Two hundred years ago, a squirrel might've traveled for dozens of miles through Tennessee's forests without ever touching the ground.
Folk lore even claimed a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without touching the dirt floor.
Among those forests stood the American chestnut, growing up to 100 feet tall with a trunk diameter of 5-10 feet.
It was one of the most common and important trees in the eastern United States—feeding wildlife, feeding people, and shaping entire ecosystems.
Then a fungal blight arrived.
Within a few decades, somewhere between 3-4 billion trees were gone.
Today, most people in Tennessee couldn't recognize a mature American chestnut in a photo.
That's a remarkable thing when you consider how common the tree once was.
We need Alfred Hitchcock to come back and do a movie about this.
In all seriousness, I’m glad both people are ok.
Have you ever been attacked by an unlikely animal? I almost got into a fist fight with a white-tailed deer once. My grandpappy’s hens always tried to kill me when grandma would send me to the henhouse to collect eggs. I’ve had a few feisty run-ins with geese. On another occasion, a shrew about the size of my pinky toe didn’t like me camping near her burrow and she was going at me pretty heavy.
