In A Rut

Spring is when new babies appear all over the woods and fields, but the miracle of life is starting right now with the rut, also known as mating season. Now is the time of spectacular antler battles as young males challenge the older, established males.

Among the hoofed mammals like deer, elk, and bison, one or a handful of males control harems of females. While we humans concern ourselves with obtaining the next shiny piece of technology to come along, these guys are driven only by passing their genes to the next generation. Do successfully do that, they must either challenge the big guy or fend off a challenge.

All that fighting sometimes takes a toll on dominant male. Fatal injuries are not common, but exhaustion with sometimes take a life. Other times, an opportunistic male with sneak in and steal a mate while the alpha is fighting a challenger.

This is peak season for deer vs car incidents because they are only thinking of one thing, and it’d not safety. They are crepuscular- most active around sunrise and sunset so use extreme caution at those times.

Elk are known for their bugling sound during the rut. This National Park Service link will let you have a listen at this eerie phenomenon.

Why are all these critters mating now? Because the births are timed to occur in spring when food is plentiful. If there is anything nature is good at, it’s timing.

A Day at the Beach, Nature Style

It’s Labor Day weekend and the unofficial end of summer, so let’s take a trip to the beach and check out the tide pools. Growing up in Pennsylvania, my only marine biology experience was seagulls and jelly fish at the sandy beaches of the Jersey Shore. Moving to Washington opened up a whole new dimension of ocean life for me.

Washington has rocky beaches in some areas and sandy beaches in others. The best sandy beaches have large rocky outcroppings called sea stacks. At low tide, the rocks reveal their living treasures. I also had my first seal encounter, but unfortunately this harbor seal was a carcass.

Sea Stacks

My best tide pool walk was at Olympic National Park’s Ruby Beach. I just happened to time it with the super low tide that comes with a full moon and summer solstice. Instead of just the usual starfish and anemones, we were also treated to sponges, chitons, and even a shrimp. Higher rocks had an assortment of mussels, barnacles, and snails. Snails prey on barnacles, and I managed to witness this segment of the circle of life.

Giant green anemones

Ochre Sea Stars

Chiton

Barnacle (white) and Mussels (black)

Snail eating barnacle

Dash Point State Park’s sandy beach has a nice batch of sand dollars. These are living critters, not just fancy shells in a store. Live sand dollars are fuzzy and should be left alone. Only pick up the bleached white ones.

The tide pools of a rocky beach, such as Larabee State Park, are different. There, I encountered pools of standing ocean water teeming with life, rather than exposed to the elements like at Ruby Beach. Larabee gave up crabs, limpets, sea cucumbers, starfish, and anemones. 

Crab and limpets

Sea Cucumber

There was even a pig at the beach last time I was there. Apparently Washingtonians take their livestock to the beach. I came across a chicken with its human at Shilshole Beach in Seattle.

Pig at the beach

Chicken getting ready to hit the beach

Happy Birthday National Park Service!

Today marks the 100^th anniversary of the National Park Service’s founding. As the stewards of America’s natural, cultural, and historic treasures NPS’s mission has evolved over the century. Let’s have a look at how NPS has changed with the times.

America’s national parks began when Andrew Jackson set aside the area that would one day become Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas. Abraham Lincoln set aside the Yosemite Valley in California. In 1872 Congress created Yellowstone National Park, the first such designation in the world. By August 1916 there were a dozen national parks created by Congress, plus national monuments designated by presidents under the Antiquities Act of 1906. Some were managed by the Department of the Interior, some were managed by the US Forest Service (Department of Agriculture), and others were managed by the US Army. The growing system of parks and monuments needed unification under a single agency with a single purpose. On August 25, 1916 Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act into law, establishing that agency under the Department of the Interior.

Yellowstone was established “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people”. The Organic Act of 1916 expanded the government’s role in protecting Yellowstone and the other national parks by stating the NPS mission: “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Stephen Mather was chosen as the first NPS director, serving until 1929. A great proponent of the NPS’s creation, he worked tirelessly to promote the national parks and during his tenure the park system expanded to include the first three parks east of the Mississippi: Great Smokey Mountains, Shenandoah, and Mammoth Caves. Partnering with the railroads, Mather was able to meet his goal of increasing visitors to the parks. He felt that without visitors Congress would have no incentive to create new parks and maintain existing ones.

In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt greatly expanded NPS by issuing an executive order transferring 56 national monuments and military sites from the US Forest Service and War Departments to NPS. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) made improvements to amenities in national parks and other areas, such as trail maintenance and building campgrounds. The Great Depression also brought the vintage National Park Posters. I enjoy these posters and would like to see a new issue of vintage-style posters for all existing NPS units.

During the period of 1933-1966 the NOS mission focused more on recreation than preservation. This is the era of bear feeding shows at Yellowstone. Of course, this encouraged bears to panhandle rather than live as wild animals but the public loved it. Unless they were being mauled by bears, as sometimes happens during bear-human encounters.

Bear feeding program at Yellowstone's dump

Conditioned bears looking for a handout

Mission 66 was a revitalization effort gearing up to the NPS 50^th anniversary in 1966. Improved roads and visitor centers were the primary focus to ensure visitors could access the parks and learn a little bit while there.

Other changes during this time include the creation of the National Recreation Areas in the NPS system. Initially centered around new dams built during the Great Depression, these areas also came to include urban areas such as Golden Gate NRA in San Francisco and Gateway NRA in the New York area which were established to preserve open space and bring the parks to the people.

Today, NPS struggles to find a balance between preservation and public use. Each park periodically updates its management plan with various proposals and period of public review and comment. Many interest groups want a say in how the parks are run. There are conservationists, thrillseekers, casual day users, outdoor enthusiasts, concessionaires, industry representatives, business owners catering to park visitors, and local residents near the parks. Each has an idea of how they want their park to operate. What we all need to remember is that is our park, but we must share it because it belongs to everyone.

The Hidden Community (Part 2 of 2)

Have a look at your lawn. Under the immaculate grass is an invisible world, the soil community. Your yard, like millions of others, is home to an amazing assortment of critters. Most of them you will never see. They range in size from microscopic bacteria and fungi to macroscopic moles and gophers. Each plays its own important role in maintaining ecological balance.

Many soil organisms play a key role in several mineral cycles, including the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle. I don’t want to say any one organism is more important than any other because they are all cogs on the same great wheel of life, but if I had to I would assign that title to nitrogen-fixing bacteria. These little guys have a symbiotic relationship with plants that allows plants to absorb nitrogen, which is critical to their growth and development. And we all know plants are critical for everything else that’s alive.

Decomposers such as fungi and bacteria consume dead plant and animal material. In doing so, they return carbon and other nutrients that had been locked up in dead material to the soil where it is absorbed by plants and becomes life again.

Below is a chart of a simplified soil food web.

Other soil organisms like earthworms and moles aerate the soil with their tunnels. The tunnels allow for easier movement by air and water, benefiting plants and animals alike. Moles might be ruining your perfect lawn by making look not so nice, but they are actually making it healthier by doing some free landscape work.

Again, information is courtesy of my soil science textbook Soil Science and Management by Edward Plaster.

Did you know? Mushrooms are actually the fruiting bodies of fungi. The “body” of a fungus is actually a collection of long, thread-like cells that can be very compact or quite large. (Thanks to University of California Museum of Paleontology, http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/fungi/fungimm.html)

The largest organism in the world is in fact a fungus. It lives in Oregon and is estimated at 1900 to 8650 years old. It covers 2385 acres in Malheur National Forest of eastern Oregon and is known as the Humongous Fungus. (US Forest Service, http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsbdev3_033146.pdf)              

The Real Dirt on Soil (Part 1 of 2)

In last week’s episode of Nature Minute I pointed out that the wildflowers at Mount Rainier support an ecosystem. Plants are the base of the food chain. We all know that plants convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into food energy. Water is also necessary. But commonly overlooked as essential to all life is soil.

What is soil? More than just dirt, it is a mixture of mineral and organic material that develops over long period of time. Geological and climactic forces and chemical reactions break down rock to form the mineral side of soil, while decomposing plants and animals supply the organic material.

Plants generally don’t move a lot so soil is important because it gives them a place to “put down their roots”. Many plants live on land, and those that do absorb their water from the soil. But soil is where the food chain begins. Look at the nutritional information on a food package. All those minerals start out in the soil. Plants absorb them and they move up the food chain into your chicken noodle soup.

Not all soils are created equal. Parent material (the rock which weathers into soil), organic composition, water, and climate all affect the soil. There are 12 orders of soil, and each order is further divided into groups, families, and series. Each type of soil is suitable for different types of plants.

The official soil profile for my location in Eatonville shows a great deal of sandy loam. Sand, silt, and clay are different particle sizes in the soil world. Sand is the largest and coarsest, silt is smaller and finer, and clay is the smallest and finest. Sand is porous and gives soil its ability to drain water. Clay particles stick together (if you’ve done arts and crafts with clay you will attest to its stickiness) and block drainage. The diagram below shows how the different particle mix to create different soil textures.

In my travels through nature working with amphibians, my biggest concern with soil so far has been whether or not wetlands are present. The three factors that determine whether or not you are dealing with wetlands are: 1 hydrophytic (water tolerant) plants, 2 hydric soils, and 3 hydrology (water movement). Hydric soils are characteristic of wetlands because they are flooded or saturated long enough to become anaerobic (lacking oxygen).

While plants are the base of an ecosystem, it is soil that determines the makeup of the ecosystem. You can overlook its importance and even walk all over it, but soil is another way that everything on the planet is connected. Next week is Part 2 of soil. Stay tuned!

This week’s soil information is courtesy of my soil science textbook Soil Science and Management by Edward Plaster.