Whenever we met up with a horse, we would have to stop, and the rider would dismount and lead his frightened animal on foot past the panting machine." The motorcar was taking over by 1914, and that is the approximate birth date of most of the current woods in Westchester.

        Now that the land is being used for "en joyment," as one fifth-grader I know put it, Westchester is about eighty per cent wooded. Although the population, in the 1970s, is larger than ever before, it is possible in the northern part of the county to walk for many miles, as I have done, without crossing more than a few roads or setting eyes on more than half a dozen houses. Around Somers, the woods are deep and plentiful enough to have concealed for a period of three months to a year the body of a man of about sixty who had been shot once in the side of the head with a .22-calibre bullet. A rucksack beside his badly deteriorated remains, found by children in September, 1974, contained sketches of some birds, a whiskey flask, a topographical map of the area, and a few other effects that gave no clue as to his identity, Detectives hoped that his dental work might give them a lead, but up to now the case has not been solved.

        From the base of the fire tower, we descended between walls of granite along a steep path that doubles as a stream after rain. The trees on the next level of the mountain were tall and in vibrant prime. The air was moist and mild. With rock blocking the north and sun pouring in from the south, it was like a greenhouse here, Clusters of honey mushrooms-golden, with scales on their caps-had sprouted beneath some of the older hardwoods. They are delectable parboiled to remove a slight bitterness and fried in butter. But underground the fungus was attacking the roots of the trees and killing them.  A burst of machine-gun fire, followed by a peal of maniacal laughter, rang out in the woods. "Pileated woodpecker!" one of the bird-watchers announced triumphantly. A century ago, at the peak of farming, the pileated was on the brink of extinction; now that there is a supply of big, half-dead trees to excavate, the bird is becoming fairly common. The tree this one was working on had probably been weakened enough by honey mushrooms to have been invaded by carpenter ants, the bird's favorite food.

        I have seen the red-bellied woodpecker in Westchester. It was larger than a hairy and smaller than a flicker. The red mane and ladder back were unmistakable j so was its call-a sort of juicy cluck. Red-bellieds are the latest in a long line of Southern species that have been expanding their ranges. The cardinal started to do it in the forties and fifties. The tufted titmouse followed suit in the sixties. So did the turkey vulture. Most recently, the mockingbird and the Carolina wren have moved up in quantity, and they're no longer unusual. White-eyed vireos, blue-gray gnatcatchers, hooded warblers, and Louisiana water thrushes are doing it, too, but they're here only in the summer, and not in significant numbers. There are several possible explanations for the presence of these Southern birds here: mitigated winters, the return of the forest, human encroachment on their habitat and birdpopulation pressures in their range, the sudden boom in suburban bird feeders. Mockingbirds, which have no trouble relating to man, have benefitted from the growth of suburbia and from the increased planting of holly trees, of or namental crab apples, and of multiflora roses along highway baffles. The cuckoo, uncommon under ordinary circumstances in the area, is enticed north in larger numbers by periodic outbreaks of the tent caterpillar. No one knows yet why red-bellied woodpeckers have suddenly found Westchester to their liking. Perhaps they are filling the niche of the red-headed woodpecker, whose numbers here have shrunk to practically nothing, largely because of competition from starlings for their nesting holes.

        Lying on the leaf-strewn floor was the shell of an old log. Rock-hard and weathered silver, like barn board, the wood had resisted decay for a good fifty years. It was the remains of a chestnut tree. Once, chestnut trees were common enough that the woods in these parts were known as the oakchestnut forest. Their nuts were sought by squirrels, deer, and turkeys, and by people, who roasted them and sold them on sidewalks. Chestnut was used as "extract timber" for tanning leather. Its durable wood was the almost exclusive choice for telephone poles and railroad ties. The trees grew fast. Hundred-foot specimens were not. unusual. But by 1890 a potent fungus, Endothia parasitica, had arrived in the New York area, quite possibly with a shipment of trees from Asia. Spreading rapidly in the metropolitan area, its wind- and animal-borne spores encountered no resistance from the American chestnut tree. The epidemic had been identified in 1904 at the New York Botanical Garden, but, owing to public apathy and inaction by the Legislature, nothing was done about it in New York State. By 1930m the chestnut had been wiped out over most of its range. Somehow, though, in White Plains the blight missed one tree. It stood, at 279 Hamilton Avenue, beside the police station until a few years ago, when it was taken down to make room for a parking lot.

        Around the silvery log, numerous shoots with long, drooping, large toothed leaves had sprouted from the roots of the fallen tree. Rich in tannin, the roots and shoots of chestnuts are resistant to the fungus. But when a sprout reaches about twenty feet it loses its resistance. Orange pustules, the fruiting structure of Endothia, invariably appear on its bark, and, girdled with hollow cankers, it soon dies. We turned the log and found a snail, a packet of slug eggs, and three worms in the rich brown earth. I picked up one of the worms and stroked it. It felt bristly. This meant that it was an Asiatic worm, and not one of the native ones. The Asiatic worm has a ring of setae on each segment. (Setae are hair like bristles which enable the worm to get around.) The native worm has ut two setae per segment. Longer and hardier, the Asiatic species has been steadily usurping the niche of our native worm since it entered Westchester, by way of the Midwest, twenty years ago.

        The mountain descended in tiers, each marked by subtle changes in vegetation. We jumped a number of rushing brooks, some headed west to the Hudson, others east to Long Island Sound; Cross River Mountain is along a drainage divide. The lower We got, the younger the woods were, and the more they'd been tampered with. 

        Most of the trees were making their second, third, or even fourth comeback. Hardwood root systems are irrepressible: no matter how often the stems are cut, the roots will keep sending up new ones. The original single bole will replace itself with a "copse" of half a dozen sprouts. After a time, usually before they have reached a fiveinch diameter, one or two of the sprouts will take the lead, leaving the others to wither away and succumb to the attack of fungi, insects, and wood peckers.

        Westchester is in a woodland known as the Sprout Hardwoods, which is in the Oak-Hickory Zone of the Central Hardwood Forest, which stretches from Boston to Washington and westward to Chicago and Tennessee. The Sprout Hardwoods are rich in species, because the ranges of many Northern and Southern trees overlap in them. Except for a few isolated stands, for example, the northern limit for naturally occuring sweetgum is in Rye, where it grows with heech in a rich lowland forest that is subject to the ameliorating influence of the nearby sea. American holly and Atlantic white cedar also have their northern limits in the Sprout Hardwoods. The holly is rare and occurs only in southern Westchester, but the cedar inhabits swamps as far north as Bedford. As you go north and inland, farther away from the "maritime effect," enamelled white hirches make their appearance. There are scattered white birches as far south as Pound Ridge. Another common member of the New England understory, striped maple, grows in high places as far south as Chappaqua, and certain bog plants-sphagnum mosses and pitcher plants, which are typical of New Hampshire and Maine-also dovetail into Westchester. As a determinant of vegetation, elevation is as important as latitude: every thousand feet up is the equivalent of two hundred miles north.

        We came to some woods that must have heen less than thirty years old. The floor was still grass, and there were still a few shrubs and "pioneer" trees-sumac, aspen, and gray birchthe first species to come into a field that has been let go. Short-lived and sunloving, many of the birches had already died, and their rotting stems lay wedged among the maple saplings that had begun to replace them. The site was filled with "escapes" from other parts of the world-winged euonymus, garlic mustard, Japanese honeysuckle, Oriental bittersweet. There are dense woods in Westchester without a native plant in them. Once, in Banksville, far from any house, I came upon a thriving hamhoo thicket. It was the temperate bamboo of Szechuan, which grows above the rhododendron forest.  Giant pandas eat it and live in it. 
 
 

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