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Responding to the Climate Crisis in Colorado Landscapes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 15, 2023| Leave a Comment »

By: Jim Tolstrup

Responding to the Climate Crisis in Colorado Landscapes

Links:

Last year I wrote a book about restoring nature in the environments where we live, work, and play focusing on the use of native plants in landscaping and habitat restoration. At the end of the book, I included the following comment: The communities that we design and build need to have a positive effect on natural areas and resources, or nature will have a negative effect on us.

The previous summer hundreds of thousands of acres of forests were burning throughout the West. In cities along Colorado’s Front Range, fumes and smoke hung in the air so thickly at times that it created an otherworldly light. Air quality was in the poor to dangerous range off and on from August through much of October.

On Oct. 22, 2020, the East Troublesome Fire leapt over the Continental Divide, blazed through many favorite hiking spots in Rocky Mountain National Park, and reached the western edge of the town of Estes Park.

My comment was meant to be philosophical. Of course, there are feedback loops from nature, and a species that destroys its environment will begin to die out as its ecosystem declines. But humans are good at manipulating that feedback, or so we may believe. The thought that a raging fire could consume an entire neighborhood, destroying nearly 1,000 homes in a single afternoon, as it did in Superior, Colorado on Dec. 30, 2021, was beyond anything we had previously imagined. This single event shattered the notion of a “fire season” in Colorado and introduced us to the term and the lived experience of an “urban fire storm.”

The fire cycle is certainly not new to our region. Historically, lightning strikes caused low-level grass fires from the prairie to the montane zone, elevations of approximately 4,500 to 9,000 feet. The montane zone sometimes called the “ponderosa pine savanna,” is a landscape shaped by fire. Ponderosa pines naturally lose their lower branches, which otherwise could become ladder fuel that could help a fire reach the crown of the tree. The pumpkin orange bark of a mature ponderosa pine has evolved to slough off in layers when exposed to fire, making them somewhat flame resistant.

Before the arrival of white settlers, fire shaped the montane zone into a park-like environment with large trees spaced far apart in a grassland filled with shrubs and wildflowers. Fire helped to clear out and renew the understory periodically, and kept these trees from becoming too crowded. The wide spacing of trees helped to keep this old-growth forest healthy by limiting the number of trees, thereby reducing competition for available ground moisture.

Low-intensity fires can help to regenerate growth in Western landscapes.

Snowmelt from Colorado’s subalpine forests provides water to over 40 million people in seven Western states.

Indigenous people used fire to regenerate the land and improve habitat for the game on which they depended. The absence of these traditional land management practices, combined with the excessive suppression of naturally occurring fires within the last century, has resulted in an overgrown, and less resilient forest. It’s estimated that 80% of the trees in Colorado are less than 100 years old. People who say that “trees are the answer” and apply this standard universally, regardless of bioregion, may be missing an important point about how our ecosystem functions in the Rocky Mountain West.

When fires ignite in the overgrown forests that currently exist, they don’t just burn along the forest floor. They leap up into the crowns of trees, creating such an intensity of heat that they often burn the soil, which undermines the forest’s recovery. When storm events hit the scorched slopes following this type of fire it can cause erosion, siltation of streams and acidification of water which corrodes the pipes of municipal water supplies.

In both the montane and sup-alpine forest prolonged drought and milder winters have exacerbated the issues brought on by overcrowding leading to an outbreak of mountain pine beetle, ips beetle and other insects that have killed large numbers of trees over vast areas. In some ways it could be said that these insects are doing the work of forest thinning in the absence of fire. In many parts of the montane forest the beetle kill resembles a burn pattern, taking out a group of trees here and leaving others there.

An area burned in the High Park fire of 2012. Today, snowbrush (Ceanothus velutinus) is common there since its seeds can only germinate after it they are scarified, generally by wildlife.

However, there are many places where the subalpine forest has been reduced to nothing but a stand of dead trees, as far as the eye can see. But on closer examination, there is a tiny understory of forest already reestablishing in many areas. In 100 years these large areas of dead forest may be completely regenerated. But there is some concern that rising temperatures and a continual drying trend may not allow the subalpine forest to recover.

Water supplies in much of the West are dependent on Colorado’s high-altitude forests that trap and store snowfall. As snow in the cool sub-alpine forest begins to melt, it replenishes streams and rivers, including the Colorado River, which supplies water to 40 million people in seven western states.

The growth of cities in the American West has increased water consumption from the Colorado River and pushed this critical natural resource beyond its recharge capacity. It is possible that we could reduce some of this demand within the communities that we design and build by switching to a style of landscaping that is more appropriate for our region, thereby conserving water while restoring some of our state’s unique biodiversity.

Western native plants are adapted to the Colorado region’s bright sun, high altitude, and windy and dry conditions.

Here in the cities on Colorado’s Front Range, a region that typically gets 12–14 inches of precipitation per year, the average person uses 150 gallons of water per day. About 60 percent of residential water consumption goes to support landscaping. This amounts to approximately 90 gallons of water per person per day used to keep exotic landscapes on life support.

Colorado’s population in 1900 was 543,000. By 2019, the population had increased over tenfold to 5.7 million. Over the next 20 years, Colorado’s population is expected to grow by roughly 30%, increasing from 5.7 million in 2019 to 7.52 million in 2040.

Global climate change is already impacting the timing and the amount of water available in the state. Rising temperatures can lead to fewer, but more-intense precipitation events and can alter the ways in which plants grow. The transpiration process of plants pulls water from the soil and disperses it into the atmosphere. Transpiration increases as temperatures warm, which causes the plants to use more water and further dries out the soil.

Although our growing population and a changing climate will reduce available water, thus far, we have made virtually no effort to conserve water in landscaping. However, the rising cost of water is beginning to change how municipalities, developers and landscape designers are re-envisioning “regionally appropriate landscapes” that utilize native plants adapted to our high altitude, bright sun and dry climate.

Native landscapes can help wildlife survive during periods of drought. In the summer of 2020, during a prolonged drought, our gardens in Loveland, Colorado were thronging with birds and pollinators. Hummingbirds, which are usually found at higher elevations in summer, buzzed through our gardens in record numbers. Songbirds flocked to our gardens as well, seeking fruit, seeds and insects when many other sites were barren and dry. Hiking in the mountains to find wildflower seeds yielded nothing because many plants had flowered little, or not at all.

By late summer the dead standing timber in the high country, fanned by a hot dry wind, exploded into flames that burned over 665,000 acres. The resulting fires killed countless thousands of wild animals and caused $266 million in damages. 2020 was the costliest fire season in Colorado history until the following year when the Marshall fire broke this record in a single afternoon.   

After the long summer’s drought of 2020, stress that resulted from fires and heavy smoke, and a sudden deep freeze in early September sent millions of birds in the Rocky Mountain West into a migration for which they were not prepared. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of birds were found dead in Southwestern states, where birds literally dropped from the sky.

With the growing threat of extinction facing so many species, today’s gardens need to be more than just pretty; they need to serve an ecological function. Thankfully, birds like the cedar waxwing are also protected under the U.S. Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Holding one tiny bird while thousands of others flocked to our gardens under a smoke-filled sky.

A subsequent necropsy confirmed that the birds had died of starvation, unable to gain sufficient weight before migrating. As the effects of climate change increase occurrences such as this, it increases the need for us to subsidize the diet of our wild birds. A study undertaken by the Audubon Society says that 389 species, roughly two-thirds of all the birds in the U.S. are threatened with extinction or significant loss of habitable range due to climate change. Providing habitat within the landscapes that we design could make an enormous difference to their survival.

Full disclosure – shifting landscape practices, although perhaps the low hanging fruit, is not in itself enough to solve our water supply problems. It’s important to note that an estimated 50% of water used in the Colorado River Basin goes to raising cattle, and as much as 25% of our water nation-wide. While it could be argued that meat is the only sustainable food in our region because grazing animals do not destroy the native plant community in the same way that cultivation does, this does not represent the facts of the situation. Cattle are not drinking all this water. The water is used to grow crops to fatten cattle in crowded feed lots.    

Solving the problems presented by climate change is, of course, not a simple matter. It will require two things that seem to be in extremely short supply, a widespread acceptance of demonstrable facts, based on scientific research, and a willingness to work with a broad base of stakeholders and partners including businesses, farmers, citizens, political leaders, and nature herself.

Many native plants have interdependent relationships with the insects that co-evolved with them, such as this two-tailed swallowtail (Papilio multicaudata)

The simple notion that it’s more beneficial and cost-effective to utilize native plants vs. laying down thousands of acres of irrigated turf would seem to be a foregone conclusion, but the notion is only slowly taking hold. Nonetheless, this conversion, if only out of the necessity of water shortages, is inevitable. But this is not an argument for austerity. This is rather an invitation to celebrate landscapes that are vibrant and interesting year-round, in a way that allows other beings, present and future, to do the same.

We have observed firsthand how dramatically and rapidly our local birds and pollinators recover when we grow native plants in our gardens. Celebrating our native biodiversity can restore our relationship to the land and may allow the new civilization that we have built on this land to continue, in harmony with nature.

Jim Tolstrup, author of “SUBURBITAT,” is the executive director of the High Plains Environmental Center, in Loveland, Colorado, a unique model for restoring nature where we live, work, and play.

The gardens at High Plains Environmental Center are virtually never watered, yet they are ablaze with color and thronging with wildlife throughout the season.

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My Eco Dad

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 10, 2012| 4 Comments »

“Shut the door!”

…my Dad shouted, when my brothers and I left it wide open in the chilly Boston winter,

“you trying to heat the whole world?”

Now many people say that’s exactly what we’ve done, heated up the planet through excessive use of fossil fuels. Looking back, Dad said lots of prophetic stuff like that. If we left the water continuously flowing when we washed dishes Dad would say “you waste water like that, someday it will be too expensive to drink.” Little did we imagine that one day people would pay more per ounce for bottled water than we pay for gas.

We realized that our Dad was different from other kids’ parents. We much preferred it that way. Dad was cool! He read us Paul Reps’ Zen Flesh Zen Bones at bedtime and Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan; he played the tenor banjo and sang sea shanties. And though we didn’t phrase it this way at the time, we knew intuitively and unequivocally that Dad was no “Muggle.”

Dad was into organic gardening and home brewing beer; he marched to a different drummer and taught us to do the same—which isn’t so easy to do when you’re 10 or 12 years old. I remember the lunches that we brought to school and how mortified we were by the thick, uneven brown slices of homemade bread we pulled out at lunch time when all the other kids had nice, white, perfectly uniform slices of Wonderbread.

My Dad’s ability to discern between the authentic and the artificial is uncanny and so is his ability to sum it all up in one pithy comment. Regarding the first Earth Day in 1970 he said,

“I hope they’re wearing bio-degradable protest buttons.”

By example my Dad ingrained in me a strong sense of responsibility for the world. Walking through the woods Dad would pick up any trash that we came across and when we said “Dad that’s not our trash” Dad would say “it’s our world.”

My Dad is a bit of a mad scientist (it’s traditional in my family to speak of “the madness” in boastful tones). When I was a kid, Dad would be down in the basement every evening, making things like a model 19th century circus or cutting gem stones. From my father’s passions I learned that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.

I also learned that when “the madness” strikes and there is something that you absolutely must create or do, you can begin it by going to the library. I went to the library with my father many times when I was young. While he looked for books about making marionettes, or colonial period clothing, or gemology, I was reading about Indians, and Druids, and plants.

Sometimes our passions settled on the same topic. One year Dad read Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons. That summer we ate cattail pancakes and elderberry jam washed down with sumac lemonade. I was, excited by the idea of “living off the land.” Eventually, I spent a week on my brother Dave’s land in New Hampshire living only on what I could gather. I mostly survived on daylily tubers and ketchup.

When my Dad was about the age that I am now he lost his job as an electronics engineer. That was the beginning of a difficult period for Dad, looking for jobs and interviewing, but never again working in his chosen field. In retrospect, I’m sure he would say that was the beginning of some of the best parts of his life.

Dad went back to school to get a biology degree from Harvard (just for fun) and graduated when he was 64. At the age of 75, Dad still works at the Boston Museum of Science, a role that combines two life-long passions: science and teaching kids new things.

Dedicated to David A. Tolstrup – A cool guy.

“

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Rescuing Nature

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on May 12, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Is nature really “red in tooth and claw,” is it “survival of the fittest,” or are those just  phrases that are intended to excuse our own rude and selfish behavior?

This story begins, as many of my posts do, with me walking in my neighborhood. My friend came up along side me and rang her bicycle bell. What happened next was like witnessing a crime, it all happened so fast. A squirrel near us darted out into the street. A car almost hit the squirrel and it ran back towards us. Then it attempted to cross the street again and was hit by a car coming in the opposite direction. The squirrel managed to get to the opposite curb and pulled his small body up, hand over hand, like Bruce Willis in a Die Hard movie.

There on the soft grass beneath an elm tree, that was perhaps his home, the squirrel died. Because I admired the squirrel’s bravery and determination and because I am a romantic, I carried the squirrel’s body home with me in great solemnity and gave it a burial worthy of my Viking forebearers. As my ancestors did, I laid food in the grave of the fallen warrior to sustain him on the journey to the halls of his bushy-tailed sires. A few weeks later I noticed that someone had dug the squirrel up and eaten all but the tail. It’s as if a fox had been watching over my shoulder saying “are you done playing with that? I hate to see a perfectly good squirrel going to waste.” But there I go being romantic again.

 Last fall, I was walking (again) and I saw someone dumping something out on the grass. When I got closer I saw that it was a baby bull snake. The guy that was dumping it out said that he had found the snake in an irrigation box. He had told his wife that he wanted to keep it as a pet. I was able to guess at her response as I examined the tiny snake on frozen ground, too cold for this snake to be able to find a suitable place to hibernate. I warmed the snake in my hands as I carried it to the edge of the woods and found a rotting log there in a sunny spot. I dug through the rotting wood as the snake warmed in the sun. When I poked my finger at the snake it opened its mouth as if to bite. I figured it was warm enough to find its own way to a proper depth in the debris for hibernation. I wished the snake pleasant dreams and went on my way, pondering the question “When are we actually being helpful?” It seemed to have something to do with knowing how things actually work in nature.

My dog Tashi barks her head off when something is unusual or different. Once she barked for three hours over a butterfly in our backyard that had a deformed wing. So, I knew something was up when she stood facing a lilac shrub and barked incessantly. When I looked where she was looking I saw a robin with thread wrapped around her leg and hanging upside down. With the help of our neighbor, Tara, I was able to cut the the thread loose.

Was it necessary to free this bird in the larger scheme of things? Is intervening in nature the right thing to do? I don’t know but perhaps it was this bird’s gift to me to allow me the chance to see her take off again, free, her fragile bones all intact. For weeks afterward my wife, Kathy, noticed a robin that seemed to be looking in our window. “She’s coming back to say thank you” Kathy said.

Romantic?

Is it a mistake to anthropromorphize animals? Conservationists in Baja California have had some success in curbing the illegal killing and consumption of sea turtles by encouraging fisherman to name individual turtles, using their own daughter’s names. Movies of the 1950’s and 60’s, where birds or giant insects are trying to wipe out human beings are a lot like movies about American Indians of the same period, a case of the destroyer fearing the destroyed. During that time we started wiping out insects (and subsequently birds) with pesticides and urban sprawl—and that’s a much scarier movie.

Is there tenderness in nature? What do you think?

Are individuals within species, and species within ecosystems more cooperative than competitive? Before we dismiss the capacity of animals to feel and express complex emotions like compassion, check out this link to photos of a swallow displaying shock and grief at the fall of its mate.

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Ospreys Return to Northern Colorado

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on April 11, 2012| 1 Comment »

Each year at the High Plains Environmental Center we await the return of the Ospreys…

 

In 2006,  a group of volunteers built this nesting platform and has been inhabited by a successfully breeding pair of ospreys ever since. This osprey platform is a great example of how what we do at HPEC is not conservation (preserving what exists already) but rather restoration (creating new opportunities for nature in the midst of development).

Our friend Bill Miller (President of the Fort Collins Audubon Society) wrote the following  history of ospreys in this area.

Ospreys were relatively common on the west slope of Colorado but were mostly migrants passing through on the east slope.  At the time the only known nesting pair was found up at Parvin Lake, east of the community of Red Feather Lakes.  Ospreys are slow to pioneer into new territory but, even though the northern Front Range of Colorado had lots of suitable habitat as a result of more than a century of irrigation projects, there was not a breeding population east of the mountains.

 In 1988 and 1989 the Colorado Division of Wildlife (CDOW), in cooperation with the Denver Museum of Natural History, the Peregrine Fund1, and interested members of the public, joined forces to establish the Peregrine Partnership with the intent to introduce peregrine chicks into the Denver urban setting using a process called ‘hacking.’  Five peregrine chicks per year were provided by the Peregrine Fund and released into a hack box on about the 20th floor of what was the Denver Post building.

 The hack box allowed volunteers to feed the chicks without being seen, thus preventing the chicks from imprinting on humans.  After reaching a certain maturity the chicks were ready to ‘fledge,’ or instinctively take flight.  Instinct would once more take over as the peregrines would take to capturing and feeding on Denver’s numerous pigeons.  Unfortunately, due to the low numbers of peregrines released to the wild through this process, relatively low survival rates in the wild for young birds, and tendencies to disperse from their fledge sites, only one of the ten chicks released in this manner was ever documented to have returned.  It defended the hack site vigorously, rendering unusable for any further releases.

 Buoyed by the enthusiastic public interest and participation in the peregrine project the CDOW determined to have another public-participation release project and assigned it the NE Regional Office in Fort Collins.  The project was assigned to Lisa Evans, NE Regional Education Coordinator.  She garnered support and participation from a variety of organizations.  A Steering Committee was formed, consisting of: members of the Fort Collins Audubon Society and the Colorado Wildlife Federation, the environmental education coordinator for the Poudre School District, the director of the Rocky Mountain Raptor Program, a retired CSU wildlife biology professor, the director of the City of Fort Collins Cultural, Library and Recreational Service,  a representative of the Fort Collins Parks and Recreation Department, other employees of the CDOW,  and interested members of the public.

 The first task undertaken by the Steering Committee was to identify a bird species to be released in the Fort Collins area using the hacking process.  At this point in time reintroduction of peregrines in Colorado was being de-emphasized as the species had been released into the wild with great success.  Bald Eagles were also discussed but the Steering Committee was cautioned against them by several committee members who knew that Bald Eagle chicks can be quite difficult to work with.  Finally, Alex Cringan, recently retired CSU Wildlife Biology professor and who had grown up in Ontario and was quite familiar with the species, suggested that we consider Osprey as the species to be introduced.  The Steering Committee concurred.

 Another major detail that had to be considered was the construction of two hack towers.  These would be the first home in Fort Collins for the osprey chicks.  So the scramble was on to purchase, acquire through donation, or otherwise ‘scrounge’ materials for the two towers.  Public Service Company of Colorado, as it was called at the time, donated six long wooden power poles.  Each tower would be supported by two poles connected by two heavy 4” x 4” timbers commonly used as the cross arms on power poles.  These would provide the base structure for a cage that would be constructed about 20’ to 25’ up in the air, supported by the 4” x 4” timbers.  The cage would be about 4-ft. square, with a plywood floor and top.  The back wall, located where the ladder came up, would have a small door hinged so that volunteers could throw fish into the cage.  The other three walls would consist of electrical conduit mounted vertically in holes drilled through the upper and lower 2” x 4” boards.  The conduit was vertical because there was less chance for a chick which was testing its wings to get caught and break its wing.  The front wall was pivoted at its bottom so that it could swing outward into a horizontal position, supported by a rope.  This would be the launch pad from which the chicks would first take flight once they were ready.

 By the time we were ready to construct the two hack towers we had a sizeable body of volunteers who came with a broad set of skills.  The first tower to be built was along the Poudre River at the southern end of the CSU Environmental Learning Center (ELC).  Constructed in December of 1989 and January of 1990, it was surrounded by a chain link fence to keep ELC visitors off of it.  The second tower was constructed in the spring of 1990 on an island on the west side of the largest water-filled gravel pit that is part of the Riverbend Ponds complex north of East Prospect Street and east of the Poudre River.

 First to be constructed was a footbridge to the island, using a crane that placed the two longest of the six donated power poles across between the shore and the island.  Once that had been constructed volunteers were able to carry the shovels, scoops and other tools necessary to dig two holes for the support poles.  A helicopter was used to lift the poles into the air and transport them to the island where they were guided into the holes.  Once earth and rock were tamped around the poles the superstructure was constructed as per above, followed by the hack cage.

 In July of 1990 my wife and youngest son took a vacation trip to Lake Coeur d’Alene in Northern Idaho.  The CDOW had worked out a wildlife exchange whereby Idaho Game and Fish Department received some Bighorn Sheep in return for giving up some of their plentiful Osprey chicks.  There are numerous saw mills located along the northern end of the lake where it empties into the Spokane River.  Logs harvested from the hills around the lake are dumped into the lake, chained up to form rafts and then towed to the saw mills.  There they are corralled using more chains suspended on floating logs and extending between log pilings set into the lake bottom.  Osprey took to the pilings as nesting sites and the saw mill personnel had fitted each piling with a 4’x4’ sheet of plywood and two hay bales.  After adding a few token sticks to the hay bales and calling it a nest, Osprey were raising two to four chicks on each piling.  Needless to say, there was no shortage of osprey chicks!

 On July 10th the Idaho Game and Fish staff provided two small boats, one being equipped with an extension ladder.  Then, while other members kept that boat from drifting away from the piling, one brave soul climbed the ladder and took one or two chicks out of their nests, always leaving a minimum of two chicks in the nest.  I was able to video this operation from the second boat on the water while a CDOW cinematographer filmed the process from the Denver Channel 9 News helicopter.  A total of 10 chicks were obtained in this fashion.  It was humorous to see a motel room that night filled with osprey chicks.  Following a supper attended by all participants, my wife, son and I drove home to Colorado later that night, arriving in Fort Collins late in the afternoon of July 11th.  On July 12th the CDOW staff flew the chicks home in a fixed-winged Otter aircraft piloted by a CDOW pilot, and the chicks were released into the two hack cages on the 13th.  And then the fun started!

 For the rest of the summer it was all hands on deck.  The chicks were taken from their nests approximately four weeks before they would have fledged.  Now they had to be fed twice daily atop the wiggling hack towers.  Other volunteers would monitor and record the birds’ behaviors.  And when the birds first started to fly one would occasionally land in the water and have to be rescued by a volunteer who would swim out after the downed bird.

 Ospreys migrate south to Central and South America for the winter.  Adults will return north the following spring but the young of the previous summer will spend another full year in the south before making their first journey north.  Ospreys are found on all of the world’s continents with the exception of Antarctica.  Their diet consists of about 97% fish with the rest being snakes, lizards and amphibians.  Osprey feet and talons are unique in the world of raptors.  All raptors have four talons; all other raptors, however, have three talons facing to the front and one facing to the rear.  Osprey talons are arranged so that one of the three forward-facing talons can be turned so that they have two facing to the rear.  This enables them to gain a better grip on fish which they will then carry back to the nest or a feeding perch slung like a torpedo under them for greater aerodynamic efficiency.  Ospreys usually plunge feet first into the water to capture a fish seen from the air, and then use their powerful wings to rise above the water and fly off carrying their prey.  (See http://www.care2.com/causes/osprey-gives-amazing-fishing-lessons-video.html for how Osprey go fishing)

 

In 1991 a third hack tower was built along the Poudre River west of North Taft Hill Road.  This was called the Olander Site because students from Olander Elementary School had raised part of the funds for the hack tower’s construction.

 

Osprey chicks were obtained from Lake Coeur d’Alene in Idaho in the summers of 1990, 1991, and 1992.  In 1993 the chicks were taken from along the Spokane River in Washington.  Collectively approximately 57 osprey chicks were hacked at the three tower locations during the four summer hacking periods.  Since all chicks were banded at the time they were removed from their nests it was possible to determine that some of the introduced osprey had survived their first three or four years and were successful in bringing mates back to Fort Collins.  Currently there are about four or five active osprey nest sites in Fort Collins and one at Equalizer Reservoir in Loveland.  I guess one could conclude that the efforts of two decades ago were successful.

 1)      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peregrine_Fund

 

 

 

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Bushy Tales: The Truth About Squirrels

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 31, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Squirrels are among the most common wildlife inhabitants in suburbitat, yet most of us actually know very little about them.

Colorado, my home state, is home to three kinds of tree squirrels. The rusty red, fox squirrel; the Abert’s squirrel which has a striking black or salt-and-pepper gray coat and magnificent ear-tufts; and the smaller but noisier pine squirrel, or chickaree.

Abert’s and fox squirrels are about the same size (up to 20 inches long and two pounds in weight), although Abert’s has longer fur, and therefore looks larger. The pine squirrel is much smaller—14 inches long and weighing only about nine ounces.

The Fox squirrel is most familiar in streamside and urban woodlands, especially on the eastern plains. Abert’s squirrel is resident of ponderosa pine forests, and the pine squirrel (or chickaree) occupies high timber.

All three tree squirrels build nests of leaves or needles, depending on habitat. Predators of the tree squirrels vary with habits and habitat. Fox squirrels spend some time on the ground and are killed by coyotes and foxes. Magpies, hawks and snakes eat nestlings. Martens are a major predator on pine squirrels. The forest-dwelling goshawk eats Abert’s squirrels.

Fox squirrels eat fruit, nuts and buds, and bury nuts for winter (and because they are forgetful, they plant a lot of trees!). Abert’s squirrel does not hoard food, but eats whatever part of its host tree, ponderosa pine, is available in season: cones and inner bark of twigs. Pine squirrels harvest and store vast quantities of cones (spruce, fir, Douglas-fir and lodgepole pine), often beneath a feeding area.

Tree squirrels have two litters of two to five young; one litter in spring, the other in early summer. Gestation is five weeks for chickarees, and up to seven weeks for their larger cousins.

(Source – Colorado Division of Wildlife) http://wildlife.state.co.us/

When my second cousin, Max, was a child he lived in Bali and was the self-appointed guide of Western tourists visiting the monkey forest in Ubud. http://www.monkeyforestubud.com/ “The monkeys have kings,” Max told me. Each of the monkey kings are large, standing head and shoulders above other monkeys (as the now fully grown Max does among men). The forest is divided into distinct kingdoms, and sometimes the monkeys actually war over territory. “If you visit the Monkey forest,” Max told me, “and if the monkeys rush you for food, just give it to them, never hold the food up over your head unless you want a bunch of monkeys fighting over food on top of your head!”

At my house, entering our front garden is a bit like visiting the monkey forest.

I confess that we do not strickly adhere to the rule “never feed a wild animal” when it comes to squirrels. In fact, they are so tame that that my wife, Kathy, feeds them out of her hand, particularly one female (or several?) that she calls “Mama Squirrel.” Thus it is likely that our squirrels will size you up to see if you have food, or even rush you like monkeys when you enter our garden.

Unlike monkeys however, the squirrel’s world seems to be one with no political organization whatsoever. One of my favorite poets W.B.Yeats wrote about the anarchy of squirrels, as well as their seeming indifference to human delusions of supremacy, in his poem An Appointment. The poem was written at a time when the poet was discouraged about his own political career.

Being out of heart with government I took a broken root to fling where the proud, wayward squirrel went, taking delight that he could spring. And he, with that low whinnying sound that is like laughter, sprang again and so to the other tree at a bound…And threw him up to laugh on the bough; no government appointed him!

There is another political reference to squirrels in Hal Borland’s Sun Dial of the Seasons, which points to the (potential) universality of conservation ethics.

You can’t be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion, or challenge the ideology of a violet.

The fox squirrel in the West, as well as  the eastern grey squirrel seem to have adapted to—even thrived in—environments altered by human beings without being altered themselves.

The simple, basic nature of the squirrel (squirrel-anity?) seems virtually incorruptible and altogether cheerful.

Would that it were so for human beings as well!

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Seeds of Wisdom

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 17, 2012| 3 Comments »

You can learn a lot about someone just by looking in their refrigerator. These days, the refrigerator at High Plains Environmental Center is crammed full of zip lock bags containing wildflower seeds in damp sand.

If you are seeding wildflowers outdoors it’s best to do it in November before the first snow, just as nature does. However, if you are growing them in trays indoors,  many types of seeds will need to have this cold period replicated in order to get them started.

From the bags in our refrigerator we are planning to grow 10,000 seedlings of native plants for restoration projects. Where some might just see bags of dirt with labels like “Verbena hastata”, “Asclepias incarnata” and “Helianthus nutallii”, my “plantish” friends and I get very excited looking through my refrigerator. We see the promise of purple, yellow and pinkish-orange flowers, soaring high above wetland meadows in summers yet to come.

At the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, MA, where I studied horticulture, I once saw a note pinned up on the wall that said “a seed is a baby plant, asleep in a box, with its lunch”. I don’t know who wrote this but it’s a good description of what a seed really is.  The “lunch” refers to the endosperm, stored starch that sustains the seed until its roots develop and can absorb nutrients. Some seeds can remain asleep in the box for years, even centuries, waiting for the right conditions to come along.

In the fall we go out and gather wildflower seeds. By gathering seeds locally we are preserving a distinct local genotype that has adapted to our specific conditions. The seeds gathered at another elevation, or in another state will not be quite the same. It’s a pleasant enough task to go seed gathering. Last fall on a golden afternoon of Indian summer, I was walking along scanning the ground for familiar friends, when a flock of sandhill cranes flew overhead, trumpeting their wild and ancient call tllrrr, tllrr, tllrr, a bit like running your finger down a comb, only much better.  

Identifying plants in their dried form requires an intimate familiarity with the plants and it helps to know the landscape well in order to know where to look for certain things.  Once you notice the pattern you can see a particular plant and know what else you can expect to find growing there. Cottonwood trees grow on creeks throughout the West; underneath them you’re likely to find chokecherries and golden currants grown from seeds dropped by birds that rested in the trees. Those who know the language of plant communities will unconsciously inventory the landscape as they drive down the highway.

One of my instructors at the Arboretum, Paul Martin Brown, taught a course called Flora of New England. I think he knew the name and address of every plant in the 6 state region. If you were talking about wild orchids, he would say “go to the Shaw’s parking lot in Nashua, New Hampshire and look north at the wetlands there, then come back and tell me what you saw.”

It is not necessary to know the name of every plant in order to enjoy them but I will offer a very brief taxonomy lesson here. Plants are categorized by the form of their flowers.  They are not categorized by the shapes of their leaves, the form of their growth, or where they grow.  Many plants within the same genus may look very different from each other. Plants, like other living things, are scientifically categorized by genus and species.  The genus, which is the first name refers to the larger group, like your family’s last name.  The second name is the species and often refers to some characteristic that distinguishes it from the others of its genus like “hirsutissima” meaning “hairy.” So, Clematis hirsutissima, is a hairy species of the genus, clematis.

There are other ways to know plants and many people who know plants intimately do not know the Latin names. Native people of the region know that chewing the seeds of the prairie coneflower, Echinacea anugustifolia, will make your mouth numb, so it makes a good toothache medicine.  Sweet flag, Acorus calamus, is good medicine for colds and stomach flu, if you can stomach the bitter taste that is.

When looking for a particular plant, traditionally native people will sit down and make an offering to the first one they find.  When you do this you slowly tune into the landscape and then you begin to see more and more.  I like to touch the plants and smell their leaves.  I find that the physical memory of them remains with me the longest but don’t do this with poison ivy, although if you do I’m certain you won’t forget it.

In the midst of a culture that marks changes of the year by the decorations and candy that appear in stores, these sleeping seeds help me remember where we really are. Over the course of my life I have repeatedly had a disturbing dream in which it is summer and I haven’t planted anything. I don’t think there’s anything psychological about it. The dream underscores for me the importance of connecting oneself to the rhythm of the seasons. I like knowing when the moon is full or new, when things will bloom or go to seed and my heart literally leaps when I hear the first peeping frogs emerge from the cold Spring mud.

You can learn a tremendous amount from a seed. Every seed contains within itself an ancestral memory of seasons past which it has never known.  It knows how to grow, how to bloom and exactly when to do so. 

 In the dark depths of winter the tiny seeds remain steadfast and resolute. They seem to know that sunlight, soil and water are the things that truly matter and that the glory of summer will inevitably return. In challenging times such as these we would do well to take a lesson from the seeds, to return to what truly sustains us and reflect on where we are in the cycle of seasons.

Jim Tolstrup is the Executive Director of the High Plains Environmental Center in Loveland, Colorado. HPEC works with developers, businesses and homeowners, to promote the restoration and conservation of Colorado’s unique native biodiversity in the suburban environments where we live, work and play. www.suburbitat.org

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Musing by the Beaver’s Lodge.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 3, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I work at the High Plains Environmental Center in Loveland, Colorado but I live in neighboring Fort Collins, by banks of the Cache la Poudre River. In both of these two places I manage (thankfully) to spend a lot of time walking outdoors. Near my home beavers took up residence this winter in a pond that was previously a gravel mine. At first I saw only the gnawed trees, evidence of the beavers presence but lately the beavers themselves have been quite visible.   

The Lewis and Clark expedition did not go through Colorado but it did cross a similar, short grass prairie landscape to the north. They believed this area to be entirely uninhabitable. On May 27, 1805 a letter from the expedition described the region as follows “these mountains appear to be a desert part of the country…barron broken rich soil but too much of a desert to be inhabited, or cultivated….We have now got into a country which presents little to our view, but scenes of barrenness and desolation; and see no encouraging prospects that it will terminate.” This area is also the “Sterile desert” we lately entered”.

The first White Men to remain in the West for any length of time were traders and fur trappers in search of beaver pelts. In the growing cities of the East, as well as Europe a gentleman wasn’t properly dressed unless he wore a top hat made of shaved beaver fur. Since the 15th century vast sums of money were accumulated all on the pelts of this semi-aquatic mammal.  Many of these early trapper were of French origin and seemed to be less interesting in “winning the West than we were in winning the heart s of the Indian maidens that they met here. In fact, many of these men became part of the tribes, interpreters for those who came later. They left their names, Baptise, Janis on modern day Indian reservations.,

Exploring my local beaver habitat I found more damaged trees in amongst a clump of red-twid dogwood (cornus stolenifera).

Red Osier Dogwood, or Red Willow as it is often called, is considered sacred to many Indian tribes as referenced in the Longfellow poem The Song of Hiawatha…

 

 

 

Filled the pipe with bark of willow,
With the bark of the red willow;
Breathed upon the neighboring forest,
Made its great boughs chafe together,
Till in flame they burst and kindled;
And erect upon the mountains,
Gitche Manito, the mighty,
Smoked the calumet, the Peace-Pipe,
As a signal to the nations.

The Lakota people historically inhabited the region from the Colorado Rockies, east to the Missouri river and north into Canada. Since times too ancient to remember the Lakota watched the sky in early spring as the constellation Aries moved closer and closer to the sun until it could no longer be seen. To the Lakota Aries and Triangulum represented Cansasa (chan-sha-sha) red willow, the bark of which is used in a ceremonial smoking mixture. When the sun lit the red willow it represented a pipe ceremony in the heavens.

The beaver is a “keystone” species, a species that plays a critical role in shaping the environment on which many other species depend and over hunting them radically changed Western eco-systems. Beavers are capable of taking down large trees which they use to build their dams and lodges.

By damming rivers and streams the beaver creates its own environment, ponds that allow the beaver to escape from predators, as well as providing habitat opportunities for numerous other species.

However, the destruction of trees has also made the beaver very unpopular with land owner and managers and has often become a reason for destroying or relocating the beavers.

The Indians participated in trapping and trading of beaver pelts but also appreciated the beaver’s inherent value. Native people refer to the “medicine” of each animal, unique attributes, verging on the supernatural, that can be obtained and emulated by human beings.

According to author, Jamie Sam’s in The Sacred Path Cards:

“Beaver is the doer in the animal kingdom. Beaver medicine is akin to water and earth energy and incorporates a strong sense of family and home. If you were to look at the dams that block woodland streams, you would find several entrances and exits. In building its home, Beaver always leaves itself many alternative escape routes. This practice is a lesson to all of us not to paint ourselves into corners. If we eliminate our alternatives, we dam the flow of experience in our lives.”

 National Geographic offers the following information about beavers…

Beavers are famously busy, and they turn their talents to re-engineering the landscape as few other animals can. When sites are available, beavers burrow in the banks of rivers and lakes. But they also transform less suitable habitats by building dams. Felling and gnawing trees with their strong teeth and powerful jaws, they create massive log, branch, and mud structures to block streams and turn fields and forests into the large ponds that beavers love.

Dome-like beaver homes, called lodges, are also constructed of branches and mud. They are often strategically located in the middle of ponds and can only be reached by underwater entrances. These dwellings are home to extended families of monogamous parents, young kits, and the yearlings born the previous spring.

Beavers are among the largest of rodents. They are herbivores and prefer to eat leaves, bark, twigs, roots, and aquatic plants.

These large rodents move with an ungainly waddle on land but are graceful in the water, where they use their large, webbed rear feet like swimming fins, and their paddle-shaped tails like rudders. These attributes allow beavers to swim at speeds of up to five miles (eight kilometers) an hour. They can remain underwater for 15 minutes without surfacing, and have a set of transparent eyelids that function much like goggles. Their fur is naturally oily and waterproof.

 http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/beaver/

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Suburbitat; A Suburban Natrualist’s Journal

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 26, 2011| Leave a Comment »

 In honor of the 10th anniversary of the founding of the High Plains Environmental Center (of which I am director) I am launching this blog. The entries that will follow in this Suburbitat series will be a Suburban Naturalist’s Journal, exploring ways of attuning our senses to the natural world, rediscovering our relationship with plants and animals that share suburbitat, developing environmental ethics and re-visioning our culture, all from the point of view of the suburban householder.

The High Plains Environmental Center, was founded by a developer, Tom Hoyt of McStain Neighborhoods. The center is comprised of 100 acres of open space, surrounding two lakes. The center also leases the surface rights of the lakes, 175 acres of open water, which is reserved for migratory waterfowl. We also manage another 135 acres of open space belonging to other landowners in Centerra, a 3500 acre mixed use development in Loveland, CO.

The project from its conception was intended to be a symbiotic relationship between a developer, an environmental center and a vital business and residential community. The first executive director of HPEC, Ripley Heinz, coined the term “Suburbitat” by combining the words suburban and habitat. The term refers to the relationship between the built and the natural in the suburban environments where we live, work and play. The concept of suburbitat also points to the possibilities for planning and building environments that restore and conserve our native biodiversity.

HPEC is funded by a percentage of permit fees collected by the city of Loveland for building within Centerra. HPEC in turn maintains trails and open spaces that are a source of pride for the community, as well as a tangible example of the commitment to environmental stewardship and corporate social responsibility on the part of McWhinney, the developer. Most importantly, this concept breaks the traditional stalemate between developers and environmentalists and facilites a constructive dialog about land use between various stakeholders.

Like many conservation areas, HPEC is constantly trying to strike a balance between recreation, conservation and education. We don’t want to put a chain link fence around the lakes with a sign that says “This is Nature – Keep Out!” People need to spend time in nature in order to be healthy and whole. Studies have shown that spending time in nature has immediate, measurable impact on our physical and emotional health. 

It is also essential to allow children to have access to nature. Since Richard Louve’s, Last Child in the Woods, which links what the author calls nature deficit disorder with ADD/ADHD, parents and educators have focused on the necessity of allowing children unstructured time in nature, as well as the need to promote eco-literacy.     

As one who is eager to pass my own life-long love of nature on to younger people, this is all extremely good news. If children don’t know that nature is out there they are not going to miss it when it disappears. After all, you don’t become an advocate for something that you never knew existed. We must begin training the land stewards of the next generation now. 

On the other hand jogging, boating, pets off leash and other impacts from human activities put a lot of pressure on wildlife and many wildlife populations are already near the breaking point. Bird populations in Colorado, similar to those in other states across the country, have crashed in the last forty years, many bird species declining by sixty percent or more.

Obviously we need to do all we can for birds and other wildlife populations if they are to survive the next forty years. We need to create a culture where conserving nature is a deeply held value and maintaining wildlife is considered an important goal. We need to learn about the wildlife species around us in order to understand what they need to thrive. Then we need to actively design a world that has benefit for wildlife built into it and like so many other things we need to do it right away.

Fortunately this project is going to be a lot of fun and it’s going to make us healthier, livelier and more aware human beings. Sustainability is about much more than the things that we build, what we drive or what we eat, it is a transformational journey that we  are making toward personal and planetary wholeness. Exploring the world around us and attuning ourselves to the rhythms of nature is part of that process.

Jim Tolstrup is the Executive Director of the High Plains Environmental Center in Loveland, CO.  HPEC works with developers, businesses and homeowners to promote the restoration and conservation of Colorado’s native biodiversity in the suburban environments where we live, work and play. http://www.suburbitat.org 

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