Blame Canada! Blame Canada!

June 9, 2023

Who knew that silly song from South Park would someday be relevant? The preoccupation this week has been poor air quality from forest fires up in Canada. We’re spoiled in the Adirondacks, used to pristine air quality, and I had headaches and burning throat until winds pushed the smoke down-country. The frequent rain here also helped. I plan to resume my outdoor sports tomorrow, weather permitting.

I started wondering about the animals affected by the forest fires. Yes, it’s sad and wrong for animals to suffer from fires caused by human activity, but nature is the cause of many fires, so I reasoned there must be adaptive responses.

Fisher. Photo USDA Forest Service.

Forest fires are a primary method for promoting ecological diversity in western North America. Fires open the forest canopy and allow tree and grass species to flourish, which in turn protects small mammals and provides food for deer. In the Adirondacks, where there is high precipitation, fires are rare (thank Goddess!) and beaver dams and snowstorms open the canopy. Otherwise, the forest composition would eventually become mostly beech and hemlock.

Forest fire affect on animals depends on the intensity of the fire. There are low-intensity fires, where the dry brush and shade-resistant plants are burned away, and the tree trunks are scorched, while the tree roots remain healthy and the taller trees remain standing. The ash from these fires enriches the soil. The high-intensity fires create high temperatures that damage the roots and turn trees into dead snags. The ash produced is toxic to some plant species and most trees do not grow in the area for years or decades. A mosaic fire is a low-intensity fire with pockets of high-intensity heat. This is actually a fine scenario, from the standpoint of ecological diversity.

In a low-intensity or mosaic fire, animals shelter in place. Small rodents go underground, bears climb to the tops of trees, medium-sized animals and some birds appropriate tree cavities, while other birds and deer move to the periphery of the fire. When the fire is extinguished, the animals move back into their territories.

In a large scale high-intensity fire, such as what is happening in Quebec right now, animals migrate quickly out of the affected area. This brings them into conflict with animals in other territories or with humans. The animals cannot move back into their territories when the fires are gone because there is nothing for them there. While some grass cover will emerge, it will take years for the area of a large-scale burn to support diverse wildlife. Large scale, catastrophic fires particularly affect animals that live in deep mature forests such as fishers and goshawks.

I haven’t mentioned the affect of large-scale high-intensity fires on fish. Landslides from denuded forests containing toxic ash slide into waters and kill the fish.

This is a depressing scenario, but the good news is that forests will recover. We humans (not just Canadians) need to become better at preventing this situation, which is mostly the result of our activity.

Otter Play Date

May 26, 2023

Saturday I was out with a group and we saw an otter. It was running out of a marshy stream into the woods, bounding quickly.

Otters to me represent play. About twenty years ago, in late winter, I was trudging along a seldom used path with a friend and we saw three otters playing in an icy stream. They would float on their backs, dive under the water, chase and scare each other – they were having a great time.

It’s Memorial Weekend, the start of summer, and I’m ready to cut loose. The licensing board disallowed 1/4 of my CEU credits, for totally bogus reasons I could not have foreseen, and I had to scramble this month to come up with enough before my license expired. Just when I thought I was done and could relax a little: more boring courses. The most painful part was all the patronizing rich girl MSW’s on a teaching mission to proselytize about preferred language on some surprising topics. I use cognitive restructuring in therapy, rephrasing problems to help clients achieve their goals, but I think this is a completely unethical trend, this cognitive restructuring on a societal level by supposed experts without the permission of ordinary people. It’s a power and control game, and it certainly won’t fly with the working class clientele I deal with. They like plain straightforward language and are rightly suspicious of constantly changing “preferred” terms. What a load of nonsense I’ve been dealing with this year!

So my compelled dumb useless classes are finally done for awhile and I really truly am ready for some down time. I’m like an otter: full of energy I’m determined to direct in enjoyable ways.

Photo: Tom Koerner, US Fish & Wildlife Service

It’s finally feeling like spring

May 19, 2023

Black fly season in the Adirondacks is quite beautiful, even when it feels like a bite on the neck. I’ve had difficulty adjusting to a head net in the past, but this year it has felt surprisingly comfortable.

Not many hikers here at the moment, and I have the woods to myself. The birds are back, though. One of my favorite sounds is the drumming of the male ruffed grouse. I’ve never actually seen him do this, but I’ve heard him often enough.

Busy Beaver

May 11, 2023

It’s looking good for my social work license. I have the continuing education hours and the money for renewal. Over 100 hours! It’s been a marathon. Some great new spring photos coming soon!

An Adirondack Spring

April 14, 2023
Eastern Bluebird. Photo William H Majoros

Well, the warm weather has arrived. Temperatures in the mid-70s melt the snow in the roads and the fields, at least in the lower elevations. There is a constant roar from swollen streams and rivers. I hear it even at home indoors. Backwoods activities are approached with caution, as rising stream levels can cut off retreat.

I saw the first Turkey Vulture of the season this past week. Bluebirds are singing. I heard the first Northern Goshawk last week and retreated, with perhaps an overabundance of caution. They’re courting, not nesting, right now.

Wild animals, like humans, are much more active. Yesterday and today, while cycling in the woods, I heard my favorite songbird, the Winter Wren. It will continue singing through the Summer Solstice.

Winter Wren. Photo Fyn Kynd

A snowy spring day

April 4, 2023

You guys are probably ready for flowers and leafy trees, but this is what it looks like here in the Adirondacks on the second week of spring.

Even so, there are noticeable changes, more than just the longer days. Crows and ravens are more active.

There is open water, reflecting the warmer days interspersed in the heavy snowfalls. With the open water comes ducks and geese.

Redbirds begin singing and Chickadees become much more vocal.

Not many tourists this time of year. It is a time of quiet waiting.

The Autumn Video

November 24, 2022

As promised, here is the slideshow of fall foliage from the Adirondacks. My thanksgiving gift to you. Share widely and be sure to credit.

Batting a Thousand

October 22, 2022

The playoffs are happening, and the World Series is around the corner, but the bats I’m writing about, celebrated this coming international Bat Week, October 24th through the 31st, are the fluttery Halloween kind.

We have at least nine species of bats in the Adirondacks, making field identification difficult or impossible during nighttime encounters. The only thing to go on is size (and sometimes numbers). I was speeding down the Blue Ridge Road before dawn this week when a huge bat flew across my windshield. Well, comparatively huge, since the most common bat I encounter is the Little Brown Bat.

With echolocation and flight agility, there is little danger of a healthy bat becoming roadkill. I’ve found they are very curious creatures, so this encounter may not have been entirely coincidental. They zero in on anything that piques their interest.

The encounter made me curious about White Nose Syndrome, the fungus that has devastated North American colonizing bats. It’s still around, though you don’t hear as much about it. Biologists are hopeful a vaccine can be developed, but right now the only solution is disinfecting the mine shafts where colonies hibernate. That sounds like a losing battle to me in the long run, since some bats will inevitably reintroduce the fungus.

I see a lot of bats, especially in the spring when they emerge from hibernation and hunt during daylight hours. It’s not because the disease hasn’t spread here yet. The Adirondacks were one of the first places where White Nose Syndrome was documented, probably having much to do with the number of biologists studying wildlife here. The American bat population, overall, has declined 90%. I think what will happen is that some bats will develop resistance to the disease and populations will then recover overall, although we will likely lose some species entirely.

In my book Invoking Animal Magic, I have an entire chapter on bats. From the book:

The term “blind as a bat” is not strictly correct, since bats do have limited vision, but obviously they are not dependent on sight to navigate a dim cave. Blindness is associated with internal vision, and it was once believed that bats used psychic powers to fly at night. Even knowing they use echolocation to get a sense of their surroundings does not make their perception less mysterious. What would it feel like to map the environment with your ears?

The bat I encountered could have been a Big Brown Bat, since this is late October and these bats are late hibernators. Photo: Ann Froschauer/USFWS
I might also have seen a Hoary Bat, since I was driving through a conifer forest and the Hoary has an atypical flight pattern. I thought for a split second this bat was a bird. Photo: Dan Clark/USFWS

Continuing Apace

October 15, 2022

My days are filled with preparations for cold (really cold) weather. I have plastic over most of the windows on the porch and will finish today, hopefully with time left for a bike ride.

A friend of mine said, Well you’re only working part time. Why is it taking so long for you to get settled? I think it has to do with moving to a smaller space, figuring out what I need to hang onto, what goes in storage, what is given away. I had to take what was available, not what was convenient, since I was being asked to move. It makes a difference.

I met a birder on the trail yesterday. (Yeah, I’m still going hiking occasionally; not that busy.) She told me there’s a lot of birding activities in the Adirondacks, and I may be participating once I get a breather. Just so I don’t have to check off lists and sit in clumps of bushes with binoculars.

The autumn foliage video is still in the works. I think my Aries process-centered approach to creative projects has taken over. But the leaves are mostly down, so it’s almost time to put the camera away.