I began tagging along with my dad and his friend Wayne Rehrig while they hunted small game when I was about 7 or 8 years old.

Most of those hunting outings were relatively close to home and often on Saturday mornings. Their favorite spots were different areas of the “White Oaks.” That was about 1960 to 1962. You could walk for hours and not see another hunter, and there were only a few homes scattered here and there.

If I pestered both of them enough, we’d go spotting deer on top of the Pocono Plateau prior to the deer season, where the scattered farms or fields around Bear Creek Dairy fed dozens and dozens of deer.

The deer fed in those tasty fields, and before dawn, they worked their way back into the scrub oaks or the forested hillsides of Call or Pohopoco Mountain.

The seemingly endless forests sustained big deer herds, the rhododendron swamps offered sanctuary to varying (snowshoe) hares, and then, only a handful of black bears.

No one heard of a coyote around here then, and a lucky person or two might bump into a bobcat on the rocky, forested hillsides.

Gray squirrels favored the white oak dominant forests, while in the hollows holding dense hemlock stands, red squirrels ruled the roost.

But I think the big change came when Beltzville Dam was constructed and our more mobile city folks found the Poconos to be a shorter drive than they realized. It seemed like overnight vast vacation-home communities started springing up everywhere. The vast undisturbed forests are shrinking.

Other changes occurred, too. The Pennsylvania Game Commission did an outstanding job regulating the black bear population, and those numbers rose dramatically. Surprising to me, both the bears and the deer adapted pretty well to this new “semi-suburban” region.

Many small mammals can be found in our forests. Some rarely venture above the forest floor leaf litter and are seldom seen. My inquisitive habits have me lifting a few flat stones or turning over a rotting tree trunk.

I almost always find red-backed salamanders and some slugs, but now and then I surprise one of our smallest mammals, shrews. When I sit quietly on my 50-year-old stool in the deer season, I regularly hear the quiet squeaking of the short-tailed shrew. And if I’m lucky, one will pop up out of the leaves for a brief second or two. More often, I watch red-backed voles (cousins of our meadow voles) scurry from one sheltered spot to another.

One newcomer that more and more people are seeing is the fisher. The fisher, a member of the weasel family, was reintroduced into Pennsylvania in 1994. I had my first sighting in Franklin Township about 10 years ago.

I was sitting in my deer blind and a murder of crows were making a huge racket. I thought they found one of the great horned owls that lives there. They were actually harassing a fisher loping through the underbrush, keeping about 10 to 15 feet away from the ever-growing number of crows.

I have since seen more and have a few trail cam pictures of them as well. They seldom stray into field areas and are truly a forest mammal.

In today’s column I’d like to highlight many of those mammals that find our large forest tracts, and even the fragmented forest tracts, to their liking.

Test Your Outdoor Knowledge (a really trivial question): Fras is ____. A. dried leaves on the forest floor; B. floating plant debris on a pond; C. grasshopper poop; D. the icy covering on the grass in December; E. discarded fast food wrappers/packaging.

Last Week’s Trivia Answer: It is not common but a fawn born in May could possibly be bred in December or even January. They, unlike a mature doe, generally have only a single fawn in spring.

Email Barry Reed at breed71@gmail.com