Growing up in the Sourlands, being born and raised, you don't think much about it.
I think like most people, your hometown is what you're used to and as I grew up, I didn't
think much about the Sourlands.
When I moved away, that's when I realized it's special.
It's incredibly stimulating, stepping out into the big woods of the Sourlands.
There's so much to experience, so much to see, so much to learn.
There's really no place like it.
Refuge here in the Sourlands means safe places to nest and safe places to molt and safe places
to refurbish during migration and a safe place to overwinter.
But it's beautiful, it's wonderful for people to come through and see the beauty and get
that feeling that you're in the middle of nowhere because all you see is trees and shrubs.
So in that sense, it's a refreshing refuge for people too.
It's not just a place that we have to talk about defending against human impacts all
the time.
It's a place that I feel can inspire people.
It can be a template.
It can be a place to go and say, look how beautiful this landscape is.
Look how it's organized into something that is not only aesthetically charming or quaint
or has beautiful vistas, but a place that really stimulates our senses.
We're in the center of the universe here.
I absolutely love it.
And at the same time, I can walk out my back door and get completely lost for an entire
day, an entire week if I wanted to.
So for me, it's that idea of being able to be in the heart of it all and be completely
unplugged all at the same time.
The animal life, the ecological balance, gives us a place for recreation.
It's wonderful for biking, wonderful for birding, wonderful for getting out and enjoying
the tranquility, and reliving some of the rich history of the area as well.
Since it's not a tourist location where you come and you get entertained, it's a place
you go to get renewed to really have as a refuge, to have as a sanctuary, and also to
get inspired.
Sauerland Mountain sits in West Central New Jersey, in the area bounded by the towns
of Princeton, Hillsborough, Flemington, and Lambertville.
The 90-square-mile region spans seven municipalities in Hunterdon, Somerset, and Mercer counties.
Sauerland Mountain is home to the largest contiguous forest between New York and Philadelphia,
and it is a remarkable place.
For centuries, the Sauerlands have been a refuge for plants, animals, and people.
In the middle of the nation's most densely populated state, and adjacent to one of the
world's most heavily developed corridors, the Sauerlands provide critical habitat for
wildlife and a peaceful, inspiring getaway for people from the neighboring cities, towns,
and suburbs.
The Sauerlands are a rich regional resource, unique in many ways.
You will see the Sauerlands not only as an ecological oasis, but also as a place of refuge
and a source of inspiration.
In 1778, George Washington made his headquarters here at the Hunt House in Hopewell Township.
Perched on Sauerland Mountain, he had a commanding view of troop movements for many miles around.
In this modest building, Washington held a grand conclave of leaders of the revolution
and planned his strategy for the Battle of Monmouth just a few miles away.
His victory there swung the momentum of the war toward the colonial rebels.
A few miles in the other direction, John Hart, a signer of the Declaration of Independence,
took refuge in the Sauerlands from the British who were trying to track him down and kill
him.
Later, Sauerland Mountain was part of the Underground Railroad.
Its remote location in deep woods were ideal for hiding escaped slaves.
Charles Lindbergh, America's biggest celebrity following his 1927 transatlantic flight, spotted
the secluded Sauerlands from his plane and built his estate here to avoid the limelight.
This was the site of the infamous kidnapping of Lindbergh's infant son, deemed by many
the crime of the century.
This is a place that I like because I feel like I can see the bones of the land exposed
here.
This is what a lot of the Sauerlands looks like, but because there's been a stream coursing
through here, there's no more soil and you can see all the boulders exposed.
This is Diabase.
This is the rock that saved the Sauerlands.
So while many of the adjacent lowlands to this area got turned into farms or became
industrialized, became suburbs, the Sauerlands stayed wild.
Why?
Well, you can't plow this stuff.
Because it was poor for farming, the development here was held back for a long time.
It did not get developed in the way that the rest of New Jersey's more prime farmlands
did get developed.
So it's here simply because of this accident of geology.
It was difficult to put roads in here.
It was difficult to do things with water like half wells.
And most importantly, it was impossible to plow this landscape.
So the parts of the Sauerlands that had this Diabase geology underlying them were able
to stay at least relative to the rest of this area, very wild.
The predominating Diabase is a hard, igneous rock formed from the crystallization of underground
magma.
The large Diabase boulders that characterize the mountain are the result of erosion and
were not deposited here by glaciers, as many mistakenly assume.
Good Diabase created a number of dramatic rock formations that have captured the imagination
of people for centuries, colorfully named places such as Roaring Rocks, Three Brothers,
Devil's Half Acre, and Knitting Betty Rock figure prominently in the legends and lore
of the Sauerlands.
The Sauerlands Diabase restricts the amount of water that replenishes the local aquifer,
which is not a flowing underground river, but mere isolated pools of water collected
in the cracks of the bedrock.
The groundwater, upon which everyone who lives here is completely dependent for their water
supply, is very difficult to retrieve, and it's a very limited resource.
So when it comes to groundwater, we have only a very finite amount of it.
Experts agree that the region's water supply cannot withstand the pressure of significant
further development.
In addition to placing further demands on the limited supply of groundwater, development
threatens the drinkability of the water supply as pollutants from septic systems, automobiles,
and other sources inevitably make their way into the groundwater.
While groundwater is critical to the residents of the Sauerlands, the area's surface water
is also important. Springs feed the headwaters of pristine Sauerland streams, which contribute
to the drinking water of thousands outside the Sauerlands region.
The area's unique geology allows the formation of perched wetlands and vernal pools, which
provide critical habitat for endangered wildlife.
As soon as I walk into a woods, I feel a wave of well-being come over me.
It's not a unique phenomenon. It's not something that some tree-hugger like me alone can experience.
In fact, the Japanese have a word for the air that exists in a mature forest, because
they've recognized that it's different.
For many, being in the woods is a common contrast with our everyday lives, and invokes a primal
sense of well-being. A forest that goes on without interruption provides shelter, serenity,
and refuge. For people, this is a source of enjoyment and inspiration. For some plants
and animals, it is habitat that is critical to their survival.
If you look at the Sauerland region, it's just this mohawk of green that streaks through
central New Jersey, and it really looks like a perfectly contiguous forest. However, these
roads and lawns and this patchwork of open areas in the Sauerlands is actually detrimental
to what you can really define as a contiguous forest, because each of those open areas has
a buffer around it where the surrounding forest isn't quite as productive as it could be,
and isn't ideal for some of the specialist species that can be found here.
The Sauerland forest faces a major threat from development. Clearing deep woods for
a home site diminishes habitat 1,000 feet in every direction.
Yeah, there is a big difference between the interior of a forest and the edge of a forest
in terms of what plant species are likely to occur there. Interior forest is an increasingly
rare thing in central New Jersey, because we put all these roads and houses and commercial
buildings and every time we do, we create more edge, and so you get what is referred
to as a fragmented forest. By maintaining the forest interior, you not only get all
of the plant species that are not able to survive on the edge, but you also get the
animals that depend upon those plants. So there are a number of birds, for instance,
that only live in forest interiors. And so the importance of having some edge, but a
lot of interior, is that it provides life to many more species of plants, and therefore,
many more species of wildlife.
Development in the heart of the Sauerlands destroys deep woods habitat, while increasing
habitat for the highly destructive whitetail deer, the second major threat to the Sauerland
forest. One of the really important imbalances in the Sauerlands is that we just have a huge
deer population throughout the whole region, and it's partially because the type of suburban
habitats that we've created, one we've eliminated all the large natural predators from our human
habitats, but we've also created habitats that deer have adapted to really well, and
we've created sort of an outrageous population imbalance.
I think nothing made me sit up straighter and realize that there is a dire threat than
hearing a woman named Anne Rhodes say that if deer aren't controlled in another 200 or
300 years, we will not have an eastern forest, because the trees that are in the canopy now
will have died, largely died, some of them will survive a little longer, but most of
them will have died, and there won't be anything to replace them, because the deer will have
eaten all of the seedlings.
See this substrate here is park light, it's all been eaten out by deer, anything that
tries to come up, our hardwood seedlings will be eaten this winter, so you don't see any
ash or shag bark or oak trees that are three feet tall or over, we just won't.
As a result of deer browse, there are huge swaths of Sauerland forest in which there
is virtually no understory, no next generation of trees, compare this with an area of healthy
forest understory.
Whether they're the result of development, storm damage, or other natural causes, holes
in the forest are taken over by invasive plants.
These invasives, unlike native plants, are inhospitable to native birds and animals.
In addition to threatening the Sauerland forest, the overpopulation of deer also poses dangers
to the area's human population.
Lime disease, a sometimes debilitating illness spread by deer ticks, is epidemic in the Sauerland
region.
Most Sauerland households have been involved in at least one automobile collision with
a deer, sometimes resulting in death, or serious injuries, and extensive damage to vehicles.
Deer are a beautiful and gentle presence in the forest, but there are naturally large
numbers in the Sauerlands present a menace.
Human activity has caused the deer population to grow to its current grotesque size.
It is up to us now to correct the imbalance in the ecosystem through increased hunting,
the only viable method of large-scale control of the deer population.
The Sauerlands provide a really rich environment.
From a bird's eye point of view, this is one of the most attractive sites you'll ever find.
If you're flying up the East Coast and you're a bird, you're going to want to land in the
Sauerlands.
The Sauerlands is a bit of greenery between highlands and Cape May, and the birds come
down to roost and feed.
It's a stopover for migration where they can refurbish before they go on.
A lot of people think, oh, the birds are in decline because those nasty people in the
tropics are cutting down the tropical rainforest.
Well, most of the birds that are around here live in the tropical rainforest in the winter,
but they come up here because food is abundant and it's a good place to raise your family.
And so if we don't provide that for them, then it has the same effect as it would if
you were cutting down the rainforest in the tropics.
Other types of birds breed in the Sauerlands, taking advantage of its unique mosaic of forest
and grassland habitats.
Endangered species such as red-shouldered hawk, winter wren and eastern meadowlark breed here.
Birds are not the only creatures that depend on the Sauerlands.
Reptiles, amphibians, and mammals, both common species and rare, breed here and live here.
There's a very unique situation where you have ponding in the soils that are above
the ground, and that can create these beautiful habitats called vernal pools, which is basically
a surface water body that dries up in the fall, which means that fish do not thrive there,
and so there's a whole number of other organisms and amphibians that do thrive there.
So you have these very abundant ecosystems, rich in diversity ecosystems that are throughout
the Sauerlands.
The endangered wood turtle finds the Sauerlands clean headwater streams and woodlands to be
a wonderful home.
Forests of habitat due to forest fragmentation is the greatest threat to these venerable
creatures.
Development forces turtles to travel to find mates in nesting sites.
Not well suited for trekking, they are often run over by cars, attacked by predators or
collected by people as pets.
Some of the Sauerland forests include bears, foxes and mountain lions.
So the Sauerlands are a depletable resource that, you know, obviously when you cut down
the trees and clear the fields that it's done forever.
In the case of the Sauerlands, I think that's less easy for people to look at and say, okay,
what's the big deal when you cut down the trees, so what?
And I think the so what is that it's a symbiotic relationship with us and the Sauerlands, us
being the people and the farming and where we live and the refuge that it's become.
Once that stuff is gone, it doesn't come back and it's not that they move to a new place,
that the Sauerlands are a refuge that if they're gone, we lose a lot of stuff that goes along
with it.
Only three times the size of Manhattan Island, the Sauerlands are New Jersey's own central
park.
Although it's not all parkland and much of the Sauerlands has not yet been preserved,
the area provides a large natural space where people from the surrounding towns and suburbs
can come to enjoy a wide range of recreation.
The Sauerlands are great for cycling, hiking, hunting, horseback riding, birding, photography
and bouldering.
There are abundant opportunities for deer hunting and fishing.
There are dramatic rock formations where people come to climb and hundreds of miles of beautiful
trails where hikers can be in the woods and see 200 year old white oaks, vernal ponds,
clear mountain streams and the countless pleasant surprises that nature offers.
Well, I for one like to bike through the Sauerlands because I think about the history.
I appreciate the wildlife and the forest diversity and I am often reminded that this treasure
is in the middle of the most densely populated state in the country.
Keep it pristine but also keep it in a natural balance is really important.
The ability to be out here hiking or cycling and just in some ways both lose yourself and
find yourself at the same time is the beautiful irony.
For cyclists the Sauerlands are the middle way, not flat like the plains east of Princeton
but not as strenuous as the big steep hills along the Delaware River.
Cyclists from throughout New Jersey gravitated the Sauerlands because the area offers plenty
of ups and downs with great vistas, cathedral like woods and enough rest stops to relax
and refuel before the next set of hills and valleys.
When I ride through the Sauerlands I think sometimes of the many times I was stuck inside
either in a school room or in an office and I looked outside and I said you know I want
to be out there and now when I cycle here I have the chance to do that and really enjoy
it and by riding slow you see things that you don't see when you really go quickly
and try to ride fast and try to really push yourself and when you see things it just changes
the way you view them.
A visit to the Sauerlands offers a respite from traffic and crowds, an unlikely refuge
we share with plants in wildlife.
The Sauerlands provide inspiration, its natural wonders reminding us of both nature's resilience
and its fragility.
We are fortunate in the heart of New Jersey to have the opportunity to experience a real
forest and enjoy lovely mountain vistas.
We have something here that's worth protecting, something that's very beautiful, something
that is easily encroached on by suburban sprawl and by other things that could really change
the landscape here in dramatic ways and it's a real choice that people make in terms of
you know is this something worth protecting.
I think most people do respond to the idea that they're not an island, that they do live
in a community and the goal is to enlarge their sense of that community to include the
natural areas that surround them.
Yes I want to be able to turn my tap on in my kitchen sink in 10 or 20 years and know
that the water is going to be there and that it's going to be clean but I also want to
know that we have held on to something that is a really exceptional resource that my children
and grandchildren will be able to see a little slice of New Jersey's agricultural past and
our beautiful ecosystems.
You know we tend to talk so often about people as bad actors within the landscape as only
causing disturbance and degradation and I think one of the reasons why the idea of stewardship
appeals to me is because it allows us to resume our role as very important animals within
the landscape that encourage abundance and resiliency.
But the parts that aren't preserved and protected are still under threat of development and
development encroaches a little bit further into the forest every year.
So ideally that would stop ideally the rest of the sourlands that isn't developed is
protected and habitat managed so it can support those sensitive species that are there now.
It's important that people understand what a treasure the sourlands is and how much work
needs to be done on the individual level and on the community organization level to preserve
the beauty and the important environmental contribution that is the sourlands.
