Nature Wars IV - last post on this topic

I promise, this is the last post on this topic. It's amazing what a reader can get from one book. Chapter Ten of Jim Sterba's Nature Wars is all about Roadkill. He begins by introducing the reader to Brewster Bartlett whose nickname is Dr. Splat because as a high school teacher looking for a way to use the fledgling Internet and e-mail system to help communicate the findings of a research project, he decided to have his students keep track of the roadkill on the roads around town. Ghoulish you might think but as a high school teacher myself I can appreciate that students especially some of the young guys would think this was a cool project.

I myself heard Bartlett speak at the New Hampshire Environmental Educators spring conference a couple of years ago. As an educator I am amazed to discover how little my students know about the world around them. Very often they are surprised when I tell them about plant life and the food that they eat. "EWWWW, fruit is the ripened ovary of the flower?" "I'm allergic to plant sperm (aka pollen)?"  I get a sense of gratification when they look through the microscope and see the beauty of cells that make up a leaf. Author, Richard Louv, in his book The Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, makes an argument for reconnecting our children with the natural world. They spend way too much time indoors. The shame of it is, children don't get to play and explore outdoors often. After school care, living in areas that may not be deemed safe, over scheduled lives, and time spent in front of the TV or computer screen keep kids from experiencing nature.

Much of Sterba's book focused on how disconnected we all have become from Nature. We want to protect it and yet we still carry out behaviors that places the environment at risk mostly through our overwhelming consumption of resources. In the Epilogue, he points out that here in America we have an abundance of natural resources many of which we take for granted. From our abundance we wear blinders that prevent us from realizing how much we spend on repairs to damaged cars (deer and other animal strikes), replacing landscaping or crop damage, the cost of cleaning up playing fields and golf courses (geese feces), and the damage from flooding caused by beaver dams. If we were to find ourselves unable to pay for these repairs we certainly would have to change our world view. In fact I try to remind my students that when we talk about environmentalism we must realize we speak from our own cultural experiences and that for other people around the world their concept of nature is much different from our own. We've saved our own forests here in the US but if we purchase products that result in the damage or deforestation of someone else's land then shame on us. It may be time for us all to take a good look at our role in the ecosystem because we are not separate from it, we are part of the biotic factors that make it up and our possessions and lifestyles create many of the harmful abiotic factors that we all have to live with.

Nature Wars III - I'm Guilty Too!

My empty bird feeder

I am really captivated by Jim Sterba's Nature Wars, as you can tell since this is the third post I've generated based on this one book. I never thought that feeding the birds wasn't really the best thing to so, even after we were visited by a bear (one of the other animals discussed in the book) you would have thought I might have changed my behavior.

Many of us love to hang up a feeder and watch the various species that come to feed at or under the feeder. I've had chickadees, nuthatches, finches, titmice, cardinals, woodpeckers, mourning doves, and the list goes on. I've also had both red and gray squirrels. Sterba's right when he writes that these creatures can find plenty to eat on their own. In fact the many perennials that are planted in my garden provide plenty of seeds for the birds, and the fact that I leave the seed heads on long after the blooms have faded helps them to find a delicious meal.

Now granted the seed does attract other animals, as well as, the birds. I mentioned squirrels, which are really something when it comes to getting at the birdseed. I've had squirrels eat through the plastic tubes of feeders to get a meal. This summer one of them got into the garage where we stored the seed in a plastic covered container. The squirrel chewed through the cover to get at the seed. We placed the container in a garbage can with a cover on top and the darn thing chewed through that as well!

At one time I used to purchase those feed filled suet squares which were very popular with the birds in the winter. Well, they are popular with bears in the early spring. I never saw the bear but I found the damage that he or she left behind. The shepherd's crook from which the suet feeder hung was bent over (and couldn't be straightened) and the feeder itself gone. My neighbors informed me that they saw the bear in action. That put an immediate halt to feeding the birds. I read up about bear behavior and learned that they will remember where they have found food in the past and will revisit those sites. I also read about hibernation times and figured I'd put out food only during those times.

Sterba points out that feeders become a feeding site for predators of small birds. I've noticed a few cats over the years come stalking through my yard but never really thought that they might be after easy pickings from the feeder. I just hoped they'd take care of my chipmunk population. But it's the hawks who have really benefited from the smorgasbord that I''ve created. I've witnessed the hawk come swooping in for the kill. Sometimes the big bird is successful and other times I've seen a small bird take cover in a bush where the hawk could not fit.

I guess what finally got me was Sterba's statistics - 50 million Americans spending close to $3.5 billion (yes that's right billion) on bird food. On food that these birds don't need because they can fend perfectly well for themselves. Here I am donating food items and money to the local food pantry and feeding the birds. I've decided that's got to stop. I'll let nature take care of her own, and I'll use the money that I save to help support those of my own species who are struggling to feed themselves.

Nature Wars II - Oh Deer!

Deer damage - a defoliated
hosta plant in my yard

Jim Sterba in his book Nature Wars challenges the reader to think about how one relates to nature now that nature has returned. The eastern deciduous forest has rebounded and with it many species which were once threatened, the white tail deer among them. Those darn pesky deer are now so numerous that they cause huge costs to the insurance industry due to car strikes. They do quite a bit of damage to landscaped yards (mine included) and crops. But without man taking part of the ecosystem as the top predator we no longer work to keep the population in check.

My father grew up during World War II when people planted Victory Gardens for their sustenance. My grandparents bought a piece of land which at one time seemed to be in the middle of no where but today is smack dab in the middle of sprawl as Sterba calls it. But back then going to the market wasn't as easy as it is today. My grandmother preserved the vegetables that they raised along with meat from the chickens they kept, while the eggs were sold. It would be years before they'd give up that hard work as groceries became easier to obtain.

Dad learned to hunt and fish as a kid going out with his father, grandfather, or uncles to bag deer, duck, frogs, and trout. He continued his hunting and fishing into his adulthood. He taught my sister and I how to fish taking us out when he could. He even got himself a lobstering license and some pots. I remember bobbing about in a small boat near the breakwater while my father stood up in the boat and hauled his pots up from the ocean floor. It was just business as usual.

I saw Bambi as a kid and was traumatized by his mother's loss but I saw it for what it was. Hunting is one thing and the murder of a parent is another, and I think many people get the two confused. Man has always been a part of keeping other animal populations in check. Not until the mid-20th century did we take on large animal farming and decided that we would eat only chicken, beef, and pork. No wonder there are plenty of geese, turkeys, and deer available fore us to eat today and which we don't. We think of them as nuisances, our grandparents would have seen dinner. For me it was natural that people hunted, my father hunted, we had a deer head on the family room wall. Sterba's book challenges us to realize that more and more we are separated from nature and we really need to reflect on how that changes the way nature is viewed and managed. And yes we do need to take a role in managing the ecosystem for our benefit and for the health of the other organisms in it.

Nature Wars I

Striped Maple tree bark
Harvard Forest

Striped Maple tree leaves
Harvard Forest

I picked up Jim Sterba's Nature Wars: The incredible story of how wildlife comebacks turned backyards into battlegrounds, at the library recently and have been reading through it. As with many books there are things written within them that  you are very familiar with. For example, Sterba visited the Harvard Forest in Petersham, MA to learn about how the deciduous forest of North America regrew. If you go there for a visit you can view the dioramas, which really are beautiful works of art, that were created in the 1930s to depict the history of the forest from pre-settlement (1700) through 1930. Here in New England we have no concept of what it must have been like to see the land cleared of trees akin to what the mid-western states are like in topography. It makes sense when you stop to think of  all the stone walls that run through the woods. They didn't get there by themselves. Those stones were moved by the early settlers attempting to clear our glacial soil of rocks in order to plant their crops.

Once farms were abandoned in the 1800s with farmers moving to the newly opened west, or to work in the newly built mills in the every growing cities, or even to take jobs in the ever expanding whaling trade, the land was left to revert to its previous state. In ecological terms this is referred to as secondary succession (primary involves the destruction and replacement of the soil).

I too visited the Harvard Forest for a professional development workshop to learn about forest succession and how to teach this very topic to my students. It was here that I saw for the first time a striped maple as pictured above. Although their distribution covers New England I was unfamiliar with this variety of maple tree as we do not have any around my area. I love learning something new every day whether it be from a personal experience or a book.