Campus News

October 20th, 2026

Dodge speaks on flora, fauna of Garrett County

Garrett College professor featured as October’s JCLS presenter

McHenry, MD – Kevin Dodge’s presentation was entitled What Meshach Saw: The Presettlement Flora & Fauna of Garrett County, but Garrett College’s professor of Natural Resources & Wildlife Technology covered much more ground than the era of the 19th-century outdoorsman Meshach Browning.

Dodge took attendees back from over 10 thousand years ago all the way up to present-day Garrett County in last Thursday’s Joan Crawford Lecture Series presentation.

“We can speculate on what it looked like back in the day,” Dodge said of the area’s pre-settlement environment. “We have sources of evidence for determining past forest vegetation, including pollen preserved in bogs, witness trees from land surveys, written accounts, and summaries of logging history.”

Released pollen, according to Dodge, is particularly helpful for looking back at pre-settlement conditions due to where the pollen ended up settling.

“Pollen is released by trees and drifts across the landscape,” said Dodge. “Here, one of the places it settled was in our bogs – and it remained intact because the material in bogs – peat – doesn’t decompose. You can take a core down through that peat and, looking from the bottom to the top of the peat, see the changes that took place over time.”

Dodge discussed a pair of researchers whose work attempted to “reconstruct the past vegetational history in one part of Garrett County” that took readers back thousands of years.

Jean Maxwell and Margaret Bryan Davis published a study in 1972 titled Pollen Evidence of Pleistocene and Holocene Vegetation on the Allegheny Plateau, Maryland. Dodge said the study provided a look back at conditions from nearly 19,000 years ago until present in what they called Buckle’s Bog, but what many local people know as the Peat Bog or The Glades.

“The bottom of the pollen record showed that the vast majority of pollen came from sedges, which are grass-like plants, reflecting a tundra-like environment,” Dodge reported. “As glaciers receded, the sedges were replaced by pollen primarily from spruces and pines with an eventual transition to more pines and birches. Then we saw oaks show up on the scene.”

Dodge did discuss Browning, covering excerpts from his book, Forty-four Years of the Life of a Hunter. Dodge noted that the book contained information about the wide variety of tree species Browning saw, including spruce, hemlock, white pine, yellow pine, maple, wild cherry, white oak, red oak, birch, black walnut, white walnut, wild cucumber, chestnut, and beech.

One of the many time periods Dodge covered was the late 19th- to early 20th-century logging era.

“This was not modern forest management,” Dodge emphasized. “This was an era of industrial logging or railroad logging where it all came down and got hauled out.

“The landscape was laced throughout with narrow-gauge railroad lines used for hauling out logs – and that logging completely changed the environment,” continued Dodge. “Dolly Sods is like the poster child for the worst of what resulted. There you had perhaps 10 feet of organic soil on top of the rocks you see up there today.

“When they removed the canopy, the organic soil dried out,” said Dodge. “Then sparks thrown from the steam-powered engines ignited the tinder-dry soil and it burned all the way down to bare rock. Subsequent rains led to erosion. There was little or no soil left. That completely altered growing conditions. The same likely occurred in places here in Garrett County.”

In more uplifting news, Dodge talked about the 20th- and 21st-century resurgences of many animals in Garrett County.

“Deer were here before, but not at the abundance that we have now,” said Dodge. “Their elevated numbers have had an impact on the structure and species of our forests.”

Dodge also noted the recovery of black bears. “That’s a real success story that we can now sustain a managed [bear] hunting season.”

Turkey and northern river otter populations have also rebounded, according to Dodge.

“Thanks to an aggressive program of trapping turkeys where they were abundant and transplanting them to Garrett County, along with restoration of our forests, we have a resurgence of turkeys,” said Dodge. “Over-trapping and stream and river degradation led to the loss of the northern river otter, but around 1990 we started live-trapping them down on the Eastern Shore and releasing them here, eventually restoring their population.”

Dodge said fishers – a carnivorous mammal – were nearly non-existent in this area for years, thanks to forest loss and over-trapping.

“Then, in 1969, some fishers were released down in West Virginia and they began to expand northward,” said Dodge. “Over my career here at Garrett College, I have seen them become a fairly common animal.”