Context Matters Considerations for Large-Scale Conservation Thinking locally leads to small-minded decisions and, ultimately, to global homogenization. Such is the fallacy of misplaced scale. Land managers need to consider a bigger picture, a broader context. By Reed Moss Summer 2002 Vol.3 No.3 I leaned against my dusty 1974 Opel in the parking lot of Sugar-creek Nature Reserve in southwestern Ohio, reviewing the day’s count. The 10 most common bird species— common grackle, northern cardinal, carolina chickadee, red-winged blackbird, American goldfinch, blue-gray gnatcatcher, European starling, indigo bunting, field sparrow, brown-headed cowbird—contrasted sharply with some of the least common: ovenbird, black-and-white warbler, cerulean warbler, yellow-throated warbler, wood thrush, scarlet tanager, pileated woodpecker. As every ornithologist familiar with this region knows, the latter species are characteristic birds of the eastern deciduous forest of North America. In an intact forest, they are common. They belong. The former group, which dominated my counts, constitutes generalists or species of the forest edge, birds that thrive in forests degraded by human activities. These species do not need the help of conservationists to survive. What might need help in Sugarcreek, it appeared, are birds of the forest interior. The only common (within the top 20) forest-interior birds in my surveys throughout the summer of 1978 were the red-eyed vireo and acadian flycatcher. Clearly, I was dealing with a disrupted ecosystem. In today’s world, that is hardly a startling discovery. What really bothered me, however, was that Sugarcreek Reserve contained one of the larger forest patches remaining in this part of Ohio, yet the reserve’s managers apparently did not recognize the value of this forest. Here, in this 228-hectare reserve and the smaller woodlots still (at the time of my surveys) connected to it by wooded corridors, was an opportunity to maintain and restore a vestige of the great eastern deciduous forest. This forest once stretched from northern Florida to central Ontario, from the Atlantic coast to the Great Plains. It was magnificent. Part of Sugarcreek had been farmed, and the abandoned fields were in the process of returning to forest. Osage-orange and honeylocust were spreading out from the fencerows where they had been planted long ago, while boxelder, white ash, wild black cherry, hickories, and other trees sprang up from the fields of grasses and goldenrods, which once had held corn. The forest was recovering. Yet the managers of Sugarcreek seemed bent on halting this process of succession. They were cutting down areas of regenerating forest and managing them as meadows or thickets. They were mowing insanely wide trails—up to 7 meters in some cases—apparently to accommodate large groups of visitors, but in the process they were fragmenting the forest and creating abundant edge habitat. What were they thinking?