What Should a Clever Moose Eat?: Natural History, Ecology, and the North Woods
256
What Should a Clever Moose Eat?: Natural History, Ecology, and the North Woods
256Overview
In What Should a Clever Moose Eat?, John Pastor explores the natural history of the North Woods, an immense and complex forest that stretches from the western shore of Lake Superior to the far coast of Newfoundland. The North Woods is one of the most ecologically and geologically interesting places on the planet, with a host of natural history questions arising from each spruce or sugar maple. From the geological history of the region to the shapes of leaves and the relationship between aspens, caterpillars, and predators, Pastor delves into a captivating range of topics as diverse as the North Woods themselves. Through his meticulous observations of the natural world, scientists and nonscientists alike learn to ask natural history questions and form their own theories, gaining a greater understanding of and love for the North Woods—and other natural places precious to them.
In the tradition of Charles Darwin and Henry David Thoreau, John Pastor is a joyful observer of nature who makes sharp connections and moves deftly from observation to theory. Take a walk in John Pastor's North Woods—you'll come away with a new appreciation for details, for the game trails, beaver ponds, and patterns of growth around you, and won't look at the natural world in the same way again.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781610916783 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Island Press |
| Publication date: | 02/04/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
What Should a Clever Moose Eat?
Natural History, Ecology, and the North Woods
By John Pastor
ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 2016 John PastorAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-677-6
CHAPTER 1
Setting the Stage
How the ice sheet sculpted a landscape of surprisingly high diversity of landforms that control the flow and distribution of water.
Robert Frost, whose poems often contain perceptive observations about the natural history of the North Woods, said that ice "would suffice" for the world's destruction, but he had it exactly backward. Ice, in the form of a massive continental ice sheet, was responsible not for the destruction of the northern world but for the creation of the landscape on which the North Woods assembled itself. Ecology may be the theater for the evolutionary play, but the sculpting of this landscape by the ice sheet set the stage for the assembly of northern food webs and ecosystems and the evolution of the organisms they comprise. Before the North Woods assembled itself as its species arrived from the South, before the moose, beaver, and loons arrived, there was the land emerging from beneath several kilometers of ice. The natural history of organisms is in part a set of adaptations to the landscapes they live in, and these landscapes are shaped by their underlying geology.
Our understanding of how ice created the northern landscape did not begin in North America but along the Swedish shore of the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea, a region whose forests and shorelines are strikingly similar to those of Lake Superior, both today and in the distant past. In the early 1700s Anders Celsius, a Swedish geographer, astronomer, colleague of Linnaeus, and the inventor of the temperature scale, was studying records of the locations of old Viking villages. Celsius noticed that quite a few villages that were on the shore in Viking times were by then up to a kilometer inland. Being seagoing people, Vikings did not move villages inland. Plenty of people, from local villagers to scholars in Uppsala, must have noticed the inland displacement of Viking villages but gave it no further consideration. Instead, it was Celsius who thought long and hard about what this observation might mean. His thoughts and investigations eventually led to a revolution in the way we understand the earth in general and the origin of the North Woods in particular.
Celsius realized that the inland displacement of Viking villages meant that either the land was rising or the sea was falling, but he did not know which or why. To shed more light on what was happening, he decided to measure the rate of this displacement by taking a chisel in hand and carving lines in cliff faces at the water surface on the Baltic shore in northern Sweden. Above the line, he carved the date and his initials. He then instructed his students and their academic descendants to do the same periodically and measure the distance between his line carved in the early 1700s and theirs carved decades and centuries later. Thus began what is perhaps the first systematic, long-term ecological experiment.
These chiseled marks, which can still be seen today, are aligned in columns up several rock faces on the northern shores of the Baltic. They remind one of the marks parents sometimes make on doorjambs to record the growth of their children. They are often accompanied by a crown with the initials and number of whichever King Gustav happened to reign at the time. These are striking hieroglyphics, with deep scientific meaning about the history and stability of the land. I've visited these shores several times during the past two decades while doing research in northern Sweden with my friend and colleague Kjell Danell. It is always a remarkable experience to stand at the waterline, look at these marks, and realize that the spot where Celsius knelt and made them three centuries ago is now 2 or 3 meters up the rock face. These marks were the first demonstration that sea level and the crust of the earth are not stable; thus began the science of geology as the study of the dynamics of the earth and not just its structure.
Celsius eventually came to think that the vertical displacement of land and sea meant the sea level was falling. Given a long enough record, this hypothesis could be easily tested. If the land is stable and the sea level is falling, then the sea level should fall down from Celsius's original marks by the same amount at every spot along the coast. But by the late 1700s, his students found that the vertical displacement of land and sea was uneven across the Baltic. Swedish geologists then concluded that the land must be rising and taking Celsius's original chisel marks with it at different rates in different places. Still, they did not know (yet) what was causing the land to rise.
The next clue to what was happening came from Switzerland. In the early 1800s, Jean Charpentier, a Swiss geologist, called the attention of Louis Agassiz, his compatriot and colleague, to the boulders scattered across the Swiss landscape downvalley from glaciers. These boulders were curious because they were of different rock types from the local bedrock they were perched on. Similar boulders had been noted throughout northern Europe from Scotland to Finland and east into Russia. Clearly they had been transported there somehow, but the sizes of many of these boulders, from that of a cabbage to a cottage, raised the obvious question as to what the transporting agent could be. It had been thought that they were transported to their present locations by icebergs drifting on Noah's worldwide flood, so these rocks were called drift, or erratics, from the Latin errare, meaning "to wander or to roam far from home." But Charpentier and Agassiz realized that the Swiss boulders had clearly been transported by the mountain glacier because they could see them dropping from the face of the glacier like bowling balls.
In a bold creative leap, Agassiz extrapolated from the glaciated Swiss valleys to all of northern Europe and proposed, in 1840, that a giant ice sheet, or continental-scale glacier, once covered the northern half of the continent and transported these boulders southward. Later, after he moved to Harvard and explored the landscapes of Maine and Lake Superior, Agassiz proposed that a similar ice sheet once covered the northern half of North America. Most geologists and naturalists at the time thought this was lunacy (except for Henry David Thoreau, who, in his Journals, provided a remarkably accurate interpretation of the landscape around Walden Pond in light of Agassiz's theories). But Agassiz prevailed by the weight of the observations and his eloquence (Agassiz's writings are some of the most lucid of all natural history writings). By his death in 1873, most reputable geologists and naturalists had accepted his theory of the Ice Age in principle, although the details still needed some working out.
In 1865, shortly after Agassiz's original hypothesis of a continental ice sheet, Scottish geologist Thomas Jamieson proposed that an ice sheet thick enough to cover a continent must have been heavy enough to warp the crust of the earth downward into the more viscous mantle beneath it, pushing the mantle outward. (The mantle is the layer of hot but not molten rock between the lighter crust floating atop it and the molten core beneath it. The consistency of the mantle is similar to that of a candle softened in the hot sun.) The Swedes had the last word, as Jamieson's hypothesis was confirmed for the Swedish coast in 1890 by Gerard De Geer from the University of Stockholm.
Now imagine a sheet of ice 2 or 3 kilometers thick (about 1.2 to 1.8 miles) covering the land from Minnesota to the Atlantic coast and north through Hudson's Bay 18,000 years ago. The ice age that produced the Laurentide Ice Sheet is known as the Wisconsinan Glaciation, the latest of at least four such glaciations in the past million years or so, each separated from the others by warm periods. (The Wisconsinan Glaciation is so named because of the especially well-preserved glacial landforms in that state from this particular advance of the ice sheet.) These glaciations and the intervening warm periods were partly caused by wobbles in the earth's rotation and orbit; these wobbles determine the distribution of sunlight across the earth's surface and through the seasons. When the tilt of the axis and the shape of the orbit were aligned to minimize the amount of energy being delivered to the northern hemisphere in summer, then summers were cool enough that snow laid down during the previous winter did not melt, and the snow cover began to accumulate. Year after year, decade after decade, the snow accumulated and compressed the lower layers into ice. When the ice accumulated to 50 meters thick, its weight caused it to stop being the brittle substance we are familiar with. The ice sheet was born and began to ooze southward across the continent.
Ice continued to accumulate in the thick core of the ice sheet even as it oozed outward along its thinner margin. The weight of the ice in the thicker core ensured the continued flow of ice downslope to the margin. As the ice sheet flowed south it entered a warmer climate where melting at the ice sheet's surface exceeded snowfall. The front of the ice sheet had passed out of its zone of accumulation at the core and entered its zone of ablation near the margins. The ablation zone is where there is a net loss of ice by melting, snow blowing off the surface, and calving from the snout, or front, of the glacier. The ice in the ablation zone can be sustained only by continued flow from the core. Where the rate of melting and calving at the snout of the ice sheet equaled the inputs from both upglacier flow and local snowfall, its advance came to an end. This point defines the terminus of the glacier. (The snout is the physical "nose" of the ice sheet, and the terminus is its location. You stand at the terminus but touch the snout.)
At its greatest extent, the weight of several kilometers of ice — nearly 2 metric tons above every square centimeter — warped the earth's crust downward 80 meters near the ice margin and more than 400 meters beneath its thick core in Labrador, east of Hudson's Bay. Even today, the crust beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet is still warped nearly 400 meters below sea level.
About 15,000 years ago, continued changes in the wobbles of the earth's rotation and orbit moved the earth to a position where the energy from the sun reaching the northern hemisphere was enough to melt the winter's snow during the next summer. When snow accumulation in the core decreased, flow of ice to the ablation zone slowed. At the same time, warming also accelerated melting in the ablation zone. Slower flow of ice downglacier and faster melting in the ablation zone caused the terminus to retreat northward. The ice sheet then began to disintegrate at its southern margin, opening up land for the northward expansion of the ranges of plant species. Except for remnants such as the Greenland Ice Sheet and a few small glaciers remaining on Baffin Island and other high Arctic islands, the last vestiges of the Laurentide Ice Sheet had melted by 9,000 or so years ago.
As it was relieved of its burden of ice, the crust rebounded rapidly, much like a trampoline, then more slowly as the mantle oozed back underneath. For the past 10,000 years since the ice sheet retreated from the current region of the North Woods, the crust has continued to rise near Lake Superior, Hudson's Bay, and in northern New England, especially along the Maine coast. Along the shore of Hudson's Bay and along the Gulf of Bothnia in Scandinavia, the land is still rising slightly more than 1 centimeter per year, as Celsius's chisel marks first showed. The rebound of the crust and redistribution of the mantle have been sufficiently large to change the shape of the earth and alter its rotation. The rebound is not yet over and won't be for another 10,000 years or more.
After it melted, the ice sheet left behind a watery terrain as its legacy. The unequal rise of the crust during the rebound controls much of the regional distribution of water in the northern landscape. The land in the north is rising faster than that in the south, partly because of the greater thickness of ice near the ice sheet's core than at its margin and partly because the northern lands were relieved of their ice burdens much later. The greater rise of the earth's crust in the north tilts the land's surface toward the south and spills water onto the southern shores of the Great Lakes in North America and large lakes in Scandinavia. The mouths of rivers flowing to the southern shores of the Great Lakes are drowned by water spilling into them from the faster-rising northern shores. Rivers along northern shores, in contrast, flow straight and fast into lakes, often down precipitous waterfalls marking earlier shorelines.
If the rebound of the land from the weight of the ice determines the regional distribution of water in this northern landscape, then the sculpting of the landscape by the ice sheet — carving the bedrock here, depositing debris there — created the topographic and geologic template on which today's watersheds are organized.
This topographic and geological template was created by the down-glacier flow of ice, which was a giant conveyor belt that continuously plucked clays, silts, sands, cobbles, and boulders from the previous landscape and either brought this unsorted debris forward to the snout or plastered it on the slopes of hills and in the valleys. This unsorted debris of dirt, cobbles, and boulders is collectively known as till. The cobbles and boulders in the till were often transported on a journey many hundreds of kilometers from their origin and, when deposited atop different bedrock from that where they originated, became Agassiz's erratics.
The ice sheet sculpted the landscape in three ways: by carving the bedrock, soil, sediments, and debris beneath it; by bringing the till forward and depositing it at its snout; and by releasing meltwater that washed, sorted, and deposited materials across the landscape in front of it. These landforms are the record of the climate history of the glaciated regions of the earth for the past 18,000 years.
Beneath the flowing base of the ice sheet, the sand embedded in it smoothed and polished the underlying bedrock. Rocks embedded in the ice carved parallel grooves onto the surface of the underlying bedrock in the direction of the ice flow. Whenever I stand on top of one of these polished bedrock surfaces and look down the axes of these grooves, I almost feel the grinding power of the ice sheet at my back. In places, the rocks in the ice chattered as they were dragged forward, making nicks on the bedrock surface where flakes were chipped off. These nicks are known, appropriately, as chatter marks. Smaller grooves and chatter marks were also carved on most of the cobbles and boulders embedded in the till.
The conveyor belt of ice brought the till forward and deposited it in a broad ridge known as the terminal moraine at the southernmost terminus of the ice sheet. Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Long Island form a long sweep of terminal moraine from the Wisconsinan Glaciation out into the Atlantic. The terminal moraine then extends westward through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois before veering northwest into Wisconsin. It then arcs northwest through Minnesota, Manitoba, and beyond to the Canadian Arctic, running along the edge of the great granitic Canadian Shield just west of Lake Athabasca, Great Slave Lake, Great Bear Lake, and thousands of smaller lakes in between, like beads on a rosary. Except for a finger pointing down the spine of the Appalachians, the North Woods lies entirely inside the continental arc of the terminal moraine.
I've been speaking of the terminal moraine as if it were a single long ridge deposited all at once, but it's a bit more complicated than that. The ice sheet was actually composed of a number of lobes flowing more or less southward, each depositing its own debris, including its own terminal moraine. Each moraine has its own signature till determined by the bedrock eroded by the parent lobe that gave birth to it. The lobe that deposited the moraines closest to my home in northern Minnesota is called the Superior Lobe because much of the material was scooped out of the bottom of Lake Superior by the ice sheet. What I have been calling the terminal moraine is actually a system of terminal moraines made by each of these lobes.
As the climate warmed, melting at the snout exceeded the forward flow of ice, and the terminus began retreating. When the ice was advancing, the snout was a tall, straight cliff of clean ice, like the bow of a ship plowing through the sea. But as the ice sheet melted, crevasses were cut into the ice down which waterfalls often flowed. The once tall, straight, and clean snout became rounded and furrowed by the melt-water. Although the terminus of the ice sheet retreated northward, the flowing ice would continue to bring till south to the melting snout, which became dirty in its lower layers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What Should a Clever Moose Eat? by John Pastor. Copyright © 2016 John Pastor. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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Table of Contents
ForewordPreface
Prologue: The Importance of Natural History
Introduction: The Nature of the North Woods
PART I: The Assembly of a Northern Ecosystem, and the Discovery of its Natural History
Chapter 1. Setting the Stage
Chapter 2. The Emergence of the North Woods
Chapter 3. The Birth and Death of a Beaver Pond
Chapter 4. David Thompson’s Canoe
PART II: Capturing the Light
Chapter 5. How Long Should a Leaf Live?
Chapter 6. The Shapes of Leaves
Chapter 7. The Shapes of Crowns
Chapter 8. How Should Leaves Die?
PART III: Foraging and Food Webs
Chapter 9. Foraging in the Beaver’s Pantry
Chapter 10. Mouse Wars, Fungi, and Spruce
Chapter 11. What Should a Clever Moose Eat?
Chapter 12. Tent Caterpillars, Aspens, and the Regulation of Ecosystems
Chapter 13. The Diversity of Warblers and the Control of Spruce Budworm
Chapter 14. The Dance of Hare and Lynx
PART IV: Pollinators, Flowers, Fruits, and Seeds
Chapter 15. Skunk Cabbages, Blowflies, and the Smells of Spring
Chapter 16. When Should Flowers Bloom and Fruits Ripen?
Chapter 17. Everybody’s Favorite Berries
Chapter 18. Coevolution of Crossbills and Conifer Cones
PART V: Fire and the Dynamics of the Landscape
Chapter 19. Does Fire Destroy or Maintain the North Woods?
Chapter 20. The Legacies of a Fire
Chapter 21. The Correlated Evolution of Serotiny, Flammability, and Fire
Epilogue: Climate Change and the Disassembly of the North Woods
Postscript: The Beauty of Natural History
Bibliography