Unearthing the History of Catskills Trees with Dr. Michael Kudish

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Michael Kudish: My PhD thesis is on the Vegetational History of the Catskill High Peaks. It's from ESF Syracuse, which was then known as the New York State College of Forestry. The college was satisfied, granted me the degree, but I was not satisfied, so I've been working on it ever since [55 years].

[00:00:21] Brett Barry: That thesis earned Michael Kudish his PhD in 1971, but the research never stopped. In 2000, Purple Mountain Press published his landmark book, The Catskill Forest: A History. Now, an updated 6-volume set is in the works. Mike Kudish is the authority on Catskills trees and forests, and I met him at his home/research library in Delaware County to hear about his latest research sampling Catskills bogs and radiocarbon dating peat and charcoal for even more insights into our Catskills forest past. I'm Brett Barry, and this is "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast."

[00:01:09] Campbell Brown: "Kaatscast" is supported by The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie Counties, including brands for the local region such as the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and the Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com; and by Briars & Brambles Books. The go to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily. For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call (518) 750-8599. This episode is supported by Hanford Mills Museum. Explore the power of the past and learn about the ingenuity of the historic milling industry. Watch the waterwheel bring a working sawmill to life. Bring a picnic to enjoy by the millpond. For more information about scheduling a tour or about their 2024 exploration days, visit hanfordmills.org.

[00:02:08] Brett Barry: Let's start, Mike, if you could please introduce yourself and tell us where we are.

[00:02:16] Michael Kudish: Physically, right now, where we are, just outside of Arkville, New York.

[00:02:21] Brett Barry: And this is your home, but also doubles as a research library and herbarium. Can you explain what that means?

[00:02:28] Michael Kudish: Well, a research library. When I retired from teaching up in the Adirondacks at Paul Smith's, I could come down here and do something that I wanted to do for a lifetime, that is, work on the Catskills forest history full time, so when I arrived here, I could do that, but I've been building a library on Catskill Forests and the Catskills for almost a whole lifetime. So the library contains not only books, but papers, and many, many, many maps. A lot of the material that I've written, a lot of the material that other people have written, magazine articles, newsletters, someone just made a comment to me, oh, a friend, a few weeks ago, that I keep everything. So if I write an article for a newsletter and say to the membership, "Consult your 2012 issue of the newsletter for that organization," my friend said, "Many folks may not keep it," whereas I have all the newsletters going back to when I was a graduate student from all the organizations I belonged to.

[00:03:36] Brett Barry: And everything's well-organized. You have rooms that are labeled and you even bought a separate house?

[00:03:42] Michael Kudish: The house next door is for non-Catskills materials. So that all the Catskills and a few items from the Adirondacks are in this house. You asked what a herbarium is? Because this house really has four herbaria and the library. An herbarium is a collection of dried, pressed plants, and it's used for matching unknowns with knowns, plants that come and are collected. I have people coming here to use various portions of the herbarium. There are four of them. One is woody plants, trees, and shrubs. It's primarily wood and bark, and then I have an herbaceous plant, mainly herbs, wildflowers, ferns. That's in another room, and then I have a bryophyte herbarium that's mosses primarily, and the fourth one, it's a collection of dried and dead plants from peat in bogs, and that's in the stockroom. So there are four herbaria.

[00:04:47] Brett Barry: Tell me how you came to study trees, specifically Catskill trees.

[00:04:54] Michael Kudish: My PhD thesis is on the vegetational history of the Catskill High Peaks. It's from ESF Syracuse, which was then known as the New York State College of Forestry.

[00:05:04] Brett Barry: And why did you choose that topic?

[00:05:07] Michael Kudish: Well, I had done some recreational hiking here for several years, even when I was an undergraduate, and when it was time to get a thesis together at ESF, my professors were pushing me to get going on a thesis. You need to start your research. Well, it took me a while to find a topic, but once I did, I've been working on it for 55 years, and they were satisfied, the college was satisfied, granted me the degree, but I was not satisfied. So I've been working on it ever since. The problem I was trying to solve when I was a grad student has expanded, and now it's a lot larger, covering a larger geographic portion of the Catskills in a much greater span of time.

[00:05:57] Brett Barry: What was the initial research?

[00:05:58] Michael Kudish: Well, climbing peaks from a recreational point of view, just like most hikers do, I noticed that from one mountain summit to the next, which could be less than a mile from away and about the same elevation, the forests were all different. One summit would have spruce and fir on it. Another summit would have fir without the spruce. Another would have neither spruce nor fir. Another would be all hardwoods, meaning trees that lose their leaves in the winter, and of all the hardwoods, some of the summits had sugar maple, some did not, some had red oak, some did not. The mountains were close together very often, and of a similar elevation, climate was very similar, so I had to start looking into why. I just wondered why, so that was the thesis. No one had ever figured it out before. Some people had done some sample plots, but no one actually mapped what was on each summit, so I went around all the high peaks and some of the lower peaks and just took vegetational samples of what was on the summits, but as far as actually figuring out why the summits were all different, that didn't happen until I moved here and retired, and I could really study at full time. I had fewer obligations, like full time teaching.

[00:07:30] Brett Barry: Okay, so what did you discover about why the peaks are so different from each other, and is that unique to this area?

[00:07:39] Michael Kudish: Oh, I think it's unique. Certainly, I think, to North America, if not for the world. There's no place like the Catskills. In the Adirondacks, in the mountains of northern New England, and north into Canada, into the Maritime Provinces in Quebec and Ontario, if a mountain is at a certain elevation on the top, one can predict without having climbed it what's going to be on the top, and when you get up there, there it is. In the Catskills, it didn't work, and south of here, when you get into Pennsylvania in the mountains of the southern Appalachians, there are differences because they were not glaciated, so everything is a lot older down there and, and, and different, and different rules, different things going on, different species in some cases. The Catskills are the southernmost populations of boreal forest; spruce-fir forest in eastern North America that's been glaciated. You get south of the Catskills, you lose the glaciation.

[00:08:40] Brett Barry: How did the glaciation affect what types of species we're seeing today?

[00:08:44] Michael Kudish: Well, everything was wiped out. There was nothing here.

[00:08:46] Brett Barry: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:47] Michael Kudish: So everything had to migrate in, primarily from the south and from the southwest [what is now from New Jersey and Pennsylvania came in here].

[00:08:55] Brett Barry: As seeds?

[00:08:57] Michael Kudish: Yeah, the seeds would blow out ahead of the trees, and the forest would migrate— maybe tens of yards, hundreds of yards each year—move north, and the seeds would be thrown out ahead of it. Those seeds would germinate into trees, and when those trees grew up, they'd shed seeds, which went out north ahead of them, and the whole forest basically moves. The individual trees don't, but their offspring are displaced to the north or northeast so that the whole forest does move. They're not like animals, where the animal actually can pick itself up and move. The plants can't do that, so the, the distribution of seeds or spores has to do that for them.

[00:09:36] Brett Barry: What kind of time periods are we talking here [when the glaciation occurred, when the ice sheets moved back and the trees started moving in]?

[00:09:43] Michael Kudish: Okay, we know that. I've got plenty of radiocarbon dates and plenty of bugs. We were out of the ice at 15,000 years, and for about the first thousand years, I'm still working on that. I think we are in what was known as a Arctic tundra with a spruce parkland situation for about 15,000 to 14,000. Tundra is vegetation that is not forest. It's small stuff—little shrubs and herbs and grasses and sedges and mosses and lichens—and it's only maybe ankle-high or knee-high at the most, maybe a little taller, and then the forest comes in later and generally not in one huge continuous mass. The forest often comes in [in what we call us with] a spruce parkland, and what that is, you have individual spruce trees and individual groves of spruce trees, which dot the tundra, and for roughly the first 14,000 years I cannot find much tree material in my fossil plants in the bogs, but once you hit about 14,000, 13,900, it was like an explosion here. The forest just moved in [and fast], so one would think, "Well, maybe the northern Catskills were forested later than the southern because it took longer for the forest to move north, but it was very quick." I can't even see anything like that. By 13,700 years, even earlier than that, we've got species as fossils which are here today, so by 13,900/800/700, we have yellow birch, we have hemlock, we have red spruce, we have balsam fir—and not far behind them we have other plants like what we call red cherry or pin cherry, and then there are blackberries and raspberries and a bunch of bog shrubs, and we're getting fossil plants in the bogs, and they can be radiocarbonated and identified.

[00:11:53] Brett Barry: When you say 13,000, 14,000, that's from today?

[00:11:56] Michael Kudish: Yes, back.

[00:11:57] Brett Barry: How do you think the trees have evolved in that time, or have they? You know, we had hemlock then. We have hemlock now. Are the trees different?

[00:12:05] Michael Kudish: I would think over a period of time of 13 - 14,000 years, and I'm not a geneticist, I don't think much because if you look at the fossils, they're pretty much the same what we have today. You can't really see a difference. I would think you'd have to go back to really see differences— certainly hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years.

[00:12:33] Brett Barry: Before you discovered bogs and started your bog research, you were getting all your information from just a few hundred years back, right?

[00:12:43] Michael Kudish: Super question. That's one of the big points I make when I give my bog lectures. How did you formulate that question? That's a wonderful question.

[00:12:52] Brett Barry: I do my research.

[00:12:53] Michael Kudish: Good, because one of the big points I make when I'm lecturing on bugs is that up to about the mid-1990s, I could go back only three or four hundred years, and for several decades thought I could never go back for more than three or four hundred years, and the evidence would be, first living trees, the oldest trees, will live 300, 350, 400 is almost impossible here, but 300 years is possible for a few species, so the trees will tell you. They've been there at least for 300 years. Another source of information would be published literature from people who were exploring the Catskills in the 1700s. There's nothing going on in the 1600s except in the Hudson Valley, but when you get into the 1700s, would be the mid-18th century, you begin to get explorers, and I'm sure a lot, many of your listeners would know of Alf Evers, who's our prime Catskills historian, and when I was a grad student, Alf Evers was kind enough to meet with me in his house and give me a lot of these sources, these explorers who came through the Catskills in the mid-1700s, and I'm able to read what they had written, and some of them were fairly detailed on the forest and what people were doing and not doing in the forest. So the literature goes back about 300 years, and the trees go back about 300 years, and I thought that's all I could do until something happened in the mid-1990s. I, I knew some people who were doing research in the Adirondacks, and they had published a paper on their work on Adirondack lakes and bogs and wetlands and peatlands, where they were able to take fossil plants, and identify them from the bottoms of lakes and the bottoms of bogs, have them radiocarbon dated, and reconstruct the history of the vegetation in the Adirondacks going back 13,000, 13,005. It's less there than here because the ice melted here sooner than it did in the Adirondacks, but still these people could reconstruct the forest and the vegetation going back 13,000 plus years in the Adirondacks. My thought was, could I do it for the Catskills? So I started, and I remember taking a few peat samples with a shovel from a few bogs: one of them was the bog on top of Balsam Lake Mountain, which is number 301 in my catalog, the first one I studied, and I remember the day I was in those days; the radiocarbon dates came by postal service, not email, and I was standing at the faculty lounge mailboxes at Paul Smith's College, and I opened up the first set of radiocarbon dates, and I thought 500, maybe 1,000 if I'm lucky, and I opened up and I started reading, and my mouth opened up and I was silent probably for 10 minutes, and the faculty going in and out, "Mike, what's the matter with you?" They were looking at me, I had this strange look on my face. I said, "The radiocarbons are in, the radiocarbon dates are in." They said, "Well, so what?" I said, "Well, one of them's over 5,000 years." I had no idea it would be that much. Little did I know later that we're back to 15,000, but that came later, but that 5,000 was a shock, and that was 1995. So it's almost 30 years since I was able to, to, to push back the clock to 15,000 years ago.

[00:16:57] Brett Barry: How long had carbon dating been used for?

[00:17:03] Michael Kudish: For dating, it goes back to the 1950s after World War II.

[00:17:08] Brett Barry: But no one had applied it to this material before?

[00:17:12] Michael Kudish: Oh yes, but not in the Catskills. There were early bog studies done by other workers in other parts of the Northeast. There was a fellow named Deavy who was working in the 50s, and some of his associates, Connelly and Sirkin, some of these classic papers—they go back to the 1950s and 60s— and those bogs were in Connecticut, New Jersey, southeastern New York, metropolitan New York City.

[00:17:41] Brett Barry: But you're the first person to do it in the Catskills.

[00:17:44] Michael Kudish: With one exception, there's a colleague, a friend of mine, Ralph Ibe, who's at SUNY New Paltz. He looked at one bog at Balsam Lake and did a bog at the base of the Catskills Escarpment over by a place called Lawrenceville, which is north of Palenville. So Ralph did two bogs, and he was looking at microfossils. He was looking at primarily pollen and spores, which are microscopic, and that was what the early workers did and still are doing [is]: looking at what we call microfossils. Fossils that are so small you need a microscope to see them in the peat, and he was using pollen and spores to reconstruct two bogs, I know he did in the Catskills. He's been [since] working on Maplecrest with some others, but those are the only two and the only person I know had ever done anything in the interior or along the edge of the Catskills.

[00:18:49] Brett Barry: Can you define what a bog is?

[00:18:51] Michael Kudish: Yeah, well, first of all, it's a wetland, that is, if you walk into it, you're gonna get your feet wet. Secondly, it's not only a wetland, it is a peatland, and not all wetlands are peatlands. Swamps and marshes are not peatlands. Logs and fens are peatlands. A peatland is where the dead plant material, which eventually forms peat, accumulates to a depth where you can study it and use it to reconstruct the history [in a swamp or a marsh, which are also wetlands]. The peat—well, it's not even peat; it's humus—decomposes very rapidly, so there's nothing in the bottom of it that's more than maybe a few decades or at most a hundred years old, whereas in a peatland, the rotting rate is very, very slow and almost nonexistent, so you can find peat in a wetland that's hundreds, even thousands of years old, and then you would call that a fen or a bog, depending on the hydrology and the vegetation, so I work with both bogs and fens and everything in between.

[00:20:08] Brett Barry: What is it about a bog that preserves the material in the, in that way? Why are things not rotting?

[00:20:15] Michael Kudish: Or rotting extremely slowly. First of all, they're very wet, but then so are marshes and swamps, and what all that water does is it limits the number of decomposition species. There were fewer animals and fungi and bacteria that can work under all that water, but it's not only that. It's not only because there's water, because you do have water in swamps and marshes. It's the acidity, and the acidity slows down everything because that eliminates most of the bacteria and a lot of the small animals. There are certain fungi that can tolerate the acidity, but most fungi can't. There are a few that do, so that those few that can tolerate the acidity will do the rotting and very slowly, and then there's a third, another factor beside the fact that it's water and acid is a lack of oxygen. We have anaerobic conditions. The water is more or less stagnant and there's very little oxygen dissolved in it, so you need organisms that can tolerate those very low levels of oxygen that will do the decomposition, and that really limits the number of primarily fungi, but, but animals and bacteria, which can decompose because it's wet, it's acid, and it's very low in oxygen. You put all those factors together; it slows everything down, and for us, it's great because then the plant materials don't rot that fast, and you can still get a chunk of wood out of a bog that's 13,000 years old and still intact enough that you can identify it by the cell structure.

[00:22:00] Brett Barry: So if you're hiking in the Catskills and you get your feet wet, how do you know it's a bog and not something else?

[00:22:08] Michael Kudish: First thing I do is I have a probe. Oh, right outside the door here. I have hiking poles with increments [marked] painted on them, so that I want to find out how deep the peat is. I was with a friend. He wanted to show me a fen that he had found over in the Beaverkill, and we probed it, and we found that it was running 18 inches, 16 inches at the most, and very sandy peat or peaty sand, and he said, "Is it worth coming back here to pull a sample?" I said, "No, it's only 18 inches deep," 16 inches, which means [it's] probably [we're] going to go back two or three hundred years; maybe if we're lucky, four hundred years; it's not worth it; we're not going to learn that much; what the early history is, so the first thing is, how do you know it's a peatland? Probe it. See how deep the peat is, and when [if] you're probing down with a tool, even a, even a stick or a branch if you can get down, or a shovel or a ski pole or a hiking pole, get down, you hit 16, 18 inches, and you get resistance, you hit either rocks or more likely glacial till, which is a combination of mineral materials, sand, silt, clay, boulders, cobbles, gravel. If you've hit the mineral material, forget it. I mean, you can't get into it. You can't probe it, and it, it won't tell you anything, so it's primarily the depth. We'll tell you it's a peatland, and then whether it's a bog or a fen, that's a little more tricky because they can integrate. You can have a wetland which is halfway in between. You can have a wetland, which is a bog at one end and a fen at the other. One classic bog—it was a wetland I've been studying for a few years—is just that. It's got a fen at one end and a, and a bog at the other, and that's a whole story unto itself—what's been happening there over the thousands of years? One difference is the vegetation. Fens are normally forested, and they may have a lot of sedges, which are grass-like plants, and they usually have either hemlock or spruce or fir or maybe no conifers—could be just yellow birch and red maple, but it's usually a forest, and the bogs tend to have open areas to the sun. There might be a pond, and around the pond is not directly a forest but what we call heath shrubs [H-E-A-T-H]. They're shrubs that are maybe knee-high, waist-high, so [that] you have shrubs like leatherleaf, cranberries, bog laurel, sheep laurel, labrador tea, there's a whole array of shrubs in the same family. You might have some other shrubs growing with them that will grow waist-high, maybe knee-high, ankle-high, and in it you have some unusual carnivorous plants. You can have sundews, and you can have pitcher plants, and there are other characteristics like the cranberries that grow in the bogs. The bogs, therefore, are generally non-forested and open to the sun, and there might be a pond or used to be—the fens tend to be forested, and there's another difference, which I've learned from my friends who are geologists, that it has to do with the water source— that a fen generally has an inlet and there's groundwater flowing in at one end and maybe groundwater flowing out the other, so it's being fed not only by rain and snow, but it's being fed by water flowing into it from, from the surrounding area, whereas a bog gets most of its precipitation from the, from the sky, from rain. In fact, we have terms for bogs ambrotrophic, which literally means fed by the shadows, fed by the clouds, so it's primarily rain and snowmelt fed, whereas the fens are mineral trophic. They're fed with, with what underground water coming in or surface water coming in from around them, upland surrounding and carrying minerals into the into the basin where the, where the bog is.

[00:26:28] Brett Barry: You can extract peat and charcoal from both bogs and fens?

[00:26:32] Michael Kudish: Yes.

[00:26:33] Brett Barry: What's the difference between peat and charcoal?

[00:26:36] Michael Kudish: Well, charcoal is burnt, primarily burnt wood. Peat is not burned and it's not always wood. I get bark. I can get needles, pieces of leaves, seeds, pieces of cones from conifers, whole cones— you can have charcoal in the peat shreds and pieces of it, and what usually burns is wood, so we have charcoal is burnt wood.

[00:27:08] Brett Barry: Can you radiocarbon date other matter that's in the peat or just the charcoal?

[00:27:12] Michael Kudish: Oh, you can date anything as long as it has carbon. You can date everything, anything, and everything, including charcoal.

[00:27:20] Brett Barry: Seeds and pine cones and things like that are just preserved in the peat, and you can identify them.

[00:27:25] Michael Kudish: There are different degrees of preservation, depending on how much it's rotted. Sometimes you get samples of, of wood or bark that are so far gone, so far rotted, that you can tell maybe it was wood, but you're not sure what it is because they're so decomposed just as often, and in some certain peatlands, the fossils in the peat are so relatively undecomposed that you can see right away. There's one bog out in the Beaver Kill. The material was so fresh. It was almost as if it had just fallen in and died just a few years ago. It was very difficult digging; it was not digging, but pushing the corer down the peat sampler was very tough going. We had to really use some really strong young people to push it down and then pull it out, and when I looked at most of the peat, it was a moss, and it wasn't sphagnum; it wasn't peat moss. It was a moss I had not seen in a, in a Catskills bog before. If I gave you the Latin name, it probably wouldn't mean anything because it has no common name, and when I looked at that moss, from what was that 13,400 years was the bottom of the bog? The cell structure of that moss was so well preserved. It was just as good as if I had a fresh specimen that I just collected from a live moss.

[00:28:47] Brett Barry: So the deeper you go, the older it is?

[00:28:49] Michael Kudish: Generally, yes.

[00:28:50] Brett Barry: And so you—I guess your practice is to go as deep as possible to see what the earliest records are?

[00:28:56] Michael Kudish: Yes, we want to go to the bottom to get the bottom peat. In some cases, we also want to get a peat sample part way down, two-thirds of the way down, halfway down, quarter of the way down— the peat samples themselves can be about half a meter, which is about 20 inches high or long, but if it's a deep bog, if the bog is five meters deep and you're taking a sample, it's only a half a meter. You only have one-tenth of it [of the story], so we might take a few samples, two or three, and then look at them, and if there's something really unusual where there's a change in vegetation, then we have it [radiocarbon dated]. We don't just [don't] radiocarbonate everything and anything. First of all, it's a lot of work, and second, it's expensive.

[00:29:36] Brett Barry: What do you radiocarbon? Is it one tiny piece, or is it a whole core?

[00:29:41] Michael Kudish: The laboratory wants individual fossils, so it's a, be a piece of charcoal, a piece of wood, a piece of bark, and they can be very tiny. They don't need much. If I send a sample, that's a tenth of a gram. Oh, they're tiny. I mean, they're about maybe just an eighth of an inch in diameter. It's, it's enough.

[00:30:01] Brett Barry: Where do you send for radiocarbon dating, and, and when you say it costs a lot of money, can you give us an idea of what that means?

[00:30:06] Michael Kudish: Yeah, well, I used to use a laboratory in Florida, and the new laboratory is at University of California at Irvine, and each sample is $300, and they will take only 10 or more. You can't send them one sample or eight or nine. One of their rules is we need at least ten.

[00:30:27] Brett Barry: So minimum $3,000?

[00:30:29] Michael Kudish: But you get ten of them. The other lab that I used before that, for three thousand, you get only half the number of samples dated, but they would take one at a time if they, if you wanted it.

[00:30:39] Brett Barry: How do you fund this research?

[00:30:43] Michael Kudish: My retirement. It's not, I mean, if you think about it, I send one batch off a year or two, so three thousand, it's a lot less than I pay for food or utilities or travel, so it really isn't that much. When I was at the college, I did get a minimum grant that would help a little bit each year, and then when my aunt passed away, my Aunt Liz, she left me a little bit of money in her will for this because she knew about it and she liked me. She was very much interested in what I was doing, and that ran out, so it's pretty much out of my own funds, out of my own retirement funds, but it isn't that much. I mean, if it's three thousand or six thousand a year, it's not thirty thousand or sixty thousand.

[00:31:32] Brett Barry: Can I ask how old you are now, Mike?

[00:31:34] Michael Kudish: Yeah, 80.

[00:31:36] Brett Barry: And at 80, you're still going full steam ahead?

[00:31:40] Michael Kudish: No one told me to stop.

[00:31:42] Brett Barry: What do you still hope to understand or discover in your research?

[00:31:47] Michael Kudish: I think this is a, really a transition time for me, and all my friends have told me to slow down on the research, slow down on the fieldwork, slow down on the lectures, slow down on the meetings, and concentrate on rewriting the Catskill Forest History book, which came out in 2000, so that the next few years I hope to spend most of my time writing the Purple Mountain Press, a planning, and I are planning a 6-volume set, and I'm hoping that I can get it completed because it'll be an enormous amount of work. It's basically a whole life's work summarized.

[00:32:30] Brett Barry: How do you go from a 1-volume to a 6-volume? Is it the way you're categorizing the information or is there that much more information?

[00:32:37] Michael Kudish: Both, both. Because since I retired, so to speak, here, 19 years ago, the volume of information has just grown several times. Just, for example, the sheer number of bogs. When the Catskill Forest History book came out in 2000, I had about 30 bogs. I have 125 now. That's just a sample, and also something like the number of sawmills, and there's a lot more information. I must have a number of tanneries increased that I've found and studied, so [that] the detail has probably gone up somewhere around three, four or five times.

[00:33:22] Brett Barry: And when you talk about tanneries and sawmills, are you looking at their written records?

[00:33:27] Michael Kudish: In some cases, yes, but that's volume 2. Volume 1's on the bogs.

[00:33:33] Brett Barry: Let's stick with the bogs for a minute. When you discover through radiocarbon dating that a piece of charcoal, a piece of burnt tree is 14,000/14,500/14,900 years old, what information do you get with that—just that the forest goes back that long?

[00:33:54] Michael Kudish: Well, it'll tell me that the forest was there and tell me what was growing in it.

[00:33:58] Brett Barry: And what was growing in it seems to be consistent with what's growing now.

[00:34:03] Michael Kudish: Yes, I think I already mentioned that emerald bog up in the Mountain Top Arboretum [Tannersville] and many other bogs and fens. The forest has not basically changed. In 13,000, 12,000 years, that's not a unique situation. I can probably find how many bogs do I have now that are bogs and fens. I think I have 8 of them that are over 14,000 and 20 of them that are over 13, so out of the 125 that I've studied, 28 are over 13,000 and many of those have the same vegetation now as they did then.

[00:34:43] Brett Barry: What does that tell us?

[00:34:45] Michael Kudish: Well, it tells us that once hemlock, red spruce, balsam fir move in, they stay and they keep the other species out. In a few instances, hemlock has gone from a few of the bogs. In a few instances, the balsam fir's gone. There used to be a little bit, and I think only two instances, there's spruce that used to be in the bog that's no longer there, and if you take the bogs that never had any conifers or any evidence of conifers, once yellow birch and red maple move in, pretty much stays the same. Other species are kept out. There are many species of plants and trees that cannot grow in these wetlands. No sugar maple, no beech, no black cherry. What other of our forests? Not red maple, yellow birch can do it. Beech, black cherry, sugar maple, hop-hornbeam, basswood, white ash—they cannot grow in these wetlands, so they're kept out because of the water, and other species might be kept out because of competition—especially if you have hemlock yellow, hemlock balsam fir or red spruce. There's a shade tolerance question because these conifers are very shade tolerant and they can keep out other plants that need a lot more sun. They just, the other plants can't grow in.

[00:36:04] Brett Barry: It's interesting that the, that the tree species have remained consistent. I'm more surprised that the bogs themselves—that the wetlands have maintained themselves for that long—that nothing's dried out—that, that the environment itself hasn't changed.

[00:36:22] Michael Kudish: That's just it. Basically, what I'm doing on the Catskill Forest History book is the first volume will be on what we have learned from bogs, that is, if we didn't have the bogs and the fens, we would not know anything in volume 1. We just, there wouldn't be a volume 1, so volume 1 is everything that we've learned coming out of these wetlands, and one thing, yeah, if the vegetation has remained the same in many of these wetlands for 13,000 plus years, that means that the wetlands have not dried up— that the precipitation in the groundwater would be pretty much the same. Oh, you have fluctuations, but generally there are no major drastic trends and changes of drying climate or a wetting climate because the species are the same. Of course, as you know, and I know, there's a tremendous interest in climate change nowadays, and my last chapter of volume 1 [before I get to the bibliography and the index] will be just on that.

[00:37:29] Brett Barry: What is your research telling you about the current climate discussion and where our forests may be or where our bogs and fens might be in another hundred thousand, three thousand years—is it going to change drastically, even though it hasn't in the past fifteen thousand?

[00:37:47] Michael Kudish: If it's gonna get warmer and wetter, one of the bogs and fens will be fine, they'll be happy. In fact, they might even enlarge. If the water tables rise, then areas which are now around the edge of a wetland might be submerged, and the wetlands would even get bigger. They certainly wouldn't get smaller. It's only if the climate dries out that the fence and bogs could disappear or shrink.

[00:38:12] Brett Barry: Well, you've told me that you've researched 125 bogs. How many do you think there are in the Catskills? Is that a good percentage of them? And also, I'm curious what size these are. Is there, are they tiny or do they take up a big mass of land?

[00:38:26] Michael Kudish: My conservative estimate is about 200. There are quite a few little wetlands that are just too shallow, like the one I discovered on Tuesday. Too, too shallow to sample, and there are many, of course, that I've never seen because I haven't been everywhere, so I thought 200 is conservative. It could be 300. As far as the size of the bogs and fens, some of them are very tiny [merely a tenth of an acre], and some of them are huge wetlands. They can be a few hundred acres.

[00:38:58] Brett Barry: Oh, wow!

[00:38:59] Michael Kudish: Most of them are small. Most of them are, oh, half an acre, an acre, an acre and a half, so they're small.

[00:39:06] Brett Barry: How far back can be revealed by radiocarbon testing? Because it has its limits, right?

[00:39:13] Michael Kudish: Yes, and we know what the limit is.

[00:39:15] Brett Barry: What is it?

[00:39:16] Michael Kudish: About fifty, fifty to fifty-five thousand.

[00:39:19] Brett Barry: Oh, so that's quite far back. What's the oldest charcoal you found?

[00:39:23] Michael Kudish: Well, the charcoal in the bogs, in the peat, I think it's the Emerald Bog Annex 407A that had some charcoal that was back around 12 or 13, so there'd been forest fires here in the Catskills all along—lightning fires back then. There's a geologist, a colleague of mine named Paul Rubin, who has done a lot of work down in the Bluestone area near Onteora Pond, and he told me in one of our bog expeditions that he joined last summer, that he had found charcoal in a bog up by Clarksville, which is not in the Catskills, it's in the Helderbergs. It's in Albany County, up in the hill south and west of Albany, and that's a big limestone belt, which runs west, and then you have the famous tourist caves like Howe Caverns and Secret Caverns. It's in that belt off the Lower Devonian rocks, but the caves themselves are, according to Paul, the best estimate that the caves are running maybe between one and a half million to five million years old, and what he did, he's a caver. Well, I think we call him a spelunker. He goes into caves with his friends, and he found this clay in the cave, and they brought clay samples out. I have some of them here that he gave me, and mixed in with the clay were shreds of charcoal, which means that there had been a stream flowing into the cave at one time, and outside the cave would have been a forest fire burning, and some of that charcoal coming down from a stream outside the cave, bringing the charcoal into the cave, and then when the clay was deposited, the charcoal settled in with it and got mixed in with the clay, so he gave me some specimens of the clay and I dug out chunks of charcoal. I did have a few radiocarbon dated, and it was because of radiocarbon date—maximum is about 50,000 years—all I could be told by the laboratory is greater than 50,000 years. What happens is that the radioactive signal given by the carbon becomes so weak. After about 50,000 years, they can't measure it.

[00:41:38] Brett Barry: So this charcoal that you have here is greater than 50,000 years, so how can, is there any way to test it?

[00:41:45] Michael Kudish: There has to be other ways of testing it. There are other radioactive elements. I forget which one the geologists are going to use, but the estimate now by the geologists is that those caves are a few million years old, between 1.5 million and 5 million, so it's before the Pleistocene that we supposed to have had four glaciations, so it probably predates all four of them. It's older than all four.

[00:42:13] Brett Barry: How long have trees been on the planet?

[00:42:16] Michael Kudish: Well, the Gilboa forests and the Cairo forests are here in the Catskills [Devonian: 385 million, 380 million], but they're just totally different trees. What I think is unusual about the charcoal in Clarksville Cave, which is a few million years old, is I tried to identify the tree, the wood, and I think it's a conifer [was an evergreen], but it's nothing that we have here today. It doesn't match spruces, firs, hemlocks, cedars, pines, yews. It's just different, and I did quite a bit of correspondence last winter with experts on wood anatomy. One fellow was from Argentina, the other is with the New York Botanical Garden, and there was a lot of emails and correspondence and material being going back and forth. One possibility, and we're not sure yet, is that it's a genus of conifers known as a podocarp [P-O-D-O-C-A-R-P], a podocarp. Podocarp forests now are limited to Central and South America, but apparently they were in, we know they were in Western Tennessee, different workers have found studies there, and I looked up a book that I happen to have on the New Jersey Pine Barrens, and there were podocarps found in the New Jersey Pine Barrens a few million years ago—not thousand, but million. So they were here in the U.S., they were in New Jersey, and they were in Tennessee, so it's not impossible we had Podocarpus forests in New York. This is millions of years ago.

[00:43:56] Brett Barry: What do you see when you look at it in the microscope that gives you indications of what species it is?

[00:44:03] Michael Kudish: I'm looking at the wood and I'm looking at the cell structure, and the unusual thing about the wood of this charcoal that came out of Clarksville is there were no growth rings. Now, all our modern conifers in New York State have growth rings— that means the tree grows in the summer, and it stops in the winter and grows again the next summer, and in the spring, it produces different sized cells than it does in the summer, so you can see differences in the texture of the wood. That's why you can count rings.

[00:44:36] Brett Barry: So does that mean that [one and a half to two million years ago] the climate was consistent throughout the year?

[00:44:40] Michael Kudish: That's what it suggests if I'm reading it right, and it is a podocarp. I'm looking for a conifer that can grow all year. There are no dry seasons and no wet seasons or there'd be no summers and no winters, so this is going back not a, ten thousand, fifteen thousand, this is going back millions of years when the climate might have been warmer and consistently so almost subtropical. This would be millions of years ago. If this turns out to be the case, then I think we got a big find, and the reason is that no one, to my knowledge, knows what was here in New York State, a forests between the Devonian, which is 380 million years ago, and what we have post-glacially There's a big blank. This may be the first time we have an inkling as to what was here millions of years ago, so this is really big if it turns out to be right.

[00:45:36] Brett Barry: When will you know and how will you get that information?

[00:45:38] Michael Kudish: Oh gosh, I'd need an expert who could really identify Podocarpus wood, and because it doesn't go here in the U.S., I'd have to find someone from on the ship samples to South America or I don't have the time to work on it, really?

[00:45:53] Brett Barry: Well, that's fair. Remember, Mike Kudish is working on a 6-volume update to his book, "The Catskill Forest: A History." I asked about his schedule for publication.

[00:46:05] Michael Kudish: I'm hoping that perhaps we can get volume 1 done by the end of this year or 2025 [next year]. I don't know if the publisher can do it, depends on how much other and how many other books they're doing, but I'm hoping if I can get one volume done a year, but I have to stop almost everything else to be able to do that. The question is, would a publisher be able to do it depends on their workload?

[00:46:30] Brett Barry: You've identified that there's going to be six volumes. Do you know what they cover?

[00:46:34] Michael Kudish: Oh yes, it's all worked out in quite a bit of detail.

[00:46:37] Brett Barry: Can you give us a hint, a little preview of just the, the main subject areas?

[00:46:42] Michael Kudish: Well, volume 1 is on everything we've learned from the bogs that we would not know if we didn't have the bog studies—volume 2 is, covers the whole Catskill region, just like volume 1 covers the whole region geographically, and there are four divisions or four sections that are not necessarily all that closely related. The first section is on Native Americans and their forest fires, and how they affected the forest. The second section is on how the Europeans affected the forest, which means farms, European farms, tanneries, sawmills, furniture factories, acid wood plants, bluestone quarries, all the industrial that the Europeans brought in. The third section is on the first growth forest: the forest that no one could get to or no one wanted, and the fourth section will be on the ecology and the present relationships among the common dominant species, like what's going on between sugar and red maple, between hemlock and its contemporaries—more, more of a contemporary ecology of the different major plant species.

[00:47:56] Brett Barry: So that's just the first two volumes.

[00:47:57] Michael Kudish: That's the first two volumes. Volumes 3 through 6 are geographic quadrants. We're taking the Catskills and we're dividing them up geographically into four sections. Volume 3 would be southeastern Catskills, which is primarily Slide, Panther, Peekamoose Mountain, and the Ashokan Basin. Volume 4 is northeastern Catskills, which is basically the Greene County Mountain Top. Volume 5 is the southwestern Catskills, where we are now, from here southward and westward, Balsam Lake Mountain, over to the Beaver Kill drainage, Dry Brook, Mill Brook, Willowemoc areas, and the final volume, hopefully I'll get to it, I'll have the energy to do it, is on the northwestern Catskills, which is basically Delaware County, towns of, say, Middletown, Andes, Bovina, Stamford, Hobart area, Roxbury.

[00:48:54] Brett Barry: Mm-hmm, so by looking through those volumes 3 through 6, the reader would be able to really dig into a specific mountain top or a region to find out what, what the forest history was in that location?

[00:49:07] Michael Kudish: As much as I have and will have by that time.

[00:49:10] Brett Barry: Do you consider this 6-volume set your life's work or your...

[00:49:13] Michael Kudish: Yeah.

[00:49:14] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:49:14] Michael Kudish: Yes, if I had another 20 years, I could get together with some people and we could do the same for the Adirondacks.

[00:49:23] Brett Barry: You told me at the beginning of this conversation that hiking the Catskills is what led to your interest in the tree history in the Catskills. Is that right?

[00:49:31] Michael Kudish: Yes.

[00:49:32] Brett Barry: So now kind of coming full circle, you're still hiking quite a bit for the research. How much do you get to hike and is it still something that you do for enjoyment or is it...

[00:49:42] Michael Kudish: It's a lot of work— very rarely will I do a field trip for enjoyment or recreation. It's all work, and then when I come home, I've got just as much to do as a follow-up. It's all work, but then when you discover something, it becomes worth it. For example, on Tuesday, a friend of mine and I, well, he had found this grove of very large hemlocks and wondered if they had been ever touched by the bark peelers [by the tanners], and by the size of them and by other situations, we figured out that, "No, it's original growth forest." What's odd is that it's not very far from a public highway, and then we went a little bit farther and, my gosh, the whole forest in there at the south end of Woodpecker Ridge was untouched, and we found what may be the second largest sugar maple in the Catskills. We were measuring trees. We had hemlock and a sugar maple that were running 47 inches, 46 inches in diameter, and yellow birches were running a little bit smaller, but to this late day, we're still finding original growth forests in the Catskills that no one had ever cut over, burned over, farmed over, logged over, so that makes it worthwhile, except if the information comes in too much [too fast], then it's exhausting.

[00:51:03] Brett Barry: And is there a takeaway that you would hope that people living in the Catskills would know about the trees around them—something that I would imagine that most people don't know much of anything about the species that grow around us— what... what do you think people would be most surprised to realize, or that you're hoping to impart to the broader population? There's a lot of questions in there.

[00:51:25] Michael Kudish: Yeah, yeah, one is, and maybe I can end this interview with a partial joke. It's the behavior of trees with respect to each other that they're all different. They all have different personalities, different preferences. They grow together—that means that their preferences overlap, and I remember telling a friend of mine who had just given a guest lecture at SUNY Delhi, and I said, "Well, maybe SUNY Delhi should open up two whole new departments—not individual teachers and not courses, but whole departments. One on red spruce behavior and one on balsam fir behavior, and just study the behavior of individual tree species, just like they study the behavior of individual domesticated animals and people and so forth. The joke was that it should be a whole department because there's so much that there... there are interrelationships among plants. A lot of it is competition, not all of it, and that there are relationships that are kind of subtle because plant-plant relationships aren't as obvious as animal-animal relationships.

[00:52:43] Brett Barry: And communication, right? We're learning about how plants communicate with each other.

[00:52:47] Michael Kudish: It can. Underground through mycorrhizal fungi, but it's not all... all friendly. It can be helpful, but it doesn't always have to be. There's still competition going out there. That's a whole other topic.

[00:53:00] Brett Barry: Well, Mike, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Spending some time and learning about this amazing research, and I'm really excited to see these new books come out.

[00:53:09] Michael Kudish: Well, so am I. I just hope that I won't be so worn out that I can't do them.

[00:53:14] Brett Barry: Alright, well, we better end this interview then and get back to work. Many thanks to Dr. Michael Kudish, a Catskills legend. "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast" has a new story every two weeks, so be sure to subscribe on the platform of your choice, and if you can give us a rating, it'll help other podcast enthusiasts find us. More at kaatscast.com and on Instagram: @kaatscast. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.

[00:53:48] Campbell Brown: "Kaatscast" is supported by a generous grant from the Nicholas J. Juried Family Foundation, and by listeners like you! If you'd like to make a donation, you can do so at kaatscast.com. Thank you!