whenever a recorder set out to make a list of all of the island’s trees.

Tally of species

FIGURE 1-13. The frequency of the principal broad- leaved genera in a tally of all records apart from the tree lists.

We should bear in mind, however, that apart from their relative abundance there is another factor that may have contributed to the very low scores of some of these trees: six of the seven very low- scoring genera (alder, cherry, willow, hazel, Indian pear and mountain ash — comprising eighteen different species) grow only in the form of small trees or shrubs, and even though they are mostly wood-edge or successional species that are likely to have been far less common in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than they are today, it may have been more their small size than their low abundance that has caused them to be ignored by the list-makers. However, the seventh, ironwood, can grow into a reasonably sized trees", and so the factor responsible for its low frequency in the lists must indeed be its rarity: it is today the rarest of the island’s trees being found in only a few localities in the west of the province, and it has probably always been uncommon.

Moving up the scale of frequency, the occurrence of four broad~|eaved genera (oak, poplar, ash and elm) in fifteen to twenty-three of the 37 lists, all capable of forming large forest trees, suggests that they were much less common than the three leading hardwood species. And when we also consider the surprisingly low score for these same species in the total tally (between two and ten records only — Table I-QB), it is evident that they, like the very low scorers just discussed, also

5‘7 Farrar (1995) notes they can be up to 25 cm in diameter;

Metzger (1990) that they are normally less than 30 cm -— though a tree of 91 cm was found in Michigan in 1976.

entered the written record only when a recorder set out to make a list of all of the island’s trees. In agreement with this, the contemporary comments on these species indicate that they were all viewed as being relatively uncommon in the pre—settlement forest.548

Returning to the three leading trees in both the lists and the tally — beech, birch and maple, we should not be surprised that these genera include the three especially shade-tolerant hardwood species occurring on the island: American beech (Fagus americana), sugar maple (Acer saccharum), and yellow birch (Batu/a al/eghaniensis), species that on account of this tolerance we might expect to have been the main components of the island’s pre-European old-growth upland hardwood forest.549

An important question, however, is whether we can further use the data in Table 1-9 to differentiate between the relative abundance of these three climax species in the pre-European forest. The tree lists do not help in this respect: 'beech’ and 'birch’ occur in all 36 complete tree lists, while 'maple’ occurs in 35, and since all of the maple and birch records are either of sugar maple or yellow birch, or else, where only generic, can still be interpreted to include these trees”, this means there are virtually no differences in the list scores (Table 1-9A, Figure 1-12) for the three species. However, in the total tally, even though at first sight the frequencies of the three genera are similar, ’birch’ receiving 70 mentions, ’maple’ 64, and ’beech’ 62, there are important differences. For, when we subtract those records that do not apply to sugar maple and yellow birch (i.e. the references to red maple, mountain maple, striped maple and white birch), then, as is shown in Figure 1-14, beech, with 62 records, becomes the clear leader over sugar maple with its maximum possible score of 5555‘, and yellow birch

5‘3 See the comments recorded in the General distribution and abundance sections for oak, ash, elm and poplar,

5‘9 See footnote 385 for a comment on the problem of determining the contribution of red maple (Acer rubrum) to the pre-settlement upland hardwood forest.

55° Yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis), occurs in 24 of the lists

(usually under the name ‘black birch’ — see Table 1-5), while it is included in the remaining twelve lists under the generic names ‘birch' or ‘birches‘. Sugar maple occurs in 16 of the lists under various names (see Table 1-6), and is included in an additional 19 lists under the generic name ‘maple' or ‘maples'.

55‘ The score of 55 includes the five records where the species is named as ‘rock' or 'sugar’ maple, plus the 31 records where the context is either maple sugar or upland hardwood forest (see the footnote on maple in Table 1-9). If we add to these 36. the 19

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