The Colorado Plateau (5/2/2024)

If you are somewhat of a regular, you know I always have a few books open, and yes I need to update my reading list on this blog. Currently, I am reading Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. While this is a required reading as I describe <here>, I am getting a lot of enjoyment out of it. Abbey is a radical; he was on the FBI watch list, and I just read that he wanted to grind up all the domestic dogs into hamburger and feed it to the coyotes. He was hoping that this might change the tune of coyotes and make them more pleasurable to listen to. I have heard many coyotes in the Chihuahua of southern New Mexico during the field work that I was doing for my Ph.D. On top of that we have seen and heard them in the woods behind our home here in suburban Virginia. I dare to differ with Abbey in that I actually enjoy their shenanigans and howling.

Abbey's description of the landscape in the Moab area hits me in the guts. I spent time in the area in 1980 and 1981 to do field work for my Masters. His description of the landscape is amazing: the Henry Mountains, Dead Horse Mesa, the La Sal mountains, the towns of Hanksville, Blanding and Moab, the Bear’s Ears, and of course Arches National Park. My research plots of the time were in the Henry Mountains, near Fry Canyon, in the mountains near Monticello (between Blanding and Moab), and near Green River. 

I realize now that I might as well have spent time on some of the mines Abbey wrote about but were abandoned when I spent time there in 1980. Abbey wrote about uranium prospecting in his book, and I was working on the results of all that work.  As I am sure, a lot of you are aware of, uranium was used to generate energy and for more sinister reasons such as blowing up things and killing millions with one small bomb.  Southeastern Utah and the Moab area is littered with mine shafts dug into the cliff sides and piles of waste materials that were dumped below those holes. These dump sites were bare, and we were doing research on the revegetation of these piles. 

 My research involved the revegetation of uranium mine-spoils. Uranium and its mining features heavily in Desert Solitaire. In the 1940s, 50s and 60s uranium was in huge demand; areas in Ontario Canada and in the Canyon lands had some the largest deposits of that mineral in North America.  At the time Blanding had a uranium enrichment plant.  I also worked on a site of another uranium enrichment plant in the Red Desert of Wyoming, just north of Green River, UT and Rawlings, WY.  That plant had a large herd of wild horses nearby and it was always fun watching them gallop through the area.   

One of my favorite experiences was my work near Fry Canyon. The canyon was aptly named, it was scorching hot in July. My thermometer read 110 degrees. It had the typical desert vegetation of juniper, salt bush, galleta grass, Indian rice grass and I remember seeing mallows, sunflowers and cacti. We had our two dogs with us and during the day they slept under the truck I was driving. We had to drive up a dirt road in the canyon and arrived at my plot after maybe a half hour to forty-five minutes off-road driving. Camping there was fun as well. Just nice to be out so remote in the desert with no extraneous sounds or lights. It is something that the folks I follow on YouTube (my guilty pleasure) that live in vans out West often do. I remember wondering about cougars, poisonous snakes, scorpions and coyotes.

In 1980 we showed my parents around the Four Corners Region when they visited from the Netherlands, and we took them to Moab, Arches and Dead Horse Mesa. What still amazes me was that during our visit to Dead Horse Point, we were standing and looking at the Colorado River, when a car drove up and two Dutch ladies stepped out, speaking Dutch. At that point there were five citizens of the Netherlands and only one American on the point. Quite a coincidence. One of my favorite memories is that after the meeting we decided to drive down a dirt road to the Colorado River. My wife Donna walked in front of the car (an old AMC Pacer) to move all the big rocks out of the way, make sure we would not bottom out or slide down the ravine.

As I mentioned before, we returned to the area in 1992 and it was great to see it again. I was more of desert rat by then, after getting my Ph.D. and subsequently having lived on the Colorado Plateau in Gallup. Abbey's description of the Navajo, the people, the nation and the treatment of the people was very familiar as well; I spent 3 years working with and around the Navajos. I describe our recent visit to Gallup and the region <here>.

Anyway, these are some of the things that I am reminded of when I read Abbeys book. While he is an interesting writer with great observations, his book can be tedious at times because of the run-on sentences and the difficult words. This is something I try to avoid in my lousy writing, but Abbey is a master. I found one sentence that is an entire paragraph long and in print was something like ten printed lines in the book. Moreover, I had to use a dictionary to look up some of the words he uses. But he was radical; while most of the time I agree with him, I would not dare to put some of it in print. He had guts and called it out.

I hope it was somewhat interesting and motivates you to pick up this interesting book.

September 24, 2024, my return to the desert of the Colorado Plateau.

Come on baby, light my fire (11/21/2018)

On January 8, 2015 Donald Trump, the man soon to be our president tweeted the following:

“Who is paying for that tedious Smokey Bear commercial that is on all the time - enough already!”

The latest count (Sunday, November 18) of the ”Camp fire” is 77 people dead and 993 missing. During a visit, the president seemed to have claimed that more raking would have helped, because that is what they do in a forest rich Finland. Moreover, the president did mention that he did not think it was climate change that caused it, but that he wanted great climate, which left many who attended the meeting baffled at what he meant. I wonder if he got a whiff of some nearby pot plantations going up in smoke.

Well, as we all can imagine, the internet has been having fun with all this, but on a serious side, this is a terrible situation. I am not writing this blog post to complain about or have fun with our president; well I admit, maybe a little.

Forest fires are a serious business; as we can see they can cause the loss of life and extensive property damage. I am in no way trying to downplay the severity of what happened with the title of my blog.  The pictures and the videos on YouTube are horrific.  The problem is that wildfire is a natural element of nature and actually a vital part of nature in many cases, depending of course on the ecosystem. Forest fires are needed to open up the system, the decrease the litter or dead materials that have accumulated on the soil surface.  Our problem is that fire suppression has caused the accumulation of too much fuel which results in these destructive fires.

The accumulating material also causes other problems.  It chokes out the seedlings and small plants trying to germinate, and areas that are burned show a tremendous greening up after a fire.  In addition, fire kills some of the smaller weedy species, sick and damaged trees; it opens up the canopy, allowing the sunlight to reach the floor of the forest giving the herbaceous plants an additional  chance to proliferate.

Some forest dwelling species are actually dependent on forest fires. My favorite example is the red cockaded woodpecker in the southeastern part of the U.S. This bird needs to nest in big old pine trees in a forest. However, these forest need to be open with often a grassy understory and no small trees. The way to maintain this was through fires. In the old days, this was not a problem, but with increased habitation, folks started controlling forest fires and oaks to the detriment of the woodpecker invaded the woods. Wildfires killed the oaks seedlings and the control of fire have a region-wide negative impact on the woodpecker population.

The woodpeckers were able to thrive in one particular area. That was on the life-firing ranges of military bases in the southeast. The life artillery often would set these areas ablaze with wildfires and this was just what the birds needed. While they were not bothered a lot by the artillery (except by a direct or a nearby hit), the resulting fires would keep the ecosystem open. Nowadays, managers use fire or control burns to manage remaining habitat of or restore habitat for the red cockaded woodpecker.

When we moved into our home some 18 years ago and walked in the woods behind our home, we noticed that the area had recently burned. There were black burn marks on the bases of the trees and actually, there were two areas that it obviously was replanted in the past 5 to 10 years, which I always assumed was the result of some kind of disturbance, which could have been a very intense crown fire.

Walking through the area with the burn marks now, I cannot find them anymore. The trees have grown and new bark has covered all the burn scars. It reminds me of some of the dendrochronology (tree aging) work I did in New Mexico in the late 1980. There, on 150 year-old or even older trees we could still see exactly what year there was a fire in these woods. In addition, we could see what direction the fire came from that year. It is pretty darn cool to be able to see that, but I digress. What it shows was that even in New Mexico where it is dry, the high elevation forests (at 7 to 9000 feet or so) did have a regular fire regime, as do most ecosystems in the U.S. Albeit, the fire frequency there was much longer.

Behind my home, like most in most of the ecosystems, fire suppression reigns supreme. What is happening is that there is a tremendous amount fuel building up in these areas. This include years of leaf litter, fallen branches, twigs and whole trees that were brought down by storms. The result is that herbs have a difficult time growing, seeds cannot germinate, and if a fire happens to get started, it may get so hot and high that it could get all the way into the canopy of the trees instead of being just a ground fire. Once it hits the tree canopy, the fire can spread fast and easily. It then can jump to roofs of homes and even create its own weather. Now it is difficult to contain. This is what we are seeing in California. 

This picture shows an area with some old fallen trees.  While a fire may burn some of this, these trees will most likely not create much of an issue during a wildfire.  They are wet and rotting.  They are likely to smolder; moreover, they are important habitat for the salamanders and other creatures living in the woods behind our home.

This area on the other hand has a lot of wood laying over each other like "pick up sticks."  This is already set up as a nice camp fire.  If we ever get a wildfire through here, I am afraid it is off to the races.  You can see the homes in the background.

 Sections of the woods behind our home have a huge accumulation of debris. We have had a number of hurricanes that threw trees, folks from our neighborhood have used it as dump for their yard waste, and we have had more than 25 years of accumulation of litter. I am not sure, but I estimate that the fire frequency of our woods is somewhere between 10 and 20 years, if not more frequent. Yes, our woods are very wet, so a fire would be spotty and a burn would look like the spots on a Dalmatian, or better the areas not burned would look like the black spots on a Dalmatian. However, that is ok, it contributes to the diversity of the woods behind our home. 

One thing is for sure, we need to stop being afraid of fire, because if we do, fuel will build up and we might end up with a catastrophic fire instead. While smoky is correct, control burns are good, and forest management is important. While control burns may not have prevented the “Camp fire”, together with well-funded forest management it might have been less severe and less catastrophic. The same could be the case behind our home. The woods are divided in two sections, and the part managed by Newport News is better managed and in better shape than the part managed by the National Park Service, which is underfunded. They simply do not have enough money to do forest management. 

People on Twitter were having fun with this picture after the president's visit to the disaster area in California over the weekend.  It is what has happened and what we are also seen in our National Park; a severe lack of funding.

Therefore, my call to action is to:

1. Insist on fully funding forest and wildland management, whether that is by way of the Forest Service, the BLM, the National Park Service, or even your local state or county land/park management agency, and
2. Make fire (read: control burns) your friend!

Wakefield (4/11/2015)

Spent a wonderful time Saturday running around in Surry, Sussex and Southampton Counties.  This is a more rural/agricultural area of the coastal plains of Virginia.  Our road trip started with a ferry ride across the James River from Jamestown to Scotland.  We first visited Chippokes State Park.  They were holding a fiber festival and were sheering sheep and alpacas and selling wool and its paraphernalia and peanuts.  This was my first visit to Chippokes; I think I've always considered it less attractive and less charismatic, since it is so close to home, in an area that I know well, ecologically, environmentally and from being on the water so much.  But I was proven wrong; in our minds, while we were driving through the place, we were already renting a cabin for a weekend sometime this fall.  The fiber festival was small and intimate.

This visit was followed by lunch at the Virginia Diner.  The diner is a great place the have some interesting Virginia style food, and our current all time favorite: Peanut pie!  It seems that Guy Fieri from Food Channel's Diners Drive-Ins and Dives visited the diner for the first season of the show.  The Virginia Diner also sells lots of peanuts and it is a great meeting place.  That brings you to the economy of the area.  Driving around, you see agriculture and forestry; that's basically it.  Agriculture includes a lot of peanuts and pork, although I understand peanuts are somewhat on their way out and being replaced by cotton, corn and soybeans.

After lunch we visited a natural area that is managed in a different way than many of the woods here in Virginia.  The photograph below shows you what I mean:

Very rarely do you see a savanna type forest as you see in this photograph.  This type of forest (vegetation) is somewhat more prevalent further south, but even there it is on it's way out.  This vegetation is a typical example of a stand that is frequently burned.  Yes you can see some of the scarring on the trees, but pines can and will survive it, at least when the fire does not get too hot.  All the needles on the ground will burn up, giving grasses a better chance to get established.  Moreover, most of the broad-leaf species do not like fire and they are suppressed.  The photo below somehow show this as well.  The area to the left appeared to have been burned last year while the area on the right-hand side of the trail was burned a few years earlier.  You can see to invasion of the broad-leaf species such as oaks and gums.

As regular readers know, I am such a proponent of maintaining the natural balance in the woods.  I have lamented about the lack of predators in the woods (just look for the labels for "deer", "natural balance", or even "wolves", to read some of my postings on that subject).  The lack of fire in these forest ecosystems is another one of those things that is sorely missing in our area and in many areas.  Yes, fire consumes a lot of biomass in a forest (or at least it looks like that); it kills a lot of the hardwoods; it produces a lot of smoke; and it might threaten human life and property (as we see in some of the California fires), but the complete fire control allowed for the development of forests that the first colonizers would not recognize.  Driving back through Isle of Wight County after a day in these woods we were astonished that you could hardly look more than 10 feet into the woods and everything was blocked by crappy plants that live in the edge of wood lots.  A walk though the woods behind our home was an eye opener after a day like Saturday.  There in so much dead biomass built up in those woods from fallen trees, which in addition, to all the leaves and needles have made these woods a complete fire trap.  On top of that, these woods without fire are not very diverse.  The layer of leaves are basically prevents the seeds from germinating and this really impoverishes the forests.  Naturally those damn deer don't help.  An additional positive impact of fire is that it may keep some of the non-native plants that are trying to invade our woods under control.

It is amazing what the reintroduction of fire did to the area.  Our guide told us that he has never seen a fox in the area, while at the same time we stopped to admire some rare birds and carnivorous (flesh eating) plants.  In all, this again shows the result of humans modifying the environment we live in.  Whether it is killing wolves or suppressing wild fires, the environment changes as a result of these modifications, often with unintended and unanticipated results, all the while doing it thinking we are doing it for the benefit of humanity.  It was an exhilarating day and we learned a lot.

Beautyberry (10/14/2014)

You can always notice it is fall when the beauty berries in our yard start producing their bright purple fruit.  Beautyberries are a very common native (weedy) species in our yard.  We started with one, just in the right spot, and now two or three years later we have three additional plants scattered throughout the yard.  Since the fruit is a bird favorite, you can guess where we get the new plants: underneath existing shrubs and trees.  Birds eat the fruit and poop out the seed, usually when the sit on a perch.

I saw this when managing on a 400 acre ecosystem restoration project in the Indianapolis area.  We had planted tree seedlings in rows in all these acres of farmland and we were required to monitor the success.  We started to notice that volunteer seedlings were germinating everywhere.  While seedlings of plants with light seeds established were germinating throughout the area, we saw that seedlings from plants with fruits were germinating only at the bases of the tallest seedling we had planted.  This was pure evidence that birds were using the tallest seedlings as perches to look over the field and pooping out seeds.  Great to see nature in action like that.

Honestly, I love beautyberries. Callicarpa americana as it is known in scientific terms is a great native plant, it serves as food for birds during a time they are fattening up for winter or migration.  It seems that the plant has a chemical compound in its leaves that repels mosquitoes, and in our yard we need all the help we can get.

I am posting this picture as part of Cee's Fun Photo Challenge.  This weeks challenge was to post a picture with vibrant colors, and lucky me, I took this photograph this past weekend.