Sunday, December 30, 2018

Both Adrian van der Donck's 1653 book entitled A DESCRIPTION OF NEW NETHERLAND and Virginia DeJohn's 2006 book entitled CREATURES OF EMPIRE provide many first-hand colonial accounts of the wild and domestic animals that inhabited the eastern woodland forests................. Both provide excellent glimpses into what was Americas first frontier, the eastern seaboard in the early and mid 17th century.......... .....Each paint a vivid portrait reminding us that the first frontier in what was to become the USA("from sea to shining sea") was in fact the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean


https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sa=X&channel=ipad_bm&biw=1024&bih=729&q=A+description+of+New+Netherland&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLSz9U3SDYpL69IBwCdf2WbDgAAAA&ved=2ahUKEwjM7ouk1sjfAhUJq4MKHbc6CpQQgOQBMAd6BAgSEDo
VAN DER DONCK'S A DESCRIPTION OF NEW NETHERLAND:

The Fauna in New Netherland(New York City and surrounding northern New Jersey and Hudson Highlands up to present day Albany Ny) was as varied as the flora. Nan der Donck and other thers too, reported the presence of lions(Pumas), black bears, moose, deer, wolves and various sorts of birds and fish. According to Van Der Donck, lions were never glimpsed by Dutch colonists, but were known through pelts brought from the Indians. Same with Lynx, which can still be found in the Adirondack Mountains.












 The Dutch every so often saw bears but these were not dangersous as they took flight as soon as they smelled humans. Van der Donck asserted that moose were easy to tame. Large number so deer featured in New Netherland. Wolves were not too much of a nuisance to the Dutch since their main prey was deer. Occasionally, they would tak a calf, sheep goat or pigs, although pigs wer no easy prey if they were in a group.Various types of snakes inhabited New Netherland, most of which were not dangerous, with the important exception of the rattlesnake.Of the fur-bearing animals, beavers were the most valued although raccoons, mink, otterrs, foxes and wildcats(bobcats, pumas, lynx) were also hunted.






DEjOHN'S CREATURES OF EMPIRE:

Peter Wynne related the curious fact that Virginia's Indians "keep nothing tame about them." William Strachey made a similar observation at somewhat greater length, reporting that native people in Virginia did not "breed Cattell nor bring up tame poultry" in their villages. Although they had lots of turkeys (which Strachey apparently did not regard as tame), these Indians did not "keepe byrds, squirrells, nor tame Partridges, Swan, duck, nor Geese. Native peoples in New England had no "Tame Cattle," sniffed John Josselyn, "excepting Lice, and Doggs of a wild breed that they bring up to hunt with." 









Indians in Mexico had domesticated turkeys, perhaps as early as 3500 BC, and the keeping of these birds eventually spread to ancient Puebloan peoples in what is now the southwestern United States. Inhabitants of the Andes had domesticated llamas and guinea pigs, and the peoples of tropical South America kept Muscovy ducks.

 Virtually all Native American peoples had dogs. Even so, this list sharply contrasts with Old World inhabitants' roster of domesticated beasts, which included sheep, goats, swine, cattle, horses, and donkeys.44 What colonists attributed to backwardness in fact stemmed from circumstances beyond the Indians' control. The Americas simply had very few large animal species capable of being domesticated. Two possibilities—indigenous American horses and camels—became extinct, either through climatic change or overhunting, around 11,000 BC. Various Indian groups grew to depend on bison and caribou, but did so by exploiting the animals' predictable migratory habits rather than by domesticating them. The two large mammals most familiar to eastern Algonquians, deer and bears, were not suitable candidates. 










Eastern Algonquians did not domesticate local fauna mainly because they could not do so, but also because there was little reason for them to try even with small animals. Indians in Central and South America probably domesticated turkeys and other birds to assure their rising populations of a protein supply in a region lacking large game animals.46 But at least since around AD 1000 , far less dense Algonquian populations along the eastern seaboard of North America enjoyed a varied diet of wild and cultivated plant foods along with abundant game and fish. With ample protein readily available through hunting, eastern Indians had no incentive to domesticate animals for food, even if likely candidates had been present.









Before the English settlers arrived, eastern Algonquians were familiar with only two kinds of tame beasts: hawks, which they kept around their houses to chase small birds out of cornfields, and dogs. Most colonists, however, asserted that Indian dogs barely qualified as tame creatures. Peter Wynne maintained that Powhatan Indians in Virginia kept "nothing tame about them" even, in his opinion, the "Certeyne kind of Currs" they used for hunting. John Josselyn similarly described New England Indians' dogs as being "of a wild breed." 







To drive the point home, these men and other colonists suggested that Indian dogs scarcely differed from wolves. Powhatan dogs, according to John Smith, "are like their Wolves, and cannot barke but howle" instead. John Lawson encountered Indian dogs "which are seemingly Wolves, made tame with starving and beating," during his travels in the Carolina piedmont. 








Going even further, John Josselyn claimed that an "Indian Dog is a Creature begotten 'twixt a Wolf and a Fox" and that the Indians merely found such hybrid animals in the woods, avoiding the effort that actual domestication entailed. Indian dogs were not in fact wolves, or wolf-fox mixes. Archeological evidence indicates that dogs appeared as a distinct species in North America as much as 11,000 years ago. The colonists' testimony betrayed their preoccupation with the animals' behavior; the dogs did not seem "tame" in any sense that the English understood.












They did not sound like English dogs, and failed to act as colonists thought that dogs should. Colonists may further have disparaged Indian dogs simply because of their connection with Indian people. The English tended to ascribe to dogs the status of their owners: the gentleman's hound was a noble beast, but the peddler's companion was nothing more than a filthy cur. The nasty creature that nipped at the heels of English visitors in Indian villages could only be worse. 










Indians maintained a loose association with the animals but did not monitor their breeding or even exert much control over their daily activities. John Smith's comment about the way Indian dogs howled reinforces this impression. Since only fully domesticated dogs can bark, Indian dogs probably interbred in the wild with wolves. 






Unlike other North American Indians, eastern Algonquians appeared to make little use of their dogs. Inuit peoples in the Arctic used dogs to find seal breathing holes in the ice; the Montagnais of Labrador used them in hunting; Plains Indians trained them to pull heavily laden sleds; Miamis sacrificed them in religious rites; and Hurons consumed them regularly. But eastern Algonquians did not eat their dogs (except perhaps in times of famine) and may not have worked with them.













 English testimony about hunting, the one activity that might have involved dogs, was more than a little ambiguous.  Some colonists asserted that Indian hunters indeed brought dogs along with them. Peter Wynne in Virginia, for instance, claimed that the Powhatans employed them while hunting "land fowles." But no colonist, not even John Josselyn in his elaborate account of the moose hunt, actually described Indians hunting with dogs. Colonists may have simply assumed that native hunters used dogs because hunters in England generally did.

 Yet native dogs performed other important functions that English observers failed to notice because they took place in or near Indian villages where colonists seldom set foot. Indian dogs earned their keep in part by scavenging, ridding villages of food scraps and reducing the presence of vermin. Carolina Indians did not "starve" their dogs (as John Lawson alleged) so much as leave them to subsist on whatever refuse they could find on their own. 

Possessing a keen sense of smell, dogs also served as useful scouts on treks through the woods and as sentinels in villages. The first Indians to approach Englishmen near Plymouth were warned by their dog of the colonists' presence and thus made a quick escape. Seventeen years later, during the Pequot War in Connecticut, a howling dog alerted Indians in Mystic Fort to an imminent attack by colonial forces. The precise nature of Indians' relationships with their dogs is more difficult to discern. It is not clear, for instance, if native dogs belonged to an individual, a family, or an entire village. Whether Indians regarded dogs as pets, kept more for companionship than utility, is also unknown. 

That eastern Algonquians did place dogs in a special category distinct from other animals, however, seems likely. Narragansetts occasionally used rough drawings of dogs—but apparently not of any other animal—as signature marks on English documents. In addition, burial sites in southern New England dating from AD 800 to 1100 have been found to contain both human and dog remains. Since deceased persons were typically interred with items reflecting their status, occupation, or preference, the dog remains perhaps signified that a favorite animal had been buried with its owner. 

Friday, December 28, 2018

we learn today about Grizzly Bear hibernation from Louisa Wilcox, author, GRIZZLY TIMES BLOGGER, and Northern Rockies wildlife advocate..........For over 30 years, she has focused her energy on grizzly bears, seeking to preserve them and all native wildlife in the American West...........Louisa has a Masters in Forest Science from Yale University, which gave her a lifetime achievement award in 2014.............."When Grizzlies go into hibernation in the northern rockies(late November/December), they don't eat or drink anything for a span of 150-180 consecutive days"..............."And despite this prolonged fast that causes them to lose as much as 30% of their weight, come Spring, they are in perfect health, with none of their organs failing in any way"............"Unlike deep hibernators, bears are not unconscious during their winter slumber"..................."Nor, like ground squirrels, does their body temperature plummet to freezing".................."Which is why mother bears can give birth in the dead of winter to a cub or two, each the size of a teacup, which she groggily nurses in her den until sometime during April or even May"................"Her milk has the highest fat content of any terrestrial mammal, and so cubs grow super fast – from about a pound at birth to roughly 20 pounds at 12 weeks when they leave the den"................."How does a mother bear pull off this incredible feat?"..............."Part of her secret involves obesity".................."Gorging on foods ranging from meat and moths to ants and whitebark pine seeds, a grizzly bear packs on several pounds a day during her late summer and fall hyperphagic feeding frenzy".............."Amazingly, she consumes roughly 30,500 kcal of digestible energy every day during the fall, compared to the approximate 2,700 kcal that a 200-pound couch potato human would need to survive"...................."Scientists have long suspected that the mysteries of bear hibernation, if unlocked, could benefit people with heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and traumatic injuries"..................."They hope that by inducing hibernation in someone undergoing a stroke or cardiac arrest, they could buy doctors precious treatment time"................."So far, the closest they have come is applying cold fluids, internally and externally, to temporarily slow metabolic processes".................."Scientists are making more headway divining treatments for human osteoporosis"............."If we are inactive for months, even weeks, our bones deteriorate to the point we can no longer walk"................."But bears produce a parathyroid hormone that maintains bone density and strength"..............."Today, some doctors are treating humans suffering from osteoporosis with a manufactured hormone that matches what bears produce"................."Researchers have a rudimentary understanding of how hibernating bears avoid diabetes, but not enough for practical application"............"Even though “healthy” bears get manifestly obese by late fall, they do not get Type 2 diabetes".............."Diabetes occurs when cells are no longer able to take up sugar in response to infusions of insulin".............."When humans who are starving or who have uncontrolled diabetes rely on fat for energy, the body cannot handle the toxic byproducts of fat catabolism"............"Not so for bears"................"They are able to recycle these byproducts into making more fat".............."If that is not a miracle, what is?"


Bear Dreaming: Of Wonder In Winter

Louisa Wilcox; 12/18/18; Grizzly Times Blog


By now most grizzly bears are snug in winter dens, safe at last from poachers, big game hunters, and other dangers. Last week, to the relief of her many fans, Number 399, the rock star grizzly matron of Grand Teton Park, was seen with her two yearling cubs making their way back towards her denning area along Pilgrim Creek. She and her family had stayed up later than most grizzlies because they could feast on the abundant remains of elk killed by hunters in Jackson Hole. Once again, this 21-year-old veteran mom had miraculously survived a landscape bristling with guns as well as other hazards that come with her life strategy of living close to people. 










What does the next four to five months of life look like for her and other grizzly bear moms? Let’s peer into her lair and find out.

In the darkness below the snow, we find miracles and mysteries. I like the fact that, despite industrial-scale research, hibernation remains magical and elusive. Wild animals will always defy circumscription by the human intellect – and throw us back on heart, soul, and imagination.

There are some things that we do know about hibernation. Bears don’t eat or drink or excrete waste for between 150 and 180 days. (If it were you or me, we would have died after just a few days.) But when bears crawl out of their dens in the spring, they are specimens of health. They don’t lose much bone strength or lean muscle mass, even though they may lose as much as 30% of their fall weight. And their kidneys, liver, and hearts don’t fail.
















Unlike deep hibernators, bears are not unconscious during their winter slumber. Nor, like ground squirrels, does their body temperature plummet to freezing. Which is why mother bears can give birth in the dead of winter to a cub or two, each the size of a teacup, which she groggily nurses in her den until sometime during April or even May. Her milk has the highest fat content of any terrestrial mammal, and so cubs grow super fast – from about a pound at birth to roughly 20 pounds at 12 weeks when they leave the den.        

How does a mother bear pull off this incredible feat? Part of her secret involves obesity. Gorging on foods ranging from meat and moths to ants and whitebark pine seeds, a grizzly bear packs on several pounds a day during her late summer and fall hyperphagic feeding frenzy. Amazingly, she consumes roughly 30,500 kcal of digestible energy every day during the fall, compared to the approximate 2,700 kcal that a 200-pound couch potato human would need to survive. 

Although grizzlies mate during late spring, the female’s fertilized eggs do not implant till she dens. If she is not fat enough to pull off a successful pregnancy in the den--which could kill both her and her cubs—she spontaneously aborts. Miraculous or what?
Her choice of a den site helps boost her chances of success. She digs her den at higher elevations and on north-facing slopes where snows pile deep enough to cover the entrance hole and provide not only good insulation but also absolute safety from predators. Often taking advantage of a natural roof provided by boulders or tree roots, she makes the den a tad larger than her body for a snug fit.      

The Miracle of Hibernation
What happens next to the bear is physiologically both fascinating and confounding. Researcher Dr. Lynn Rogers provides an intimate although perhaps intrusive peek at the life of a wild black bear family in their den, thanks to a miniature video camera– complete with contractions, delivery, nursing, baby noises (from purrs and grunts to screams) and, ultimately, the cub’s emergence into the big wide world—by the scruff of the neck.

The potential importance of hibernation is not lost on medical researchers. Scientists have long suspected that the mysteries of bear hibernation, if unlocked, could benefit people with heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and traumatic injuries.
















Have scientists gotten closer to unveiling the grizzly bear’s secrets? Yes and no. They are far from realizing the dream of putting people who have experienced traumatic injury into the kind of suspended animation that characterizes hibernation. They hope that by inducing hibernation in someone undergoing a stroke or cardiac arrest, they could buy doctors precious treatment time. So far, the closest they have come is applying cold fluids, internally and externally, to temporarily slow metabolic processes.

Scientists are making more headway divining treatments for human osteoporosis. If we are inactive for months, even weeks, our bones deteriorate to the point we can no longer walk. But bears produce a parathyroid hormone that maintains bone density and strength. Today, some doctors are treating humans suffering from osteoporosis with a manufactured hormone that matches what bears produce.

Researchers have a rudimentary understanding of how hibernating bears avoid diabetes, but not enough for practical application. Even though “healthy” bears get manifestly obese by late fall, they do not get Type 2 diabetes. Diabetes occurs when cells are no longer able to take up sugar in response to infusions of insulin. When humans who are starving or who have uncontrolled diabetes rely on fat for energy, the body cannot handle the toxic byproducts of fat catabolism. Not so for bears. They are able to recycle these byproducts into making more fat. If that is not a miracle, what is?
















Kidney function in bears is similarly weird and wonderful.  If our kidneys did not excrete otherwise toxic wastes such as uric acid, we would soon die. But get this: bears have microbes in their guts that, during the winter months, convert urea to nitrogen to make new amino acids that are the building blocks of protein. This enables bears to maintain lean body tissue in the comfort of their own dens without eating or eliminating waste. It is no accident that researchers are looking to bears for some answers about how to feed malnourished populations in developing countries with limited access to protein-rich foods.  

To scientists, hibernating bears are mind-blowing for yet more reasons. For example, when they implanted a defibrillator in a bear’s heart to measure heart rate during hibernation, the bear’s body forcibly ejected it. Same with implants in its gut. The bear’s basic response to implants of foreign objects is to powerfully reject them. Maybe that is why bears rarely get infections. Researchers are especially intrigued with the possible role of ursodeoxycholic acid, a bile acid named for Ursus (Latin for “bear”) that is elevated during hibernation and could help treat human injuries.

And here is yet another surprise: bears actually stop breathing during hibernation for as much as 25-30 seconds at a time. With lower oxygen requirements, they don’t have to breathe as much. When oxygen levels get low enough, their brain sends a signal to take another breath. And get this: when a bear inhales, its heart rate can increase 800-fold, while a human’s increases only by one-fortieth as much. What athlete doesn’t want to borrow that trick?















Scientists studying bear hibernation are not the only ones who at some point just throw up their hands in awe.

Grizzly Transformation  
Awe lies at the heart of the relationship between ancient cultures and bears. All species of bear share the ability to seemingly die in winter and remerge in spring with new life. Because of this, bears have symbolized transformation since time immemorial.   Seeking the bear’s gifts, we have looked to this creature as teacher, guide, and healer.  Today, our use of the bear’s name for sports teams and stock markets is hardly accidental.  Moreover, the word “bear” in English shares the same root as “birth,” “breath,” “bury,” and “beer.”   

In modern ecology, you hear that the grizzly bear is an “umbrella species.” The health of grizzly bear populations engenders health for entire ecosystems. Ancients had a different way of orienting to the same issue. There is an old story of a bear that goes into her den to dream the world into being each winter. She dreams of antelope and whitebark pine and buffalo. In her imagination, she creates each being and entire ecosystems during the long barren months. When she emerges in the spring, trailed by a young cub, she is celebrated by all the creatures of the earth.

In my gathering of bear stories over the years, I have found only one that truly baffles me. It is the story that legitimizes killing bears as trophies and extolls destroying bears when nonlethal approaches are available for resolving conflicts. This story is the opposite of reverence and wonder. It is about domination, violence, and death.
















This utilitarian narrative, which drove the genocides of bears, bison, wolves, and native peoples, survives today in many forms, particularly in western states. Despite harboring the last populations of wolves, bison, and grizzlies in the continental US, wildlife managers in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho are relentless proponents of hunting these species, ostensibly to control populations – although the best available science shows that grizzlies are self-regulating.

For decades, these managers and their political masters have doggedly worked to remove federal Endangered Species protections for grizzly bears in the Yellowstone (GYE) and the Northern Continental Divide (NCDE) Ecosystems–succeeding in the case of wolves, which are again being slaughtered outside our National Parks. Despite setbacks imposed by a court order in September that restored federal protections for Yellowstone’s grizzlies, state politicians and their regressive allies are not giving up. Last week the NRA, Safari Club, and state of Wyoming appealed the relisting order. At the same time, the state of Montana adopted new regulations designed to facilitate removal of ESA protections for NCDE grizzlies. And we can expect more attempts to legislatively delist grizzlies during future Congressional sessions.

Elsewhere in the country, other states have broadened their financial and political base beyond hunters and fishers. This shift is boosting conservation of nongame species as well as respect for all wildlife, not just species that can be hunted. The explosion of public interest in seeing and photographing rare and iconic wildlife such as grizzlies encourages a similar approach in Northern Rockies states. But here, managers still cling to their traditional “clientele” of hunters, even though the number of hunters afield are in precipitous decline.  The stage is set for ever-greater conflict among those with opposing world views about wildlife.















As grizzly bears disappear into high-country dens to undertake the annual miracle of hibernation, we ourselves can pause for reflection. What kind of world will we dream for grizzly bears this winter? What sort of world will grizzly bears wake up to next spring?  Will it be a world in which wonder is diminished or renewed? 

Thursday, December 27, 2018

Many of you are familiar with Ecologist, former hunting guide and wildfire expert George Wuerthner.............Today, I repost his THE ECOLOGICAL VALUE OF DEAD TREES article that appeared recently in The Wildlife News...................."Like most people, I once viewed dead trees as an indicator of some presumed problem in the forest—that a ‘healthy” forest was one with a minimum of dead trees and largely free of wildfire, insects, and disease"............. "I now understand that large numbers of dead trees are critical to functioning forest ecosystems and sometimes they are ultimately more important to forest ecosystems than live trees"................"We spend billions annually trying to contain wildfire and insect outbreaks based upon the presumption that these natural processes are “destroying” the forest". ............. "Most people still view large stand replacement fires and large beetle outbreaks as “unnatural,” “abnormal,” and something to suppress, slow, and control".....................“When you start to look at managed forests outside of wildernesses and parks, you notice right away that they lack large quantities of down wood—dead trees"................"Ecologically speaking, there is a big difference between areas that have been logged/thinned compared to areas that are left alone"............ "Sanitized, managed forests are less healthy than so-called “sick” natural forests"..............“The one thing you notice in unmanaged, healthy systems is there’s a lot of dead trees and down wood”..............“Too many conservationists believe that historically forests were all open(trees spaced far apart)and fires were all low-severity"................."In the last ten years, the scientific evidence presents a much different picture of historic forests".............."Not that the low-severity fires didn’t occur, they just weren’t exclusive"................."There were vast areas of high-severity fires in those same forests”..............."One is hard-pressed to find any other example in wildlife biology where the effect of a particular land-use activity is as close to 100% negative as the typical post-fire salvage-logging operation tends to be".........."Most people have no idea how many species actually depend on dead trees and down wood".................."The evidence reveals that upwards of 60% of species that nest in severely burned forests use only snags(dead trees) for nest sites"..................."As many as 45% of all North American native bird species rely on snags for at least a portion of their life cycle".............. "Additionally, there are 15 bird species that are most abundant in forests with high snag numbers resulting from severe high-intensity stand-replacement crown fire—the kind of fires that foresters pejoratively call “catastrophic"............"It is doubtful that these species would have evolved such dependency on snag abundance if large stand replacement fires and large insect outbreaks were uncommon or unnatural, as some (conservatioists and politicians) suggest"................"It’s not just the use of snags for nesting, and even feeding as with woodpeckers, that attracts birds and other wildlife to recently killed forests".............."Burned forests also are used extensively by seed-eating species attracted by the abundance of new seeds shed by cones and colonizing plants"............"So important are dead trees to wildlife that it is estimated that two thirds of all wildlife species(birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, invertebrates etc, etc.) use dead trees or down wood during some portion of their life cycle"..................“Standing snags, once they get big enough so that they have hollow centers—what foresters call ‘overmature,’ (which I hate since it is so board-foot focused)—are the places where wildlife reside"..............“To a biologist you don’t have overmature trees—you have wildlife habitat"......................And allow me, Blogger Rick to add that in Los Angeles, the site of the pre Thanksgiving 100,000 acre Woolsey wildfire(11/8-17/18), wildlife have evolved to respond to these type 'crown high-intensity fires, and can even sometimes benefit from the disruption"............... "Birds are easily able to fly away and are usually not impacted as long as fires don’t occur during the spring when they are nesting and raising their offspring".............'It may be 1,600 degree Fahrenheit above ground as a fire rages through a landscape, but two inches below the surface, the temperature can be as mild as 70 degrees".........."Many species, such as lizards, chipmunks, ground squirrels, and mice, survive fires by sticking it out in underground burrows"............... "For the non-flying, non-burrowing animals, including deer, mountain lions, bears, bobcats and coyotes, the only choice is to run from the flames............ "Usually, most of these animals are successful when they flee on foot, but fast-moving wind-driven fires can kill a % of them"............. "For the animals that are able to escape, they usually do come back and begin to multiply"................"Additionally, newly burned landscapes are often good for new plant growth and feeding opportunities".............."For example, woodpeckers can be found feasting on the bugs who feed on burnt wood".............."Mice and California quail feed on newly exposed seeds on the ashen ground, and they are hunted by owls and hawks"................. "In the chaparral landscape, deer feed on a high-protein plant species, known as chamise".................“As time passes from a fire, and we get a bit of rain, it’s amazing how fast a landscape can recover"

http://www.thewildlifenews.com/2018/12/20/the-ecological-value-of-dead-trees/





Most of us have negative associations with the word. After all how did Death Valley get its name? Not because it was a favorite vacation spot for prospectors. Is anyone interested in fishing the Dead Sea? And when we say someone looks like “death warmed over” it’s not usually taken as a compliment. So it’s not surprising that most of us tend to view dead things as undesirable, unless we are talking about mosquitoes and rattlesnakes. (Actually I appreciate both and don’t advocate early death for either.)

 Does wildfire cause death or rebirth of the environment?









We carry this cultural bias to our view of forests. Like most people I once viewed dead trees as an indicator of some presumed problem in the forest—that a ‘healthy” forest was one with a minimum of dead trees and largely free of wildfire, insects, and disease. Oh yes, I knew that a few snags were good for woodpeckers, and as a fly fisherman I understood that trout tended to be found hiding behind logs in the stream. I suffered from the same cultural bias as most people and thought that large numbers of dead trees meant that the forest was “out of balance” or “sick.” But the more I studied ecology, the more I questioned these assumptions. I now understand that large numbers of dead trees are critical to functioning forest ecosystems and sometimes, at the risk of hyperbole, I occasionally say they are ultimately more important to forest ecosystems than live trees.
 There is no disputing the ecological importance of dead trees. Dead trees and down wood play an important role in ecosystems by providing wildlife habitat, cycling nutrients, aiding plant regeneration, decreasing erosion, and influencing drainage and soil moisture and carbon storage, among other values. Richard Hutto, an ecology professor at the University of Montana, sums up this new way of thinking about the long-term ecological value of dead trees when he notes, “Snags are important biological legacies that are passed from one forest generation to the next.”

Both dead standing trees and downed logs are snags
that wildlife utilizes in a variety of ways





OUTDATED PARADIGM
 Old perceptions about dead trees are rampant in our society. In a January 2009 Christian Science Monitor article about bark beetle and forests, Tim Love, Seeley Lake District Ranger on the Lolo National Forest, was quoted saying there was an “overabundance” of dead trees on his district from both wildfire and beetles. His viewpoint is all too common.
 In our traditional paradigm, fires and insects are generally viewed as undesirable, and tolerated only if they are small, limited, and controllable. We spend billions annually trying to contain wildfire and insect outbreaks based upon the presumption that these natural processes are “destroying” the forest. Even though there is now some grudging acceptance of some limited wildfires and even some small insect attacks as potentially “beneficial,” most people still view large stand replacement fires and large beetle outbreaks as “unnatural,” “abnormal,” and something to suppress, slow, and control.








NEW PARADIGM
 A new perspective is slowly taking root that questions the idea that an abundance of dead trees are bad and whether we are “losing” anything to wildfire and insects. Indeed, large stand replacement blazes and major insect outbreaks may be the ecological analogue to the forest ecosystem as the hundred year flood is to a river. Such natural events are critical to shaping ecosystem function and processes.
 Jon Rhodes, an independent consulting hydrologist in Oregon says, “When you start to look at managed western forests outside of wildernesses and parks, you notice right away that they lack large quantities of down wood—dead trees. Ecologically speaking, there is a big difference between areas that have been logged/thinned compared to areas that are left alone.” Rhodes turns common perception on its head when he notes that sanitized, managed forests are less healthy than so-called “sick” natural forests. “The one thing you notice in unmanaged, healthy systems is there’s a lot of dead trees and down wood.”

Bobcat using a snag tree for den









Chad Hanson, a UC Davis researcher and Sierra Club board member, sums it up. “We are trapped by an outdated cultural idea that a healthy forest is one with nothing but green trees. An ecologically healthy forest has dead trees, broken tops, and down logs. Such forests may not look tidy from the perception of a forester, but it (a forest with lots of dead trees) is the most biologically diverse and healthy, from a forest ecosystem perspective….Pound for pound, ton for ton, there is probably no more important habitat element in western conifer forests than large snags and large down logs,” claims Hanson.
 Rhodes states that studies have consistently concluded that there is deficit of large snags and downed dead wood in most western forests. “Large standing trees are important. I have spent much of my life protecting such trees, but they shouldn’t be museum pieces. They should be  part of  functioning ecosystems. When old-growth trees burn in wildfires, they aren’t completely lost, because that’s how we get large quantities critically important of snags and downed wood in the forest ecosystem.” Rhodes declares, “While some say we can’t afford to have old-growth burned by fire, it’s apparent that we can’t afford for old growth not to burn in fires, due to the importance of large snags and downed wood and its current lack in western forests.”

Black Bear using snag for denning









 Hanson suggests that even the conservation community is often stuck in the old paradigm. “Too many conservationists believe that forests were all open and fires were all low-severity. In the last ten years, the scientific evidence presents a much different picture of historic forests. Not that the low-severity fires didn’t occur, they just weren’t exclusive. There were vast areas of high-severity fires in the same forests.”
As Hutto suggested in a 2004 article in Conservation Biology, “Everything from the system of fire-regime classification, to a preoccupation with the destructive aspects of fire, to the mis-application of snag-management guidelines have led us to ignore the obvious: we need to retain the very elements that give rise to much of the biological uniqueness of a burned forest—the standing dead trees.”

 DEAD TREE IMPORTANCE FOR WILDLIFE
 One of the few ways that dead trees are appreciated by most people is their wildlife value. Think woodpeckers. But most people have no idea how many species actually depend on dead trees and down wood.
 Richard Hutto reports that upwards of 60% of species that nest in severely burned forests use only snags for nest sites. As many as 45% of all North American native bird species rely on snags for at least a portion of their life cycle.

Fisher using hollowed out snag









And Hutto has found 15 species that are most abundant in forests with high snag numbers resulting from severe high-intensity stand-replacement crown fire—the kind of fires that foresters pejoratively call “catastrophic.”  Hutto notes it is doubtful that these species would have evolved such dependency on snag abundance if large stand replacement fires and large insect outbreaks were uncommon or unnatural, as some suggest.
 But it’s not just the use of snags for nesting, and even feeding as with woodpeckers, that attracts birds and other wildlife to recently killed forests. Burned forests also are used extensively by seed-eating species attracted by the abundance of new seeds shed by cones and colonizing plants.

Red Fox using snag at base of tree






Even the presumption that large blazes are a threat to spotted owls is being challenged. Chad Hanson asserts, “There are several studies which indicate that spotted owls actually benefit from substantial patches of high severity fire within their home ranges. They selectively forage in unlogged high-severity burn patches. However, if these high-severity patches are salvage logged, spotted owls avoid them.”
 So important are dead trees to wildlife that researcher Timothy Kent Brown estimates that two thirds of all wildlife species use dead trees or down wood during some portion of their life cycle. Among Pacific Northwest vertebrates, 69 species depend upon cavities for shelter or nesting, while 47 other species are strongly associated with downed wood. And it’s not just the obvious species like woodpeckers. Many bat species, for instance, hide in cavities in dead trees or under the loose bark of dead and/or dying trees.

Pileated Woodpecker using standing snag









Jim Andrews, a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, studies amphibians and reptiles in northeastern forests. Andrews says, “Foresters tend to look at the forest from the floor up.  I have occasionally gone on field trips with them and they were rather proud of how they had managed their forests, but the forest has nothing in it. There’s no cover.

 American Marten denning in downed snag











 But salamanders are also significant predators in their own right. Andrews says salamanders eat beetle larvae, fly larvae, ground beetles, spiders, sow bugs, round worms, and other invertebrates that feed on forest debris.
 Salamanders are the top predator that shape ecosystem processes much as wolves are the top predator at another scale in terrestrial ecosystems. “Salamanders, by preying upon these species that consume leaf litter, help to maintain a deeper layer of leaves and other organic debris that holds moisture, reduces floods, and that kind of stuff, “says Andrews.

 DEAD WOOD AND SMALL CREATURES
 Our focus on the big and flashy species often causes us to ignore the small cogs that often drive the ecosystem. One of the small cogs is ants, and down logs are their preferred home. Ants are among the most common invertebrate in forest ecosystems and, not surprisingly given their abundance, are critical elements in forest ecosystems.
 Their most obvious value of ants is as food for many species, from birds like flickers to much larger animals like bears. In fact, research suggests that ants are among the most important food for bears in Oregon in June and July, as well as later in the summer if the berry crop fails. Another British Columbia study found that grizzly bears relied upon ants for food late in the fall when berries were unavailable. Reducing the number of dead trees, and thus ants, has a direct consequence for bear survival.

Gray Fox using downed snag
 Dead logs and snags are also the major home for pollinating insects like wasps and bees. Solitary and colonial bees, of which there are hundreds of species that reside in down logs and/or snags, are among the major pollinators of flowers and berry-producing shrubs.
 Dead trees are even important for other plant species. BLM botanist and lichen expert, Roger Rosentreter says that dead snags, by creating suitable habitat for lichen growth, carries the legacy of lichen species to the next generation of live trees in the forest. And research by Oregon State University professor Bruce McCune found that some common lichens were more abundant on bare barkless branches of dead trees than found on live ones.

IMPORTANCE FOR SOIL STRUCTURE 
Below the litter layer in the soil there is yet another layer of life that depends on dead wood. Tom Deluca, Forest Scientist at the Wilderness Society’s Northern Rockies office and a former forestry professor at the University of Montana specializing in soils says: “There’s a whole complex food web in the soil that is a combination of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa, micro-fauna like arthropods, springtails, mites—all those organisms thrive and are important to the composition of the forest.”
Rhodes states that research has consistently shown that downed wood is “absolutely essential for watershed and soil processes. One of the most important parts of soil function and productivity is organic matter in soil. The prime source for organic matter is decomposing woody material in forests, much of which comes from dead trees that fall down.”

Fisher going into standing snag
















Deluca notes that while forest litter, such as fallen needles and branches, are important to forest soils, forest soil development is also “very dependent upon the influx of carbon from [whole] trees that have a life cycle of hundreds of years.”
 Deluca says, “If you remove the carbon influx (dead trees) created after a wildfire or beetle outbreak, you are ultimately robbing the soil of the energy for micro-organisms. The organic influx is essential to micro-community.

STRUCTURAL VALUE OF DEAD WOOD IN FOREST REGENERATION
 People commonly assume that wildfire destroys trees, and consumes down trees leaving a smoldering pile of ashes. In truth, most dead wood physically survives blazes. Beyond the obvious value of dead trees as feeding, hiding and resting habitat for wildlife, down logs can even play an important role in forest regeneration.

Red-Headed Woodpecker at his snag home









Snags and down logs modify micro-sites that can affect seedling establishment. For instance, snags provide some shade and reduction of drying winds, creating more favorable conditions for tree seedling survival. Researching the effects of fires on snags in Wyoming, Dan Tinker from the University of Wyoming, found that only 8% of the down wood was consumed in fires. Even 35% of the down wood in clearcuts was a biological legacy left by past fires that occurred prior to logging. Tinker and his associates found that these legacy trees intercepted precipitation and funneled it to the ends of the log creating a moister micro-site that was often more favorable for tree seedling germination and survival.

CREATION OF DEAD SNAGS
 Death and taxes may be the two things you can count on, but all death is not equal. How a tree dies affects its ultimate role in the forest ecosystem. A tree killed by bark beetles has a different decay trajectory than, say, a tree dying from disease or wildfire. For instance, bark beetles, by breeching the outer bark of a tree, create tiny openings that allow fungi and other insects to enter the tree’s core.
 Bark beetles emit pheremones that not only attract other bark beetles but also insects that prey on bark beetles. And the volatiles released from the decomposing trees attract another entirely different group of organisms that feed upon dead wood. That is why one researcher in Europe found that bark beetle outbreaks increased biodiversity in forest ecosystems.

Forest Service researcher, William Laudenslayer and his colleagues, experimentally girdled trees to kill them, a common forestry practice used to produce snags for wildlife. They compared those snags to trees killed by bark beetles. They found that “bark beetle-killed trees provided significantly greater woodpecker feeding activity, cavity building, and insect diversity” compared to snags created by girdling.”
 Trees heated and killed by fire create sapwood that resists rotting and lasts longer in the ecosystem. Trees dead prior to the fire, tend to become blackened and charred. Charred trees are also resistant to decay. Thus wildfire creates long-lasting biological legacies that can survive for a century or more.

DEAD TREES’ IMPORTANCE FOR AQUATIC ECOSYSTEMS
 Wayne Minshall, formerly Professor of Ecology with the Stream Ecology Center in the Dept. of Biological Science at Idaho State University, points out the importance of logs to aquatic ecosystems as well. “Wherever the logs occur, they cause the stream to meander or braid. And whenever you get braiding or meandering, you’re getting a reduction in the power of the stream and delivering the water in a way so as to dissipate that energy so the flow becomes less destructive. That’s important in keeping streams healthy.”
 Logs are also important in trapping sediment. Down logs, by slowing the velocity of the water, allow sediment to settle out. Minshall points out that while organisms have evolved to deal with episodic sediment flush events, such as those occurring immediately after a wildfire, they are unable to cope with forestry-induced sedimentation. “They (aquatic organisms) can’t take unexpected events they haven’t evolved with, events that are chronic like fine sediment all year round for extended periods of time. Fire in a forest is no big deal. We get a short few years of sediment runoff, but it’s not a major thing that organisms can’t handle. If we clearcut, salvage log, or put roads in, then the sediment flows tend towards chronic and it’s a major detriment to organisms,” says Minshall.
 Rhodes says that scientists have not identified an upper threshold of logs in streams that is too much for fish.”The more wood, the more fish, all things being equal,” he says. “Lots of wood is a big part of the productivity for streams. And the loss of salmonids in many parts of the west is attributed to loss of wood,” says Rhodes.

GRATEFUL FOR THE DEAD
 The ecological cost of salvage logging speaks for itself, and the message is powerful, writes Hutto. “I am hard-pressed to find any other example in wildlife biology where the effect of a particular land-use activity is as close to 100% negative as the typical post-fire salvage-logging operation tends to be.”
 Although Hutto’s findings are specific to post-fire logging, many of his conclusions could equally be applied to any forest management that significantly reduces the overall biomass of dead trees.
 Chris Maser, biologist and author of Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest, The Redesigned Forest, as well as other books on forest ecology, remarks, “A forest both invests and re-invests biological capital into the ecosystem when it dies.” Removal of this biological capital jeopardizes the future productivity of the forest. Maser muses, “The question that needs to be asked is:  How much of the forest is necessary to leave intact to protect its functional integrity—not how much can be taken in the name of short-term economic profitability?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Wuerthner is an ecologist and former hunting guide with a degree in wildlife biology