Connecticut's two-pocket woodland.

For more than eight decades, the Great Mountain Forest has been managed for low-impact logging, natural species succession, and habitat diversity.

Starling Childs wove his way comfortably, as a five-year-old can, among the students and professors from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies who combed over his 6,400-acre playground last August. "That's a hemlock, and there's a sugar maple," he said, identifying species confidently. With a pet raccoon perched on his shoulder, Star looked the part of a young man who might study forestry someday himself. If he does, little Star may carry the ideals of Connecticut's unique Great Mountain Forest into the fourth generation. While we students scurried around the well-worn halls of the camp buildings, Star scampered out toward the beaver dam. And the gentleman who had been making possible this initiation for neophyte foresters for the past half-century slipped unobtrusively through the back kitchen door, bearing fresh-picked blueberries and a smile and handshake to welcome his guests. Nothing in his manner revealed the fact that Ted Childs controls the largest privately owned forest in Connecticut.

However, as we became acquainted with his land and its managers, we were convinced that Ted Childs has a remarkable commitment to managing his exceptional forest for commerce and preservation. He is maintaining the conservation dreams of his father, establishing a precious legacy for his son, and promoting progressive forestry through education.

The Childs forest land stretches broad across the Litchfield Hills in the highest part of the state's Western Upland physiographic province. The climate in these northwest hills differs significantly from that of the rest of Connecticut. Prevailing westerly winds whirl across the short, steep slopes and contribute to the region's nickname, Connecticut's Icebox. All the record lows in the state have been documented here.

The physical conditions of the site presented a barrier to development so significant that early colonizers referred to it on their maps only as "The Great Mountain." After charting its location in the midst of their farmland settlements, they left it alone.

One virtue finally enticed white men into the Great Mountain Forest: its timber. During logging's heyday in the late 1800s, the trees of Great Mountain, along with most other forests in the Litchfield Hills, were felled en masse, primarily to make charcoal. Bog iron was discovered just southwest of the plateau, and a mining operation was opened at nearby Salisbury. Two major iron companies used the surrounding forests as a source of fuel, "coaling" the wood to make charcoal, which in turn fired the smelters. Some species were skinned for tanbark to supply nearby tanneries. Others were chopped for lumber to construct villages that were hammered up around the timber-based industries so common in those times.

Now, in the late 20th century, a different standard of value imparts to Ted Childs' wooded landholdings a preciousness that grows with time. In the last three decades of rapid urbanization, a trend toward deforestation has gained momentum until now at least 3,000 acres of Connecticut forest are converted for development each year. Most forested areas that remain have been designated for public control or surveyed and subdivided--just waiting for the next construction boom. The regenerated Great Mountain Forest also has been scrutinized for commercial potential, but it differs in being both surveyed and delegated for public use, in an extraordinary private management scheme that began more than 80 years ago.

The present bounds of the Great Mountain property were accumulated in increments, beginning with a purchase in 1909 by Ted Childs' father, Starling W. Childs, and his partner, Frederick C. Walcott, a U.S. senator. These two philanthropic businessmen, who shared a concern about the plight of wildlife along the overhunted eastern seaboard, gradually acquired 3,000 acres to be used as a game preserve. Ted Childs continued to enlarge the preserve with his own purchases beginning in 1934, accumulating a total of 6,400 acres and maintaining his father's objectives of developing favorable habitat for wildlife and allowing the forest to recover from the intense exploitation of the charcoaling days.

After the iron companies abandoned the hills, gray birch was the initiator species that first reforested the land, giving early shade to other saplings that wriggled up from the burned-over scrub and brush. In low-lying areas, moisture-loving species such as fragrant redcedar and colorful tulip poplar and dogwood reclaimed the riverine soils. Hickories and oaks pioneered the lower slopes, and hemlock, white pine, and red spruce colonized the hillsides. Maples, beech, ash, and black cherry soon entered the picture, and the former charcoal ovens became a healthy, diverse ecosystem. Because the Messrs. Childs have allowed these trees to age without widespread cutting since the turn of the century, their woods now rank among the oldest three percent of forest stands in Connecticut.

The Great Mountain Forest has suffered its share of setbacks during the decades of regeneration--the chestnut blight of 1912 to 1918, a gypsy-moth invasion a few years later; the hill stands have been stormed and windthrown, the valley stands flooded. But over all, the present composition of the forest makes a vibrant mosaic on the crags and slopes that once smoldered gray and barren. As I sat talking to Ted Childs in his kitchen on a chilly October evening, fire extinguishers mounted on walls near the woodstoves hung as stark reminders of the charcoaling days. Fire would be an unwelcome visitor to the Great Mountain Forest today, and Childs confessed his occasional preoccupation with fire prevention. An uncontrolled burn in these windy hills would effectively destroy rich woods so carefully nursed for decades.

But on that brisk October day, Ted Childs calmly handled phone calls and interruptions from his command post in a sunny nook. His chief forester, Darrell Russ, perched on a stool nearby--cap in hand, smiling through a stem of grass that dangled like a pipe from his bottom teeth--interjecting amusing anecdotes into a discussion of forest-management trends.

"As a youngster," Childs recalled, "I could look over the haze of smoke from burning brush all the way across Crissey Mountain." But without this personal voucher and old photos as proof, tales of the smokey olden days on the Great Mountain would be hard to believe based on present evidence.

Management has made all the difference. Whereas forest management in general has tended toward extensive logging and treating regenerated forests as extractive commodity banks, management of the Great Mountain Forest has been guided by a different philosophy. Yes, Ted Childs does have to fill a pragmatic pocket with income from forest harvesting to support his estate, but other aims fill a deeper pocket. For more than eight decades, the Great Mountain Forest has been managed for minimal-impact logging, natural species succession, and deliberate promotion of habitat diversity.

When I openly admired the numerous superlative features of the Great Mountain, the two men most responsible fielded my praise with impenetrable modesty, deflating their own contributions and giving the forest itself most of the credit. The comment closest to a boast was Russ' casual remark that "Most places don't have a nursery like ours."

Though the mixed hemlock-hardwood stands regenerated spontaneously, many of the special features of the Great Mountain came about through deliberate and extensive effort. The conifer plantations are one such feature. Thick softwood gardens carpet more than 325 acres of abandoned fields. Childs carries a personal affection for conifers; his greatest pride in the forest, in fact, is in the numerous small stands of non-indigenous conifer species. On a list of conifers compiled to give to dendrology students, I counted 121 different gymnosperms, a dozen native to this region and the rest aliens from the far reaches of the globe. There are dragon pines from Japan and Scots pines from Europe, cypress from Central America, larches from Siberia, dawn redwoods from central China. Even the temperamental Ginkgo biloba is thriving here in this little international forest.

Childs also has fulfilled his father's original idea, that the Great Mountain should be maintained as a place for wildlife. In a remote section of the forest linger remnants of hemlocks more than 350 years old. This grove is Connecticut's closest approximation of an old-growth forest, providing a glimpse of the New England landscape that European settlers traversed centuries ago. Although each ancient hemlock, if harvested, would yield many board-feet of wood, Childs has left them in place, largely because snags of his giant hemlocks harbor the migratory Arctic three-toed woodpecker that is rarely seen south of the St. Lawrence River.

Numerous bodies of water--with names like Bear Swamp and Seldom Seen Pond--support excellent waterfowl habitat. Ruffed grouse were released early in the century and continue to thrive. Wild turkeys were brought back in 1975, and the weasel-like fisher was reintroduced in 1988. Black bears and coyotes returned of their own volition in recent years, and deer and beavers have become troublingly plentiful.

Many visitors consider the "showpiece" of the property to be Tobey Bog, "way back in the North Forty." This deep, glacial, quaking kettle bog is brimming with species unique to bog ecosystems such as dwarf black spruce, white calla lillies, and carnivorous pitcher plants. Childs set the bog aside years ago as an area to be left forever wild.

A brief journey by dirt road from this bog, the forest's features transform from the sublime to the practical, at the entrance to a small sawmill. Careful logging not only thins stands for better growth but also provides revenue. Each commercial acre supports an average volume of over 7,500 board-feet, with a growth rate overall of some one million board-feet a year. Although only about 200,000 board-feet were harvested last year, Childs' crew recently cruised the forest and assessed its merchantable volume at some 55 million board-feet, composed of a bit over 45 percent hemlock and about 30 percent red oak and white pine. Most timber is sold on the stump or trimmed by the Great Mountain's own small logging crew and delivered to nearby mills.

Christmas trees, managed intensively on 25 acres, provide another seasonal source of income. A few seedlings from the nursery are sold as ornamentals. And in springtime, 1,700 taps ooze maple sap for the Great Mountain Sugar House, which first went into operation in 1940 and still produces 400 to 500 gallons per year of sweet syrup.

These income sources permit Ted Childs to operate his forest as a "two-pocket affair," Darrell Russ told me. Allocating revenue from timber and specialty operations to the "income pocket" allows the "expenditure pocket" to support research facilities and nonprofit activities on the forest grounds. This revenue reinvestment is what Childs calls "turning the profit from timber sales into the part the public can profit by."

He has opened his pocket to the public for many years. Yale Forestry School students have benefited from instruction and research at their eight-acre base camp since 1941. The universities of Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Vermont, along with other government and private organizations and individuals, use the forestry camp as a field station and monitor experimental plots all around the Great Mountain. Even the federal government dips into the Great Mountain's public pocket, occupying a small plot where Ted Childs established a weather station back when he was conducting his own graduate research project in 1930. Childs has won every award the U.S. Weather Service has to offer for his excellent data and devoted daily readings.

Now, Columbia University scientists are studying global climate change here. Cub Scouts take outings here. Local residents hike the forest's trails and cavort in its ponds. The Great Mountain Forest, Childs remarks with satisfaction, is "well used."

What about the future? Childs told me that I would "have to talk to Star about that." Ted's son, Starling W. Childs, is a graduate of the Yale Forestry School and a forward thinker with his own ideas about management practices.

Star's innovations would include some experimentation with controlled burns to improve a few of the hardwood stands. Too young to remember the saplings rising from the ashes, Star doesn't have his father's dread of the open flame. Yet Star is as committed as his predecessors to maintaining the forest's multiple uses, and equally capable of meeting the challenges that will pass from father to son going into the 21st century.

Among those challenges will be adapting to a reorganized ownership structure for the Great Mountain. Tax-law changes have forced the Childs family to transfer technical ownership of the property to a nonprofit foundation that will hold the land in trust, with restrictions in the deed to prohibit exploitation. Management will remain with the family, however, and the pressure will be on Star to satisfy the interests of the foundation while accommodating the many--and often conflicting--demands of filling both of Great Mountain's deep and important pockets.

To maintain the land's legacy for his own son, Star must juggle numerous difficult responsibilities. But he only nodded in agreement as his father explained the family's outlook about their two-pocket forest: "Why, it wouldn't be any fun to have a place like this if we couldn't share it with anybody!"