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A tiger in your back yard?

When we think of endangered animals, among the first things to come to mind may be creatures like rhinoceroses, tigers, or condors. Large animals, lots of press, and pressing concerns. There are an estimated 799 eastern black rhinos, ~400 Siberian tigers, and 237 California condors left in the wild. In some cases, as with these animals, their numbers have been reduced by human assaults of various sorts. In most cases there are plenty of ongoing issues, often related to habitat loss, that either keep populations in decline or which make recovery difficult.

But these animals and their attendant situations all seem pretty far away. Their distant geography lends itself to experiential distance as well. We hear about them, we see photographs and documentaries about them, but we will likely never have a chance to encounter them in the wild. Of course, even with geographical and experiential distance, concern is still warranted, and we might donate some money to one or another of these causes, or at least keep up with the issues via the news media. But beyond that, what can we do? The situations for these animals, and many others like them, may be dire, but we realistically can’t be present with them.

What if I told you that there is an animal in our own back yard (if you live in the Vancouver area) with population numbers and threats akin to – or perhaps worse than – those facing a Siberian tiger? What if I told you that, like a tiger, it is a ferocious predator?

What if I told you that it’s a spider?

Gnaphosa snohomish. Drawing by Robb Bennett, used with permission.

The animal that I’m talking about is the Georgia Basin bog spider (Gnaphosa snohomish). It is quite likely that you’ve never heard of it until now, and very likely that you have never seen it, even unintentionally. That is because although it lives in heavily populated southwestern British Columbia and the surrounding area, it is restricted to a few small patches of habitat where, even in such a major population centre, few people ever go. And because few people ever go to where it lives, those spots are often under pressure for development – “if no one uses that area presently, why shouldn’t we turn it into something ‘useful’?” goes the thinking.

Because of where it lives – as the name implies, in boggy wetlands – the Georgia Basin bog spider’s population numbers are not fully known. Thankfully, though, some people do go and look for this creature, and what we do know is that, indeed, the population levels and threats are likely similar to some of the bigger animals mentioned in the preamble. This is not a situation that many often consider to be a problem for spiders and insects, and perhaps that is because we know so little about so many of them.

One of the main problems for this spider is that humans don’t live in bogs, at least not while they remain in their boggy condition. We tend to either drain bogs for development, harvest their moss for other uses, or use their natural conditions to grow crops like cranberries. In some cases other development, such as roadways, can have draining and polluting impacts on nearby bogs. All of these factors, and others, mean that when humans and bogs meet, the bog loses, as do many of its denizens. The Georgia Basin bog spider in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland is one of those creatures currently on the losing side of that ledger.

In recent years some detailed work has been done on the Georgia Basin bog spider. You can find some of the most recent assessments of its status and coverage of its known natural history here and here. Both of those links are PDFs.

In a nutshell (you can find all of this information, and more, in those two PDFs):

  • The Georgia Basin bog spider has been found only at fifteen sites – seven in southwestern British Columbia, and eight in northwestern Washington state. Recent work has also detected the spider at Island View Beach in Canada.
  • Take a look at this aerial view of the Burnaby Marshlands. You can see at that link the level of pressure on the habitat there. That location was the Canadian site at which the greatest number of spiders were detected in a previous (1998) survey. There is good reason to believe that this population has been extirpated between that survey and now.
  • All of this means that the overall area of occupancy for the spider in Canada is roughly only about 16 km2.
  • This also means that the spider populations are extremely isolated from one another, limiting gene flow. It is thought that these spiders “balloon”, which is when young spiders cast a silk thread and catch breezes to disperse to new locations. Spiders have little control over where the wind takes them. So one can imagine that a ballooning Georgia Basin bog spider is pretty unlikely to land, by happenstance, in a suitable sphagnum bog within its current range, let alone survive to maturity to find and successfully mate with another Georgia Basin bog spider.
  • From collection records, it seems that the spider requires wet, and seemingly preferably, peat bog conditions.
  • Of the five sites in Canada with presumably established populations, four are at 3 meters or less above sea level. So besides impacts of human activity, there is a distinct risk of seawater inundation following a seismic event (i.e., a tsunami).
Gnaphosa snohomish male, photo courtesy Darren Copley, RBCM.

The Georgia Basin bog spider – just like tigers, rhinos, or condors – has a limited range, a limited number of appropriate habitats in that range, and is increasingly impacted by ongoing development and other pressures.

And it may live in your metaphorical (or literal!) back yard.

In other words, keep an eye out for the little things that live where you live. Just like the big things that live elsewhere, they have some important stories to tell.

_____

Thanks to Robb Bennett, Jennifer Heron, Darren Copley, Patrick Lilley, and Andrew Baylis for assistance with various aspects of this blog post.

This is a cross post from A Rocha Canada.

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Rezoning of Prince George parks – my letter

This evening the Prince George City Council will be discussing the rezoning of park-designated land for development. The planning philosophy of selling park land to presumably pay for maintenance of other park land seems to be something of a growing and unfortunate trend in our city.

In response, I wrote the following letter to Council.

—–

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to express my concern with the proposed rezoning – and presumably the eventual sale and development – of the park-zoned space near to Ron Brent Elementary School. Beyond that, I am writing to express a general concern about the overall direction that the city seems to be taking toward the rezoning of park land not just at Ron Brent, but also elsewhere.

To put it concisely, our city has more than enough non-park space that is either undeveloped or languishing in seemingly permanent semi-development. Much of it is at least as near to services as is the proposed-to-be-rezoned area, and would thus be appropriate for such development without having to remove space from park inventory.

In my decade-plus living here I have repeatedly seen vast tracts of land cleared for supposed upcoming development. After clearing work, development often happens at a snail’s pace – witness much of the land adjacent to Tyner. Some land is actually cleared and then sits so long that it regrows a small forest and needs to be cleared again. Even then, I have seen cleared-twice land just sit there again for stretches of time – a prime example being whatever is going on next to the Save-On shopping complex in College Heights. Other examples of prepared-and-then-snail’s-pace development can be seen all over town. And this doesn’t even take into account the plethora of empty lots and abandoned or barely-used buildings (and even partially-built buildings, like that next to the library) ranging from the downtown core out to the various communities.

If there is something in this city that we do not lack, it is unused or poorly used land. It would be much more prudent to focus on completing development on sites like those rather than permanently removing valuable park space from residents while leaving bare development scars and shuttered buildings and projects all over our cityscape.

I understand that there is an underlying philosophy at work whereby rezoned park land is sold to developers and the money is then to be used to improve existing park land or to create new park land. How about instead ensuring that developers make proper and timely use of land upon which they propose to work and then using some of the tax revenue obtained from fully-developed land to fund park improvement? How about giving precedence and encouragement to developers who have creative ideas for the use of abandoned or slow-to-develop land and shuttered buildings, thereby also increasing tax revenues?

I am not knowledgeable of the ins and outs of the carrots and sticks used to entice and enforce development decisions, but from trends easily observable around our city it seems that there is a lot of carrot to clear and very little stick to complete.

People buy in neighborhoods in part because of the parks that are zoned there. People use and care about those particular parks in their places. Those parks improve quality of life in myriad ways. Once park land is removed from park inventory, it is never going to return to that state again. When land is designated as a park, the city has an obligation to preserve those lands, not to simply use them as a bank from which land can be withdrawn for future revenue.

If Prince George’s population was exploding at the seams and we were hemmed in by geography or political boundaries, then perhaps a case could be made for judicious use of park land. However we are not affected by any of these issues, and so it is time for the city to work with developers toward a more prudent use of our land base that does not involve the removal of existing parks from the communities that have come to rely on them.

Sincerely,
Dezene Huber

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Flying solitude

Between 7 and 21 November I flew across the country and back two times. Once for the Entomological Society of Canada Joint Annual Meeting (in lovely Montreal) and the other time for the annual CCUBC meeting (again in Montreal). I don’t normally travel this much, let alone in such a temporally concentrated manner. As a bit of a homebody, I am not a big fan of travel and prefer to keep my periodic migrations to a minimum. Don’t get me wrong, I benefitted greatly from attending both of these events, and I wouldn’t have missed either. But if there had been a way to teleport me to and from Montreal, I would have taken it even if I would have risked scrambling my atoms in the process.

No matter the complaints about the mounting security- and fee-based inconvenience of air travel, this mode has always been and will always be a heck of a lot easier than much of the travel that our near ancestors experienced. As a passenger I get to transition between climate-controlled airport gate to climate-controlled airplane with the only winter chill sometimes encountered on the boarding ramp. The food isn’t always great, but it’s not terrible, and I can find meals, snacks, and drinks (a glass of Merlot, even!) easily between flights and on the aircraft. Long travel – keeping in mind that on these trips “long” is measured in hours instead of the days or weeks of the past – can be somewhat boredom inducing. But there are in-flight entertainment systems, and I hear that we’ll all be on WiFi on aircraft pretty soon.

So this all means that I can move thousands of kilometres in a few hours; I can stay warm and fed; and I am given tools to zone my brain out. All I need to do is plug in my headset and pick a movie. And voilĂ ! Next thing I know we’re landing, brain happily disengaged the whole way.

This time, however, I was not as lucky. Or scratch that, maybe I was especially lucky, although I didn’t immediately think that I was. Specifically on three of the four legs of my flight I was assigned to the same seat in what I suspect was the same plane. The entertainment system in seat 30K had something wonky with its sound production, which meant that the music tracks of movies worked, but the spoken track sounded a lot like adults in Charlie Brown animations.

The first time that I experienced this “horrid” inconvenience I thought about buzzing the flight attendant to see what they could do about my predicament. But – perhaps because the selection of movies was iffy, or perhaps because I subconsciously knew that my brain needed a break – I decided to see how things went without a few hours of eye/brain candy. In the end I spent 15 or 20 hours during that two week span with nothing but a couple of books, the music supplied by Air Canada (decent little jazz selection, as it turns out), and my window to keep me company.

Having silence imposed on me reminded me of how little silence I generally get on a regular basis. And it also made me wonder once again if the lack of what might be called “boredom” in our daily lives has curtailed our ability to simply think. In fact I suspect that what we call boredom is really better thought of as solitude. And from what I’ve experienced it can be the best natural state of my brain – the state in which it can work at maximum revs.

During those hours in the air I read this fantastic book of poetry, and I plan to write a review at some point in the future. Short review: get it, you’ll be glad that you did. I also reread a few chapters from this book, and read some portions of this book, which I picked up from the ESC students’ silent auction.

I also stared out of the window a lot of the time. And, when you really think about it, there’s no way that if one of our ancestors – if she were transported from the past onto a plane 40,000 feet above the Rockies or the prairies or the Canadian shield – would stare aimlessly at a terrible rendition of The Fantastic Four. She’d be at the window the whole time. We’ve become so used to the technology of flight that we really don’t even care that we are doing something that humans have dreamed of from the time that they contemplated the birds around them. The only time we really even notice the amazingness of what we are doing is when we hit turbulence.

So, here are a few of my in-flight window musings:

  • We are so tiny. At 40,000 feet I am told that the furthest that one can see due to the curvature of the earth is about 400 km. Assuming that’s true (someone feel free to correct that if you would like to do the math), and that the distance as the crow flies between Vancouver and Montreal is about 3700 km, I would have had the opportunity to see about 1.48 million square km. Again, feel free to correct my rough estimates here, but one way or the other it’s a big number. During much of that time there were very few to no blatantly visible signs of humans below me. Perhaps a single road here or there, but that was about it. Even accounting for such a massive trip there was still a bit of Canada to the west, a larger bit to the east, and a vast swath to the north. At one point we passed a few dozen kilometres south of Calgary at night, and even such a sprawling city was just a moderate collection of lights on a vast sea of dark prairie. The ultimate tininess of humanity really hits home at 40,000 feet.
  • We punch above our weight. But just the fact that I was flying in a metal tube at 40,000 feet and traveling at over 800 km/h says something else. It says that though we are small, we have a massive impact. My carbon footprint on all four flights is calculated at 2.34 metric tons. An average stone in the Egyptian pyramids weighs 2.3 metric tons. That’s how much my trip, alone, spewed out – a pyramid stone’s worth! That’s big impact, multiplied by many, many people. Crossing the prairies I was reminded of how that entire ecosystem has been radically reworked by humans, another example of our bigness. And even above some of the areas that I thought would be the most isolated, I could still see the telltale little lights of small human settlements dotted here and there on the landscape.
  • We are connected. Below me I saw the various cities where my extended family lives. I passed within sight of both of my alma maters. I flew almost directly above many of my friends, professional colleagues, and various acquaintances. (One nice thing about the in-flight screen is that it shows all of the cites and towns on a map as you pass by them.) As I flew near each place I had some moments to think of each person who I knew below. There was pretty much no spot across Canada where I could say that I did not know someone within sight of my plane.

How do I tie this all together? Honestly, I’m not sure. These are simply some of the places that my thoughts went while in enforced solitude. In 15 or 20 hours, of course, I’d like to think that more than only these thoughts happened in my brain. Indeed, those thoughts and others continue to come back to me days after my travel is over. The question is, how do I ensure that I let my brain get back to being “bored” – or, rather, naturally active – again?

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Skiffs and shifts

Over the past few summers, I have been spending about a day a week (give or take) on the Crooked River just north of Prince George. This little river, just a few dozen kilometres in length, flows north from Summit Lake into McLeod Lake. Its source is just on the north side of the Arctic watershed, which in itself makes the river somewhat unique compared to the rivers just to the south. Its low-gradient, meandering nature, plus ample and fertile forest all around it make it a very rich habitat for birds, mammals, fish, and aquatic invertebrates. A quick kick sample of the river will bring up a screen writhing with all sorts of little creatures waiting to be discovered.

Part of the river is protected by a provincial park, but much of it is not. Even though there is copious logging activity (and the logging roads and bridges that go along with that), a major highway, and a rail line right alongside the river for part of its course, it is in great shape. But there is always a worry that cumulative impacts, or a substantial environmental accident along its banks could cause damage. The river is a real jewel, seemingly resilient, often overlooked by residents in the area, and potentially vulnerable to catastrophe. And it’s a place that has become important to me.

In previous summers one of my colleagues (Dr. Daniel Erasmus) and I, along with an undergraduate student (Claire), have sampled nymphs on the river, with a general focus on mayflies, but also collecting stoneflies and caddisflies. This year, in an effort to create a fairly complete checklist of the mayflies of the Crooked River, we sampled only adults. The nice thing about nymphs is that they are always there. The difficult thing is that they may be present in early (and hard-to-key) instars, or they may reside in hard-to-reach places in the channel. After substantial nymph collecting we decided that a focus this year on adults would potentially reveal a few species that we had missed, along with some further aspects of their natural history.

Our approach this summer was a combination of Malaise traps hung at the bank just over the water, and hand collecting. Malaise traps are not necessarily the best for mayflies as they don’t scuttle around too much after landing and so don’t always end up in the traps, but we had some success. Our best success though, it seems, was simple hand collecting. To do this we would enter the stream at several locations and would spend a cumulative hour of effort catching any emerging or egg-laying or otherwise flying and water-alighting mayflies that crossed our path. Often there were only two of us on the river, which meant about a half-hour of silence at each of our several sites. Silence, but for the sound of the water, or a kingfisher’s call, or a trout rising a few feet away (“darn, it took that mayfly on the water that I was about to collect”), or the grackle of the ravens that often greeted us at site CR2B. And the shush of a light summer breeze through the bank willows. So not-so-silent silence. But mind silence. And soul solace. The harmony of stillness.

That was a few months ago now, both temporally and metaphorically. Two nights ago we had our first skiff of snow here in Prince George. It is all melting now, but it is a reminder that we are soon to move from days of warm color to days of cool monochrome. On one hand that shift can be difficult for me and for others, not only because of the sudden change to sparseness on the landscape, but also, it seems, the concomitant increase in desk work and similar activities.

On the other hand, there are things to embrace about the shift as well, and embracing these can be helpful:

  • all of those mayflies need to be sorted, curated, and turned into tables and graphs. Each one, represents a singular moment in the past summer. A memory of the river. Claire is currently working on this as part of her thesis project and it’s exciting to think about what we are going to learn.
  • lots of other data from other projects; winter is the time where we get to learn to tell the stories of our summer data collection.
  • the ravens that visit me at my bus stop almost every morning during the winter.
  • my exercise regimen shifts from mainly outside to mainly inside. As a bit of a natural introvert (i.e., I don’t get charged up by crowds), this also means moving from a few passers-by to a zillion other people on the track at the gym. But that also means social interaction from time-to-time, or at least the presence of other humans. And that is as vital sometimes as the exercise.
  • the annual Entomological Society of Canada meeting, this year in lovely Montreal (and where I’ll have a poster up with some of our Crooked River caddisfly work), with plenty to learn about and colleagues and students to catch up with. And poutine.
  • in the winter semester I’ll be teaching three courses (yikes!) including my perennial favorite Animal Behaviour, and a new course for me that I’ve always wanted to teach, Invertebrate Zoology.
  • more community moments with family, friends, and colleagues while we spend more time indoors and in closer contact with each other.

Chris Buddle wrote (and videoed) a great discussion about not always being “fine”. For him and many others November can be a tough month. Personally, sometime around February is often my yearly nadir. I have found, though, that thinking ahead to that time in a mindful way can reduce the depth and, in some years, even make February a real time of hope as I see the transition to spring and the return of the light.

This year one of my plans is to think back to those moments of stillness on the Crooked River this past summer, to seek out quiet moments in the monochrome of the Prince George winter, to seek out family and friends as the winter deepens, to grab onto the good things that come with the season, and to look forward to a new spring and the rivers and forests that will still be there after they awaken from their blanket of snow.

 

 

Danie and Claire head off to collect from one of our Malaise traps on the Crooked River (upstream/downstream panorama at site CR2B).
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Book review: Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra

Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra
by Elena Johnson
2015, Gaspereau Press
48 pages
$17.95

 

 

 

 

One of my favorite poets, Dylan Thomas, once wrote the following in response to being questioned on his definition of poetry:

I, myself, do not read poetry for anything but pleasure. I read only the poems I like. This means, of course, that I have to read a lot of poems I don’t like before I find the ones I do, but, when I do find the ones I do, then all I can say is ‘Here they are’, and read them myself for pleasure.

…..

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes or rhythms, ‘Yes this is it. This is why the poem moves me so. It is because of the craftsmanship’. But you’re back again where you began.

You’re back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsman always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.

This has been my general approach to poetry over the years as well. Poetry is sort of like wine. You don’t need to explain why you don’t generally like Syrah, no matter the vintage, but can appreciate a good Merlot. When you find a poem or a poet or a school of poetry that rings for you, you will know it. Why? Because, as Thomas wrote, there is a “mystery of having been moved by words.” Elena Johnson’s “Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra” struck that mysterious chord with me. I suspect that this collection would have a good chance of doing that with any other naturalist who regularly engages in field work, whether on the alpine tundra or elsewhere.

I first noticed this book via a tweet from Nikki Reimer:

Three short lines – field notes, in fact. But lines that invoke an immediate image, right down to a slight chill in the air and the colorful lichens on the rocks all around. Reading those lines, I was drawn to that place, in that place.

This collection succeeds because, at its heart, it is all about place. In this case, the place is a research station in the Ruby Range mountains in the Yukon. Johnson spent a few weeks in 2008 there with several teams of scientists working out of the camp. The collection is a result of her time spent there and exhibits her abiding connection to the place.

The poems tend to be short featuring short – sometimes one-word – lines but containing intense imagery. There is not a poem in this book that would take you more than two minutes to read if you were to simply read it as you might prose and then move on. There is not a poem in this book, either, that will not cause you to linger and perhaps sip again like a complex Merlot. Each poem will provide a new surprise, a new flavor, upon second and further readings. In this way the poems are, indeed, field notes. Well-written field notes should contain substantial information in even a few words. These poems contain concentrated place-imagery, each word or short stanza bursting more detail onto the page with each reading than its short length belies.

Here is a stanza that many field scientists will appreciate (from “Topographic Map 115 G/1):

We hefted saws / and tubs and ropes / to drag it. / Slunk / through fog / in grizzly country / stopping briefly / to shout.

Lugging of miscellaneous field gear, the movement into the unknown, the heightened awareness, and the general silence of work punctuated by “hey bear” shouts. It is easy to feel like you’re right there, hoping that a bear is not ahead shrouded in the fog.

Or, in “Silent for the Dry Season”:

So little noise here; sound / becomes a feeling. My own blood / a humming constant.

This short stanza not only brings out the depth of silence that is encountered when we leave urban and even rural environments for the true wilderness (“sound/becomes a feeling), but Johnson’s choice of enjambment focuses the reader’s attention to the sound of their own heart ricocheting in their arteries. Silence is truly a reminder that we are alive, the counter-implication being that constant noise and distraction and resulting movement are, at times, more a pointer toward death than life.

A number of the poems are found poems taken from scientific field notes. For instance “Ptarmigan Observation Sheet” places five days of August field work – including time, GPS point, and behavioral details – into a poetic context. Those of us who take field (or lab) notes on a regular basis probably have never thought of our jotting to be poetic. Perhaps Johnson is suggesting that we rethink that. Reading our old notes should bring back images of what we saw, smelled, heard, did. Others reading those notes should have the same experience. Besides being drawn into a few days of ptarmigan life, this found poem also represents a lesson to field scientists. Specifically, if you begin think of your notes as poetry, you might take better notes.

Johnson’s book, as with any well-curated and well-edited collection, works as a larger poem in its entirety. The poems move in a series from first arrival to later departure. The first poem, “Mountain List” is a short four lines that indicate the author’s first impression of the “mountain lonely with sparrows.” Poems then range toward field work (including those found-poem notes) and losing count of time in day-to-day camp life:

I scratch lines onto a rock. / But I can’t remember if I marked yesterday, / if I already marked today.

In a poignant moment Johnson finds herself “Alone at the Base”:

The other tents / flap, flap, flap. No one / is ever coming back.

Is she worried? Or in some way wishing for deeper isolation? Or both?

The book ends with the author “Hiking Out”:

Two sandpipers clear / the brook’s edge, where / I tilt my bottle in.

The author drinks the last of the mountain and thus makes the alpine tundra a part of her, echoing the almost-eucharistic desire of field scientists to imbibe – and in a sense become a part of – their place of study.

The physical book is a work of art in its own right. The jacket features, when entirely opened up, a photograph of two caribou appearing over a nearby lichen-encrusted ridge visualizing one of the poems. Remove the jacket, and you will find a grey-on-black repeated motif of caribou. The font – Mauritius, designed by Georg Trump – on rich ivory paper in a quality binding reminds the reader that this is a book to come back to.

I highly recommend that you read a few of Johnson’s poems from the book and – if the “mystery” of being “moved by (the) words” manifests – that you purchase the collection.