In boggy forests one can often find hundreds of these gleaming yellow spathes rising out of the black muck; the first harbingers of spring, they almost seem to be candles lighting the forest in preparation for the pageant that is to follow.
O’CLair, Armstrong, Carstensen, The nature of Southeast Alaska
Today’s the first day I’ve noticed skunk cabbage this year, which seems a bit late. Cedar tried one nibble of the yellow spadix, the flower that comes up before the leaves (which get gigantic over the course of the summer). She wasn’t impressed. I am, though. The plants really are remarkable: they can generate their own underground heat (with temps reaching the 70s when the ground still has snow), and a single plant can live to be up to 70 years old.
As Molly points out, it’s on.
Reel by Molly Box at https://www.instagram.com/p/CbnzInTALLUfSeAX03qzAnXx6TzllW_YcWDxVk0/
“If young communities are nature’s grocery stores, old communities are the banks, where productivity is hoarded and nurtured and carefully rationed out. Old growth is not our breadbasket. The real “resource “of old growth is buried in the bonds between species, in the elderly way the pieces fit together, in longevity, and in the thousand lessons we’ve not yet learned.”
Rita O’Clair, Robert Armstrong, Richard Carstensen, The Nature of SoutheasT Alaska
Although a writing exercise under this title could allow me to fully confess the depths of my physical decline over the years, or to be honest about my role on my last hockey team, I’ll stick with the forest.
I spend a lot of time marveling at “nurse logs” in the Bigtrees. Cedar likes ‘em too. (The other day, while I was looking at the blueberry bushes and young hemlocks thriving on top of a downed log, she dug like crazy and emerged with a tennis ball.) I also love to see how trees have grown on and around stumps that later decay (apparently it takes a 30” spruce log 50 years to fully decay, not sure about tennis balls), leaving Dr. Seuss-like bases and telling an old slow story that maybe I’m slowing down enough to just begin to hear.
Perfect habitat for seedlings (here spruce, hemlock and blueberry).
I’ve been amazed at the number of blowdowns I’ve started to notice.
Apparently hemlocks have heart rot even when living, so tend to break off…
and decompose fairly rapidly.
Armstrong, Carstensen, and O’Clair remind us that “nature never wastes dead wood.” Fallen logs are a key part of the old growth community around here. They preserve moisture during droughts, stabilize sliding terrain, provide habitat for all kinds of succession, and make nurseries for hemlocks, blueberries, and invertebrates who may eventually feed our fish.
It turns out more fully disturbed or exposed areas offer more immediate food to most wildlife, but that the old growth forests like “ours” become survival habitat, protecting rather than immediately nourishing the stuff needed for thriving organisms, but also making just enough available during hard times. There’s no question that the Bigtree trail gave me and Cedar shelter during the worst of the winter.
I was shocked this morning by the profusion of blueberry blossoms—in a spectrum of gold to green to pink. Spring is on us whether the weather agrees or not. In no time the Devil’s Club leaves will obscure much of the visibility off trail, so it seems worth a moment to ponder the slow story of what’s going on on the ground level. And at least to raise a glass (or camera) to my fellow dead wood.
May we find ourselves, mid-decay, revealing one or two of those thousand lessons, or at least fitting a few pieces together.
I swear the blossoms were changing color as I watched. Happy April!
“Most carnivores would not pass up a meal of porcupine.”
This one sentence from The Nature of Southeast Alaska says more than I really want to fathom about the world.
My favorite other carnivore and I have only encountered one live porky on our walks so far, but over the winter Cedar brought me a few souvenirs –including one quill in her lower gum–from maybe the same porky we watched a few months earlier.
Porky parts, compliments of our trusty (?) retriever
According to neighbor Molly (and the new contender, sorry Mom, for most faithful reader), this poor porkster was done in by an eagle. If it’s the one I think it is (was), its life accomplishments included “girdling” and killing a nice ornamental pine in the yard where it met talons.
Turns out these funny looking pot-bellied waddlers may be the dominant herbivores in the nearby woods. Apparently, that domination is sponsored by its incisor teeth.
Again from The Nature of Southeast Alaska, about the rodent family of beavers, porcupines, and hoary marmots:
A rodent could be defined, with apologies to kangaroo rats and other racy exceptions, as a plump and visually unimpressive body designed to transport a truly impressive set of curved, chisel-tipped, ever growing, self-sharpening incisors. The incisor has been for rodents what gunpowder was for European invaders of the new world.
O’Clair, Armstrong, Carstensen, The Nature of Southeast Alaska, 1997
Well, even gunpowder backfires sometimes. I have learned a few interesting factoids about these dudes (and porkettes), though. First, of course, you’re wondering how on earth they mate, right? The Nature of Southeast Alaska calls it a “brief but spectacular” event, but gives no salacious details. Luckily (?) the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game edges us closer to porky porn (sorry, Mom).
Males seeking receptive females expand their home ranges up to five times the normal size. If more than one male shows interest in the same female, they will fight for the opportunity to mate with the female. Males use their incisor teeth and quills when fighting, and usually the largest and heaviest male wins. The breeding male then splashes the female with urine. If she is not ready to mate, she shakes off the urine and leaves. If she is ready, she stays and the male mounts in the traditional posture with the female in front and the male in the rear. She will curl her tail over her back, covering most of the quills.
North American Porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) , Alaska Department of fish and Game Website
So, old Erethizon D. gets it started with a golden shower, and apparently a girl or two likes that. Who knew? They want to get it right, though, because they only make one baby per year and have a crazy-long gestation period (7 months). Maybe that explains why she only covers “most of the quills.”
But back to not passing up the meal. Should you find yourself famished in our neighborhood, you may want to do as fishers and wolves do, circling it, biting its nose repeatedly, and then flip when ready, and…it’s bon apetit from the underside.
Besides their quills (which I’ve learned some folks capture for art by making contact with styrofoam boards) porkies have a few more tricks up their sleeveless sleeves. And this may be of value to my carnivore. After flashing a “rosette” of quills under their tails, they also emit a chemical from under their skin that The Nature of Southeast Alaska describes as “a mixture of strong, unwashed human body odor, marijuana and coconut.” That ought to either trigger flight, or a nose vacation not unlike a trip to a beach in Mexico. We’ll see.
And you knew I’d get to Shakespeare, to make my not-so-gracious exit from this one. Looking at this porkster’s little “fingers,” I couldn’t help but feel a bit of empathy for this fellow as Hamlet did looking at the skull of the old jester, Yorick. That, and I don’t really want to dwell too long on what the next porky post may entail.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
I’ve written elsewhere about Gary Paulsen’s My Life in Dog Years, but it occurred to me this weekend, during the dreaded spring cleaning, that our girl’s little life is recorded in the complete backyard scatological record.
This post is mainly to disabuse myself of any remaining romance—that having a dog might place me in a Paulsen-esque narrative. Instead, it leaves me right here, in three or four hundred dollars’ worth of dog food’s deep shit. A sordid tale indeed. Hope your weekend was more exciting than mine.
(I herby relinquish any last claims to having an audience.)
Early reconnaissance
Aerial pup turds
Little cuties…(Wait, those colors are not found in nature.)
Once warm fuzzies
A Cedar platter (and more technicolor)…
Shit is getting real
You’re a big girl now…
“A redolent story of back yard adventures…”
“A rich and fervent performance by a young actor full of…potential.”
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