Coming from an Old World intensively cut over, cultivated, and grazed by domestic animals, Europeans were awed and often overwhelmed by their first glimpses of North America—the clouds of sea birds enveloping rocky islands oft Newfoundland, the waterfowl crowding sandy beaches and inland rivers, the stately forests with their “tribes” both feathered and furred that knew not the yoke of man.

The Vikings and such latter-day explorers as Verrazano, Cartier, and Champlain encountered the deciduous eastern forest, where trees towered in parklike splendor, twenty feet in girth and one hundred feet high, over a forest floor nearly clear of brush. Luxuriantly cloaked in grapevines from head to foot, these giants showered down acorns and other nuts, including the finest chestnuts ever tasted, and the meadows brimmed with wild oats, strawberries, and flowering peas. The sweetest songsters in these woods were not nightingales, as in Europe, but shy wood thrushes, hidden among the tangles.

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