High Country Nature: 2018

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Conservation: the beginning

What pops up in your mind when you hear the word "conservation"? For many it means setting aside lands for the benefit of wildlife. For some it implies cleaning up our environment. For others it speaks to reducing fossil fuel use and for some it means having less impact on the climate system.

Have you ever heard the phrase "Zero-sum-game" bandied about? Its popular with political pundits and others concerned with influencing the human system. It means that there is a certain, set amount of stuff out there and whenever someone gets more, then someone else gets less. Oddly enough, that is the literal meaning of the word "conservation".

Conservation:- constancy over time. The amount doesn't change. Its that simple.

So here's the question: Is conservation a good goal for ecosystems, wildlife, and the land's productivity? Should we keep the same amount of wildlife, productive capacity, and all the clean air and water, soils, biodiversity, that comes with them, in the future, as we have now? Can we afford to have less? Should we get more? Instead of promoting "conservation", should we instead advocate for INCREASED natural production?

These ideas are worth considering! Before reading on may I suggest stopping here and re-reading the above, then reading it again, and really thinking about these concepts before continuing?

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There's only one way to make sense out of the bewildering complexity of ecosystems with millions of plants and animals of all sizes and types--thats to go back to the basic principles that have taken thousands of years to learn and have stood the test of time.
First Principles:
1. The First Law: Energy and Matter are conserved. In other words, they can't be created or destroyed, only changed in form. Unlike in Jay Leno's Doritos ad, you can't make more, and likewise, you can't get rid of any.

Q. But what exactly IS energy? Matter is simple, you can see it, touch it, taste it, but not so with energy. You can't see it, or touch it, you can't directly feel it, you can't smell it or taste it. How do we know it even exists?
A. We only know energy exists by indirect inference. We see what it does, not what it is. What it does, is make things happen, or make stuff go. Any movement, any change, anything at all that happens, is caused by energy. Rain falls, rivers rush, wind blows, clouds form, waves crash, people run, moles dig, bugs buzz, birds fly, fish swim, stars burn, planets revolve, volcanoes erupt, black holes collapse, all using up energy, happening because of energy, and showing us that energy is there.

So the First Law says that Energy cannot be destroyed, the total amount is constant. Wait, can that possibly be right? I mean, the last time you drove your car, didn't you come home with less gas than you started out with? What happened to all that energy if it wasn't destroyed? Can you get it back? That's where the Second Law comes in.

2. The Second Law: Energy is lost, whenever anything happens.
Wait, what? What does that mean? Is that a real law? Sadly, yes, in any real action, energy loses some of its ability to "make stuff go". The energy in the gas for your car still exists, but now is dispersed as waste heat that can never again make a car go. It has changed form from concentrated useful chemical energy to diluted waste heat which has joined all the rest of the heat on earth making atoms vibrate. It is impossible to collect that energy again.

So now you're thinking, "Hold on a second, what does this scientific mumbo-jumbo have to do with conservation, wildlife, and me? This "mumbo-jumbo" is the foundation of all knowledge and without it we are blind. Without it we haven't a leg to stand on. It will be the basis for all our further investigations, as in the next paragraph.

Ecosystems: Energy Use and Material Cycles:
This is what ecosystems do: use up energy and cycle materials.
Examples:
1. Leaves use up the sun's light energy, turning a little bit into chemical energy of sugar, and most into waste heat (2nd Law-Energy Lost). In doing so, they take CO2 from the air, and water from the soil, and cycle them into sugar and oxygen (1st Law--Materials conserved).
2. Herbivores use up the chemical energy in leaves, turning a little bit glycogen, and most into waste heat (2nd Law-Energy Lost) . In doing so, they process all the matter through digestion and deposit the resultant materials as dung (1st Law--Materials conserved).
3. Soil organisms, such as dung beetles, bury the dung and make it available to plants roots again (1st Law--Materials conserved).
4. Soil voles eat the dung beetles, turning a little of their biomass into vole biomass, most into waste heat(2nd Law-Energy Lost) and recycling their materials again to the soil (1st Law--Materials conserved) .

So let's throw away our cultural and evolutionary biases, emotional mechanisms for social survival, and see ecosystems for what they really are and what they do. Then maybe we can better manage them.

Monday, November 12, 2018

Essay: Grouse Numbers--the Long-term Ecosystem View

In order to grasp the main important concepts in the fluctuations of any wildlife populations, including Ruffed Grouse, it is important to see them as part of the larger system in which they are embedded. It is also important to recognize the scale of time and space on which the system is changing. Without the larger view there is no hope of making rational decisions on the management of our wildlife species, or of, at the larger scale, our forests.

A good simple example which shows this is the recent boom/bust cycle of wintering Evening Grosbeaks, which largely disappeared in about the year 2000 from NC after being quite common before then. People wondered why? Old data, however, revealed that prior to 1960 the Grosbeaks were almost unheard of in NC and the probable cause of their “decline” was large scale recovery of their Canadian forest habitat, after logging/budworm issues, which allowed Grosbeaks to return to their old habit of staying up north in the winter.

So to understand the large scale factors involved in land changes, we must examine the one thing that is causing massive changes in ecosystems across the planet—people. The first wave of human habitation in the eastern US about 20,000 years ago was marked by massive large scale use of fire in a place where fire was previously almost nonexistent. The regular and extensive burning of the forests of the eastern US by Native Americans was well noted and wondered at by the European explorers of the 15^th century. There is no doubt that this practice caused very large and long-lasting changes to the land and ecosystems, and that the animals present either adapted or perished.

But the first American people had not developed metal tools and did not clear the forests or till the soil on a large scale, and it is unlikely that their burning depleted or harmed the soils which were on the order of feet in depth even in the uplands. The soil structure at that time was very good and productive, so that the flush of growth after burning was extremely fast and lush. Those conditions are likely to have favored grouse and other ground-dwelling omnivores, which also benefitted by the extinctions and population crashes of most major large predators at that time. So grouse populations either boomed immediately, or they adapted to the new conditions and increased markedly over time. Grouse populations before then were likely much lower, and restricted to high elevation and northern forests which are subject to seasonal extremes, favoring low herbaceous growth.

In a historical twist, the forested lands of Eastern North America were largely abandoned for about 250 years beginning in about 1525 when American Indian populations were decimated by bacterial and viral diseases which they were not ready for. Then the forests had a couple hundred years free of fire and the vegetation grew densely again at ground level, surely making it difficult for grouse and similar species, and reducing their populations accordingly.

In the more recent past, the biggest single change to our ecosystems in North Carolina was the absolute destruction of the soil in approximately 99.9% of our uplands. It is only necessary to take a small shovel into any forest and dig to find bare clay, rock, or sand within an inch of the surface. This was caused by the clearing of the forests and tilling of the then-rich soils to grow food crops by the European immigrants with metal tools and draft animals.

The time scale for soil formation is several hundred years. Now, even our most mature upland forests are at a very early stage of ecological succession, because there is almost no soil. With no soils left, burning our forests does several undesireable things: it slows soil formation by removing the organic material that is so vital, it directly burns and destroys the top layers of soil, and destroys small plants whose roots hold the soil back against erosion. It also favors fast-growing successional species which produce very little refractory(or slow-decomposing) organic matter and therefore have very little long-term benefit for the soil. Clearcutting produces similar undesireable effects by resetting succession to zero.

So even though there is some evidence that burning and clearcutting our forests can lead to temporary increases in grouse populations, these practices are extremely harmful to the longterm productivity of our forests, their ability to provide clean air and water, fertile soils, and support diversity of wildlife. I would go so far as to say the longterm survival of even Ruffed Grouse and most of our other ground-dwelling omnivorous species, is directly threatened by reductions in forest productivity, from short-sighted, short-term thinking that resets ecological succession to zero and keeps our soils from regenerating.

Only by allowing the soils to be re-established over the long-term can we truly ensure the productivity of our upland forests, and their ability to provide us with clean air, water, and abundant wildlife.

Monday, May 7, 2018

Collettsville wildflower walk with Walt K.

On April 12, 2018, HCAS members took a field trip to the Burntfield Creek Trail, just off the John's River near the Johns River Camp, in Caldwell County, near the community of Collettsville. This blog entry is a record of what we found there.

To get to the site from Blowing Rock, the driving directions are:
-Take Business 321/221 into downtown and go straight at the traffic light onto Main Street.
-Go 0.4 miles and turn right on John's River Rd. (AKA Globe Rd., mostly gravel)
-Go 8.4 miles and turn left on Anthony Creek Rd.(paved)
-Go 1.0 mile and turn left on a road of unknown name, probably still Anthony Creek.
-Go 1.3 miles until passing Globe mountain road and continue straight
-Go 1.0 miles to a small, overgrown pullout on the left and park.
-If you get to Johns River Camp, you've gone 0.5 miles too far.

The trail is mostly unmaintained and overgrown, and it follows the creek up into the hollow for about 1.5 miles, with some parts quite steep. It passes by very pretty waterfall and ends up at a large cave below an overhanging rock mass.

With warmer weather the ticks and poison ivy are quite prevalent so its best to go in early spring. When we were there on 4/12/2018, no ticks were found and the poison ivy was all dormant. During a followup visit on 5/3/2018, I found about a dozen ticks crawling on my clothes and the poison ivy was very evident.

Also found but not pictured were Wild Bergamot, Stone Crop, and Wild Hydrangea. Here are some pictures of the cave at the top.