nests within cavities high in large longleaf pines. The most impressive in size and appearance, aside from the occasional bear that might wander through, was the heavily muscled indigo snake, its length reaching seven feet, its body blackish gunmetal blue. The indigos emerged from the tortoise burrows and consumed a variety of prey that included smaller members of their own species. At the opposite extreme among the reptiles in size and appearance was the mole skink, a subterranean lizard with vestigial legs, reaching a maximum length of six inches, and resembling an armored earthworm. So secretive was the species that it was almost never seen except by expert naturalists.
To this distinctive part of the longleaf pine fauna can be added three kinds of ants: the spider-egg eater of the tortoise burrows; a species that lived in pine trunks and canopy and served as a major source of food for the red-cockaded woodpeckers; and finally, the mound-building ants, whose colonies lived on the shores of Lake Nokobee.
The exquisitely beautiful and biologically rich pine flatland at Lake Nokobee was only a tiny remnant of what was once the dominant habitat of the Gulf of Mexico coastal region. For thousands of years it covered sixty percent of the plain from the Carolinas to Texas. Its rolling expanse was interrupted only by hardwood forest strongholds, principally the tributary ravines of rivers, streams, steepheads cut deep in sand by outbreaks of groundwater, and the cypress-dominated floodplains of the principal watercourses. There were also the countless domes growing in and around moist depressions that filled with rainwater in the winter and dried out by late spring. Stumpholes, the last decaying remnants of fallen pines, were homes to a small fauna all of their own.
For Indian tribes the longleaf pine savanna was a source of life. They could hunt the buffalo and white-tailed deer that teemed within it. For the first Spanish explorers it was a highway through the Florida Panhandle along which they thrust their way with horse and armor into unknown lands north and west. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the flatland yielded much of its space to the early English and American farmers. Then, following the Civil War and on through the next half century, the magnificent tree species that formed its centerpiece and helped sustain its integrity was almost all cut down. Longleaf pine has the misfortune of being both easily harvested and ranked with redwood, cypress, and white pine as one of the finest of North American timber species. Great fortunes were made by land and mill owners from its destruction. The timber barons enriched investors in both the Southern and the Northern cities. They built plantation-style mansions and helped lift the South from its deep poverty. When they were done, however, they left behind a wasteland of stumps overgrown by weedy stands of slash and loblolly pine, among which grew up an often impenetrable hardwood brush. Such was the secondary growth that surrounded the pristine longleaf pine area at Dead Owl Cove and most of the eastern perimeter of Lake Nokobee. But to the west of the lake on the Nokobee tract and into the Ziebach National Forest for almost two miles, the longleaf pine grassland remained close to its original state.
Odd as it may seem, fire was and remains the friend of the ancient longleaf savanna. Without human interference, lightning strikes set off fires at frequent intervals, which then spread slowly through the surface detritus. The richly diverse natural ground vegetation not only survived the low-intensity burn-offs, it needed them every several years to sustain growth and a dominant presence. This was the phenomenon that I and Alicia, my wife--and an experienced ecologist herself--studied for so many years on the Nokobee tract. We were able to confirm with detailed records that when natural fires are suppressed, the invading trees and shrubs set seed and start to overgrow the original flatland ground vegetation. Within a decade, the dense scrub takes over, dominated by slash and loblolly pine, water and laurel oak, sweetgum, and a host of other shrub and small tree species. The new woodland builds up a thick litter of fallen leaves and tree branches. Much of the layer is suspended high enough off the ground to be well aerated and easily dried out. It becomes superb tinder, so that when a fire is started it can flare into a wildfire, raging outward, clawing up to the canopies of the smaller trees, and leaping roads and streams to