Nature Wars

We're used to news of the natural world being dominated by stories of decline, loss and extinction, and those trends are undoubtedly very real. But we also have problems of super-abundance, and those are all the more difficult when they stem from perfectly valid programmes to save rare species. Jim Sterba, from the Wall Street Journal came to Harvard Forest a few weeks back to give a talk on this topic through his new book 'Nature Wars - how wildlife comebacks turned backyards into battlegrounds'. It's a great read, and I recommend it - full of eye-watering facts and appalled realisation of the size of unanticipated problems.

White-tailed buck

What particularly struck me was the chapter on deer - the white-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginiana. By the end of the 19th Century, habitat loss and hunting had reduced the population to 350000 across the whole US. In a century or so, they have rebounded to 40 million or so, and despite an 'informal army' of hunters as numerous as the ten largest armies in the world, and an annual kill of more than 6 million deer, are still rapidly increasing in numbers. Some of the consequences of this super-abundance are familiar to us in Scotland – hollowed-out woodlands deprived of understorey, regeneration and non-deer wildlife, people and deer injured and killed in collisions with cars, damage to farm crops, and a ‘mass transit system for ticks carrying Lyme disease’.  Some of the causes are familiar to us as well – hunting lobbies intent on maintaining high populations for their sport, and a focus on shooting bucks rather than does. But Sterba emphasizes a new factor – the regrowth of the great north-eastern forests, and their new residential use.

From the diorama pictures in my last post, you’ll have picked up on the trajectory of the forests here – the massive transformation by European settlers from a mosaic of old forest and beaver/native American maintained open areas to open farmland. The Erie Canal and later railroads opened the much better soils of the MidWest to export-led agriculture, and New England and the rural east emptied – and the trees returned – but so did the people. What’s not obvious – especially to summer visitors – is actually how many houses there are behind the green walls of roadside trees. Not until the leaves fall do you see a forest perforated by houses everywhere. In Massachusetts houses can be built without restriction anywhere which has a frontage on any ‘Town’ road – which includes all the rough tracks and dead-end dirt roads on which I regularly get lost while out cycling. The dean of the Yale School of Forestry, John Gordon, made a great observation:

“If you looked down at Connecticut from on high in summer, what you’d see was mostly unbroken forest. If you did the same thing in late fall, after the leaves had fallen, what you’d see was stockbrokers.”

This Perforated Forest is essentially a massive deer sanctuary. Residences have a kind of petro-ecology of nutritious lawns and shrubs, mown and fertilised, and are often undisturbed except during the periods when cars hum with commuters or kids at the beginning and end of working days. Not only that, but this perforated forest is largely off-limits to the deer’s principal predator – humans. For example, restrictions on firearm use near roads or houses make about 60% of Massachusetts safe for deer apart from vehicle collisions – and make even the task of stabilising deer numbers almost impossible. Add to this mix a range of public attitudes which include energetic anti-hunting attitudes, and the ‘almost impossible’ has in many places moved to ‘impossible’.

It’s fascinating that, throughout ‘Nature Wars’,  there is no coherent conservation philosophy of how we should manage these novel landscapes or runaway species management ‘successes’. Here, as in Scotland, we have no coherent vision, just advocacy from partisan groups promoting their species or habitat or land use at the expense of others. In a crowded world, with space at a premium, perhaps this is understandable. But I don't think that conservation philosophy has really accepted that we’re in a post-Eden world, and that we need a new mental architecture to help us manage messy issues like this – novel, widespread, and where an objective of ‘make it more natural’ becomes both unattainable and meaningless.

Giant mice

I thought I would show you a little more of Harvard Forest - some pictures, and those giant mice. I stay in an apartment in the old 1760s farmhouse, converted in the 1940s to provide staff and visitor accommodation. The main building, Shaler Hall was built in the 1940s too, some years after the establishment of Harvard Forest in 1907. Commuting takes about 1 minute, which will be handy when the snows come (cost of a set of snow tires significantly exceeds the value of my car, so I just need to avoid driving on snow).

'Community House' - the 1760s Sanderson Farmhouse

My office - Shaler Hall

The 'ship's boiler' - wood-fueled 1940s system deep in the basement

The other key feature of Harvard Forest is the Fisher Museum (Shaler and Fisher were early directors here). It's most famous feature are a series of 25 dioramas, showing the changes in New England's forests and landscapes. It's fair to say that before I arrived here, the dioramas weren't particularly on my list of things to get excited about - but actually, they're rather wonderful. My photography isn't great - combination of flash and glass cases not helpful - but the next 5 illustrate the transition from pre-colonial deep woods (interspersed with some open areas) through the immense clearances, agricultural abandonment and regrowth. Living here now, in Massachusetts with 62% forest cover, it's extraordinary to imagine the landscape looking like, well, north Devon really. These dioramas really make that contrast clearly.

Old-growth pre-colonization forest

1800 - peak of farming intensity. Those stone walls are threaded through today's forest, buried in drifts of autumn leaves 

1800 - peak of farming intensity

'Old-field' succession - the return of the trees after farming is abandoned

Mid 20th Century - the forest returned, with timber management dominant in some places

Oh, and the giant mice? Not so long ago a pair of mice found their way into one of the dioramas, and scrambled around in the wire trees, and dwarfed these model woodsmen, until the diorama could be carefully taken apart and the mice restored to a non-Lilliputian world.

Man-sized mouse

Taxes, Big trees, and Happy St Andrew's Day

I'm afraid I've missed a week updating this blog - last week was very focused on preparing for a big seminar  on 3oth November presenting my thinking so far to the (academically intimidating) staff at Harvard Forest and and others (including landscape ecology professor and international guru Richard Forman). There's nothing like a big presentation to force your thinking from the vague to the specific, as you try to sum up complicated ideas into pithy sentences. I enjoyed being able to start the presentation with a 'Happy St. Andrew's Day slide, fresh that morning from Scotland, of Jonathan setting off for his school's sponsored walk. 

Happy St. Andrew's Day

It seemed to go well, and we had a long discussion afterwards. One of the striking things I've learned is that in thinking about the effect of climate change and novel pathogen effects on trees, proposals for action have generally been dominated by saving species. A good example is the Torreya, a subtropical conifer native to only a few fragments in Florida, and soon to be lost to rising temperatures. The 'Torreya Guardians' - a group of enthusiasts - have decided to save the species by planting new stands far to the north in North Carolina.

Planting Torreya far outside its 'natural' range

In this case it seems a reasonable thing to do, although I have detected some concern that such 'guerrilla conservation' - i.e. outside formally consultations or programmes - might lead to unfortunate actions elsewhere, since similar processes have given us many damaging invasive species (think grey squirrels). However the key element for me is that such actions may save species (by moving them to another part of a giant continent-sized country), but don't maintain the forest where they're currently found. In small countries/islands like UK and Scotland, there may not be room to do that, and in any case, we probably want to find a way of maintaining our forests where they are now. That's a much bigger challenge.

Last week also saw final bike rides of the year - it's pretty cold now, and the roads have all been salted. Just before the frosts and snows I rode a loop through the tobacco growing country along the Connecticut River, and stopped to have my lunch beneath  the Sunderland Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis - not the European sycamore) - reputed to be the largest tree east of the Mississippi, and anywhere up to 400 years old. 

Sunderland sycamore (wikipedia photo - I forgot my camera!)

Recently measured at 113 feet tall and a with a girth of 25 feet, it has a huge presence. Those figures come courtesy of the Eastern Native Tree Society, a group with the coolest acronym in woodland conservation (one for Tolkien enthusiasts...).

Taxes remain big news here, but nevertheless I was surprised to receive a tax demand for a car tax from the local Town council of Petersham. It's only $12.50, but its part of the system of local Town councils setting tax rates, collection, and spending at a far finer grain than anything that we're used.

Petersham Town common (i.e. green)

The Town of Petersham has a population of about 1300 - broadly comparable to Glen Urquhart where I live. However the range of local responsibilities is much larger, including the Town Police (2 full-time officers), the school, the Board of Health, Fire, Highways, Animal Health and Planning Departments. This strikes a different balance between local accountability and (probably) the efficiency of multiple tiny departments. One of the issues my colleagues here have emphasized is that school spending can vary enormously depending on the local property tax rates. Poorer towns often simply can't pay for public schools as good as those in wealthy towns - which seems likely to entrench privilege and opportunity for the children of residents in more wealthy areas.