Appalachian Demonstration Areas

Bald Eagle State Park, Centre County, Pennsylvania

About Bald Eagle State Park

At this popular central Pennsylvania park, 5,900 acres surround a 1,730-acre flood-control lake created by a large earthen dam on Bald Eagle Creek. Park visitors can hike, camp, fish, boat, hunt, and view wildlife.

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers acquired the land in 1965, most of it was being farmed. Since then, the area has grown up into brush, pole-stage forest, and mature forest. Different habitats provide living space for many birds, including ruffed grouse, wild turkeys, and a wide range of songbirds, and for mammals such as cottontail rabbits, white-tailed deer, black bear, foxes, and raccoons. Ducks and geese use the lake, as do bald eagles and ospreys.

Lake Raystown, Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania

About Lake Raystown

This U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flood-control project in Huntingdon County, central Pennsylvania, controls a drainage area of 960 square miles in the Juniata and Susquehanna river basins. The site includes a 28-mile-long lake surrounded by more than 22,000 acres of lowlands and uplands. Wooded areas are a mix of oaks, hickories, maples, and softwoods; on the west side of the lake lie many old farms whose fields are now filling in with native and invasive shrubs and trees. Birdlife includes ruffed grouse, woodcock, wild turkeys, waterfowl, raptors, and many species of songbirds. The area supports a large deer population.

Polk Wetlands, State Game Lands 39, Venango County, Pennsylvania

About Polk Wetlands

In a floodplain on this largely forested 10,000-acre State Game Lands in Venango County, northwestern Pennsylvania, wildlife managers are converting 83 formerly farmed acres to woodcock habitat. At the core of the project is a 25-acre site where a field’s drainage pattern has been radically changed and thousands of tree and shrub seedlings have been planted.

Clermont Tract, McKean and Elk Counties, Pennsylvania

About the Clermont Tract

Forest Investment Advisors (FIA), a timber investment management company, manages the Clermont Tract, more than 25,000 productive wooded acres in southern McKean and northern Elk counties, northcentral Pennsylvania.

The rolling upland and mountainous terrain is forested with cherry, maple, ash, beech, birch, aspen, pine, and hemlock. Deer, black bear, bobcats, fishers, snowshoe hares, and a range of birds inhabit the area.

Steve Liscinsky Memorial Project, State Game Lands 278, Blair County, Pennsylvania

About the Liscinsky Memorial Project

Steve Liscinsky was a woodcock biologist for the Pennsylvania Game Commission. Throughout his career he worked in central Pennsylvania’s Bald Eagle Valley, including on State Game Lands 278. Liscinsky wrote The American Woodcock in Pennsylvania, published by the Game Commission in 1965. The Ruffed Grouse Society, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, and Liscinsky’s friends and family helped fund this habitat-improvement project in his memory.

William H. Goudy Memorial Habitat Project, State Game Lands 82, Somerset County, Pennsylvania

About the Goudy Memorial Habitat Project

Biologist Bill Goudy (1933-2007) worked for conservation agencies in Michigan and West Virginia, and then for the U.S. Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. He became a regional director for the Ruffed Grouse Society in 1984, a position he held until his retirement in 2002.

Woodcock research that Goudy did in Michigan was used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in designing the annual woodcock singing-ground survey begun in 1968. (Traveling along designated routes in springtime and counting singing male woodcock helps biologists monitor woodcock abundance and estimate population trends in states and provinces, management regions, and the North American continent.)

Kirk Orchard Unit, Green Ridge State Forest, Allegany County, Maryland

About the Kirk Orchard Unit

This 505-acre tract in Allegany County, western Maryland, was a commercial orchard before being acquired by the Green Ridge State Forest in the late 1970s. Since then, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources has managed portions of the area to keep it in a shrubby stage to benefit wildlife that needs young-forest habitat.

In 2008, a formal plan was drawn up to actively manage the Kirk Orchard as an Early Successional Wildlife Habitat Focus Area – the largest tract of public land in Maryland managed specifically for this important habitat type.

T.M. Gathright Wildlife Management Area, Bath County, Virginia

About Gathright Wildlife Management Area

The Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries manages this area at the north end of Lake Moomaw, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flood control project in western Virginia. The WMA is in Bath County and borders West Virginia to the west. Most of Gathright’s 13,428 acres are mountainous and forested, with oaks and hickories the main tree species. Deer, wild turkeys, squirrels, and ruffed grouse live on the WMA, as do many forest-interior songbirds.

About 70 acres of low-lying old fields are in the early stages of a management effort to improve them for woodcock, golden-winged warblers, cottontail rabbits, and other wildlife – this in a region where young-forest habitat is scarce.

Improving the Land for Woodcock

Sarah Fletcher Tract, Tucker County, West Virginia

About the Sarah Fletcher Tract

This property consists of 370 acres of old farmland in the Canaan Valley, Tucker County, northeastern West Virginia. The Canaan Valley encompasses about 40 square miles. It is a popular area for hiking, skiing, hunting, and wildlife viewing.

Black bear, beaver, bobcat, and fisher are but a few of the many species of mammals found in the valley. Great numbers of migrating birds stop off in spring and fall, using woodland, grassland, wetland, and shrubland habitats Forested areas support hemlock, sugar maple, red maple, aspen, and yellow birch, and lowlands have speckled alder – trees and shrubs that are more common farther north but grow in the Canaan Valley because of the area’s cold climate and 3,200-foot elevation.

Wallkill River National Wildlife Refuge, Sussex and Orange Counties, New Jersey

About the Wallkill River National Wildlife Refuge

This federal wildlife refuge lies 60 miles northwest of New York City in northern Sussex County, New Jersey, and southern Orange County, New York. Created in 1990, the refuge includes 9 miles of the Wallkill River and more than 5,100 acres of diverse habitats including headwater wetlands, scrub-shrub wetlands, wooded swamps, open-water impoundments, calcareous fens, bottomland forests, upland forests, grasslands, and farmlands.

The rich limestone soil in the Wallkill River Valley once supported many vegetable and dairy farms. Recently, numerous housing projects have been built in the area. With heavy development farther east on the coastal plain, the refuge represents an extremely important area of undeveloped land.

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