Weather: A white cover lingers, with an ice layer beneath, but the icicles have disappeared. The snow in the yard and prairie has retreated around clumps of needle grass and shrubs. Around my house, plants are still buried in snow on the north and west sides, but exposed in the cold, damp on the east and south.
Last useful snow: 1/1. Week’s low: 18 degrees F. Week’s high: 49 degrees F in the shade.
What’s still green: Leaves on juniper, arborvitae, and other evergreens, blue flax, sweet peas, coral bells, snow-in-summer, pink evening primroses, vinca; everything else is under snow.
What’s gray, gray-green, or blue green: Four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, winterfat
What’s red: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples
What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows
Animal sightings: Rabbit
Weekly update: Donald Trump recognized a problem when he saw it, and responded with his gut. He claimed one of the problems abetting the spread of forest fires was the accumulation of dead underbrush. His answer that they should be raked clean was based on a view that forests were like English deer parks that had broad expanses of green edged with trees. The difference between the wild and the domestic didn’t exist for the man raised in an urbanized area.
Actually more deer might be useful. In Michigan, where I grew up, the size of the white-tailed deer herd was a source of constant debate. When the state first was being settled, deer lived in the hardwoods of lower half of the peninsula. Elk and moose inhabited the northern pines where dense canopies suppressed the growth of competing plants.
Increased settlement eliminated the southern habitats while logging opened the north. Second growth forests had shrubs and grasses that deer could eat. These, of course, become the dead underbrush if they’re not eaten.
In the 1930s, the state began planting trees that encouraged the return of the deer herd. By the time I was a child, no tree in the upper peninsula that I saw had branches any lower than a deer could reach. I didn’t know pine tree branches could reach the ground until I saw some in Louisiana.
New Mexico has a different climate, and different ecology. Mule deer and elk are the prime game animals. However, like Michigan where white tails were hunted to near extinction by market hunters in the late nineteenth century, New Mexico has had it’s problems with the elimination of livestock in the forests.
The other animals that were hunted to death in the north were beaver and the other small fur-bearing mammals. Beavers lived on bark and the live part of tree trunks, the cambium. This of course killed trees, and limited the growth of new trees. In Michigan, that kept areas open for deer and other animals.
Fur trapping was less common in this part of the country than in the north, because the climate is not as cold and thus the fur didn’t grow as thick.
I don’t know much about game animals, but I suspect that some of the problems we attribute to forest fires aren’t so much the result of current practices, but the consequence of human actions taken a century or more ago.
Notes on photographs: All taken 12 January 2019.
1. Needle grass (Stipa comata) in the yard.
2. Vinca (Vinca minor) poking through the snow on the west side.
3. Snow-in-summer (Cerastium tomentosum) in the scree bed on the east side.
End notes: "Deer Management History in Michigan." Michigan, Department of Natural Resources website.
1 comment:
I suspect that the efforts to eliminate deer has more to do with the spread of roadways into their environment and the high number of deer-automobile collisions. Likewise, the efforts to eliminate forest fires has more to do with the spread of housing developments into the forested wild lands.
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