse Hanna, sister of Mark and Howard Hanna, and was well-connected to the quail preserve set. On the advent of bird-banding, see Mark V. Barrow, Jr., A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology After Audubon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

^25. Herbert Stoddard, "Bird Banding in Milwaukee and Vicinity," in Yearbook of the Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee, vol. 3, 1923: 117.

^26. Between 1916 and 1923 Stoddard published ten articles in The Auk and three in The Wilson Bulletin. For a full bibliography see Stoddard, Memoirs of a Naturalist, 285–88.

^27. See Barrow, A Passion for Birds, 172–75.

^28. W. L. McAtee to Herbert L. Stoddard, January 2, 1924. W. L. McAtee Papers, Box 10, Stoddard Correspondence, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.

^29. S. A. Barrett to Herbert Stoddard, March 23, 1922. Taxidermy Correspondence, 1921–1925, Milwaukee Public Museum Manuscripts.

^30. E. W. Nelson to Herbert L. Stoddard, February 5, 1924. Herbert L. Stoddard Papers, Quail Investigation Correspondence, Archives of Tall Timbers Research Station. Throughout the rest of his life Stoddard remained close to his friends and colleagues in the upper Midwest. Ironically, he left the upper Midwest just as another son of that region, Aldo Leopold, returned to it. Leopold would, over the next couple of decades, become intimate with some of the very stomping grounds where Stoddard had honed his skills as a naturalist. He and Stoddard would also become close friends and colleagues. They worked together in the late 1920s to set up university graduate fellowships in game management for the Small Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers Institute.

^31. Stoddard, Memoirs of a Naturalist, 179.

^32. Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold, 264.

^33. Aldo Leopold, "The Outlook for Farm Wildlife," in Callicott and Flader, eds., The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, 323.

^34. Five years after publication of The Bobwhite Quail, Stoddard was named special counselor, along with Leopold, in the founding of The Wildlife Society, the first professional organization for wildlife managers. The Bobwhite Quail, along with Leopold's Game Management, was a crucial study for the development of professional standards in The Wildlife Society.

^35. This essay owes a great deal to the path-breaking scholarship on fire by Ashley Schiff and Stephen J. Pyne. When the Forest Service was still debating the role of fire, Schiff had already detailed the early struggles over fire within its ranks, and gave much attention to the fire debates that originated in the longleaf forests. See his Fire and Water: Scientific Heresy in the Forest Service (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). Pyne's work is crucial to anyone wanting to understand both the cultural and physical aspects of fire. A good place to start is Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

^36. W. B. Greeley to E. W. Nelson, June 10, 1926. Stoddard Papers, Fire Correspondence, TTRS (hereafter SPFC).

^37. E. W. Nelson to W. B. Greeley, June 17, 1926. SPFC.

^38. E. W. Nelson to Herbert Stoddard, June 18, 1926. Ibid.

^39. Herbert Stoddard to S.W. Greene, May 8, 1931. Ibid.

^40. Herbert L. Stoddard, The Bobwhite Quail: Its Habits, Preservation and Increase. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931), 401.

^41. Ibid., 403.

^42. Sherwood Plantation remained Stoddard's home base—Louis Thompson deeded him the property—and he traveled across the South as director of the newly formed Cooperative Quail Study Association. This was a private association of preserve owners in the Red Hills and Albany Regions, as well the South Carolina coast and small pockets of Alabama and Mississippi. Stoddard, and his new assistant E. V. Komarek (who would also become a very important figure in the region), continued research on fire, quail food plants, fire ants, predators, and more; they published annual reports and they visited member preserves to help implement their findings. See Herbert L. Stoddard, Henry L. Beadel, and E. V. Komarek, "The Cooperative Quail Study Association, July 1, 1934–April 15, 1943" (Tallahassee: Tall Timbers Research Station, Miscellaneous Publication no. 1, 1961).

^43. Herbert Stoddard to H. H. Chapman, October 7, 1931. SPFC.

^44. Roland Harper, Geological Survey of Alabama, monograph no. 8, 1913.

^45. Henry E. Hardtner, "Henry E. Hardtner, Urania Lumber Company, Urania, La., Discusses Reforestation and Controlled Burnings" Lumber Trade Journal, vol. 74 (November 18, 1918), 35.

^46. H. H. Chapman, "Factors Determining Natural Reproduction of Longleaf Pine on Cut-over Lands in La Salle Parish, La.," Yale University School of Forestry Bulletin 16 (1926); "Some Further Relations of Fire to Longleaf Pine," Journal of Forestry, 30 (1932): 602–04; "Is The Longleaf Type a Climax?," Ecology 13 (January 1932): 328–34.

^47. See Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference, Proceedings, vols. 1–16, (Tallahassee, Fla.: Tall Timbers Research Station); and Pyne, Fire in America.

^48. S. W. Greene to Ovid Butler, September 14, 1931. SPFC.

^49. H. H Chapman to S. W. Greene, September 10, 1931. Ibid.

^50. See note 45. As a fire-disturbed ecosystem, the longleaf forest did not fit neatly into the prevailing theory of climax ecology. Chapman suggested that it was a modified climax type, or a fire climax.

^51. H. H. Chapman to Henry Hardtner, September 10, 1931. SPFC.

^52. Ibid.

^53. Ibid.

^54. Herbert Stoddard to Lucien Harris, March 27, 1944. Ibid.

^55. Herbert L. Stoddard, "Use of Fire on Southeastern Game Lands," in "The Cooperative Quail Study Association, July 1, 1934 to April 15, 1943" (Tallahassee, Fla.: Tall Timbers Research Station, 1961)

^56. This meeting was held during a crucial time in the history of American conservation. New Deal programs such as the Soil Conservation Service and Civilian Conservation Corps, reacting to environmental disasters like the Dust Bowl, began to expand conservation efforts from public to private lands. The work of earlier wildlife management projects also began to pay off in many ways, such as the efforts of the New Deal's Resettlement Administration to convert former agricultural land into wildlife preserves. Resource management on public lands, too, underwent a reevaluation. The Wilderness Society was founded in the same year with the intention of setting aside public land for the preservation of wilderness areas. The 1935 SAF meeting, and its results, deserves a spot along side these important developments.

^57. Henry Hardtner, "A Tale of Root," Journal of Forestry 33 (March 1935): 357; for the entire panel presentation see the same issue, 320–60.

^58. Herbert Stoddard to Aldo Leopold, February 18, 1935, Aldo Leopold Papers, Series 9/25/1–, Box 3—Stoddard Correspondence, University of Wisconsin, Madison Archives.

^59. Stoddard, The Bobwhite Quail, 342.

^60. Daniel, Breaking the Land; Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost; James Conrad Giesen, "The South's Greatest Enemy?: The Cotton Boll Weevil and Its Lost Revolution, 1892–1930 (PhD Dissertation, University of Georgia, 2004.)

^61. Stoddard, The Bobwhite Quail, 6.

^62. Hand-written note accompanying article, in private collection of Leon Neel.

^63. On the development of Leopold's views on agricultural lands, see Paul S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 89–98; Curt Meine, Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold, and Conservation (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004); and Aldo Leopold, For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays and Other Writings, J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999).

^64. Herbert L. Stoddard, "The Bobwhite Quail: Its Propagation, Preservation, and Increase on Georgia Farms" (Atlanta: State Department of Game and Fish, 1933), 365–67. In Stoddard, Beadel, and Komarek, "The Cooperative Quail Study Association." This pamphlet was adapted from the larger work.

^65. This is an important story that I cannot address here in detail. Stoddard was among the first to call for environmental management of predators, and contributed important research, along with Paul Errington, to the national debate over predator control. See The Bobwhite Quail, 415–38; and Herbert L. Stoddard and Paul Errington, "Modifications in Predation Theory Suggested by Ecological Studies of the Bobwhite Quail," Transactions of the Third North American Wildlife Conference (Washington, D.C.: American Wildlife Institute, 1938): 736–40.

^66. Stoddard, "The Bobwhite Quail ... On Georgia Farms," 357.

^67. Stoddard, The Bobwhite Quail, 362, emphasis in original.

^68. See Stanley W. Trimble, Man-Induced Soil Erosion on the Southern Piedmont, 1700–1970 (Ankeny, Iowa: Soil Conservation Society of America, 1974); Stanley W. Trimble, "Perspectives on the History of Soil Erosion Control in the Eastern United States," Agricultural History59 (1985): 162–80; and John Fraser Hart, "Loss and Abandonment of Cleared Farm Land in the Eastern United States," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 58 (1968) : 417–440.

^69. Stoddard, The Bobwhite Quail, 350–351.

^70. Ibid., 351.

^71. See Louis S. Warren, The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Steven Hahn, "Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South," Radical History Review 26 (1982): 36–64.

^72. Stoddard, The Bobwhite Quail, 367.

^73. Ibid., 421.

^74. Among the more condescending treatments of African American life on a Red Hills hunting preserve is Lillian Britt Heinsohn, Southern Plantation: The Story of Labrah Including Some of Its Treasured Recipes (New York: Bonanza Books, 1962).

^75. African-American Life on the Southern Hunting Plantation, compiled by Titus Brown and James "Jack" Hadley, (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2000).

^76. Stoddard went on to found Tall Timbers Research Station in 1958, an important private institution that promoted fire research not only locally, but globally. In recent years, Leon Neel has continued his work in ecological management as a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center at Ichauway, an important research station in the Albany, Georgia, region founded on the former quail lands of Coca-Cola magnate, Robert Woodruff.

^77. Aldo Leopold to Daniel Hebard, October 20, 1939, Aldo Leopold Papers, 9/25/10–2, Box 4, File 10.

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