End of the Fall colours

21st October

The last week has seen madly oscillating weather - a couple of hard frosts interspersed with days that we'd appreciate as warm summer days in the Highlands. Last Saturday it was 3C when I set out to take part in a charity bike ride for a local family whose young son has a brain tumour - 50 miles with 3800' of climbing - so VERY hilly. I came in last, but that was only because I went slower than everyone else. The following day I was in shorts again. Fall is definitely passing with many bare trees and the red colours ebbing out of the pallette as the maples finish and more sombre oaks turn. However, this does allow views into the woodlands, rather than a green wall which rather closes down any roadside views.

I've been chained to my desk for most of the week, trying to understand the approaches in Canada and the US to climate change impacts on forest trees. The focus seems to be almost wholly on planting tree species further north, or at higher altitude than where they're currently found - either to maintain timber productivity or 'rescue' rare species likely to be left behind by changing climates. The latter includes Torreya, a small evergreen tree from Florida which is being rescued by a group called the Torreya Guardians by new stands much further north. I'm detecting a degree of 'official' anxiety at such unilateral, almost vigilante action happening outside any official coordination! I haven't found any work on what I consider to be our problem -    not the moving of threatened species, but the maintenance of woodlands where the trees maybe threatened - that is, not endangered species but endangered sites. One paper mentioned this as a theoretical approach but one where no work had been done - a simultaneously frustrating (because there's nothing to learn from) and cheering (because the work hasn't already all been done) piece of news. I need to explore this more - for example even if the forests have enough species to guarantee their continuation, what is the response of managers to the loss of keystone species - like the (probably) doomed whitebark pine in the Rockies whose nutritious seeds feed grizzly bears and a host of smaller wildlife?

I finished early one sunny afternoon to walk around Harvard Pond (above) as a colleague had reported seeing moose tracks. No moose visible - they're very hard to see given their size - but lots of signs of beaver activity and a host of red and grey squirrels active before winter sets in. This site was a major industrial centre with a series of lakes dammed to power sawmills a century ago. The dam is still here, but a family of beavers evidently is critical of humanity's efforts, and has built a complete duplicate dam 10 feet back from the main rock dam.

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