White spruce coastal woods.

Forest clearance for agriculture.

Selective cutting.

Forest fires.

Effects of diseases and insects.

(Larix Iaricina) where they bordered on bogs. Along the North Shore, exposed sites and older fixed dunes allowed white spruce (P. glauca) forest to hold its own.

Forest changes. The major change in the forest since settlement began has been the wholesale clearing of land for crops and pasture. As well-drained fine sandy loam soils were most favorable to agriculture, the uplands were cleared more completely than the lowlands; some 72% of the central upland is cleared at present. In the west, too, the most extensive clearing has been in these areas, though the large areas of poorly drained soil is less favorable. Here again some 50% is cleared and in use. In the northeast, because of the large swamps the highest proportion of woodland remains; some 40% is cleared. By the combined average, 60% of the Island is devoted to agriculture, an exceptionally high proportion for Canada east of Quebec City. The remaining 40% is by no means all in woods, for some 8% of the total is in unimproved waste land, marsh or barren. The result has been the reduction of hardwood-pine-hemlock forest to a greater extent than black spruce and red maple, which form the most extensive forest areas.

Economic demand has made for selective cutting of much of the woodland that remains. In the 18th century all visitors noted that contemporary “defence resource”, the mast timber of white pines. This was cut and exported to England; later white pine and oak were used in shipbuilding, and the former in woodworking. White pine stumps rotted from the back pastures within the last 70 years in many areas. The great size of the hemlock made it useful for boards, often only for barn siding because of its relative weakness, and its bark was sought for tanning. Sugar maple, used till fifty years ago as a source of sugar, was often maintained in a grove near the farmhouse, especially in the west; most of the birch from these groves was undoubtedly removed for fuel, though the paper birch has often replaced it. During the past twenty years, the demand for pit props and pulpwood has led to the cutting of much second-growth white spruce in Kings County.

One of the earliest forces released by the settler was fire. About 1738, when the North Shore was only a base for drying fish, fire burnt from Tracadie eastward to East Point, devastating the entire north-eastern peninsula. It must have spread easily in the dry spruce and pine forest. One result of this burning was the encouragement of the heath shrubs; the resulting blueberry barrens of Tracadie have been perpetuated by accidental and deliberate use of fire ever since. The fire of 1840 in central Prince produced a great blueberry barren at Conway which

persisted for over thirty years. (This the biggest fire of Prince County history burned from Campbellton to Bldeford.)

The opening up of the hardwood stands by selective cutting has brought disease to several forest types. Yellow birch and white birch (as a member of the forest have been devastated by dieback. The beech of hilltops has often suffered from the recently (1934) introduced aphid-borne canker (Nectria coccinea) so badly that only low thickets of stump-sprout trees persist; however, there are many more undamaged stands than in Nova Scotia. Very little white pine remained to suffer from or spread the blister rust when it struck early in this century. The larch of bogs, a species apt to grow in extensive pure stands, was also reduced by an introduced insect, the sawfly, in the 1890's. However, the role of native diseases in the case of successional species such as larch, with their large pure stands, is probably less permanently significant; destruction and recovery may take place cyclically, as it seems to with the marine eelgrass Zostera attacked by wasting