6:53 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). 18 degrees, wind NNW 12 mph (twice I mistook the wind for an oncoming car, stepped off the frozen-ribbed road, dogs perplexed). Sky: blue and cloudless, rinsed in peach. Permanent streams: seasonal time warp, although on the cusp of spring, a deep winter look and feel. Wetlands: pileated mum, keeps to himself, perhaps dining in a half-rotten maple on a larder of carpenter ants; even the chickadees and nuthatches have little to report. Two red crossbills over the eastern edge of the marsh (twenty yesterday). Pond: oak leaf scuttles across the ice, stops and goes, changes direction, a land crab impersonation.
DOR: white-footed mouse. The mouse ran the gauntlet—mink, owl, ermine, coyote, shrike, hawk, fox, bobcat, all winter. Last night, a predatory pathway into the food chain halted by a tire. If it was bigger, I'd recite, Kaddish.
Red-shouldered hawk cries from aspen, a salvo of piercing calls, eyes squirrels scurrying across the front yard, then bolts, circles, vanishes into the long rays of sunrise. Two crows in compost prefer eggshells and stale bread. Once sunshine pours down the crown of Robinson Hill, a solo chickadee whistles, pure as light. Hairy and downy woodpeckers visit sunflower feeder, spill plenty of seeds, which two turkeys scavenge. Doves gather grit on the driveway and compete with turkeys under the feeder. Gray squirrels and chipmunk under feeder compete with turkeys and doves. A dozen blue jays compete with everyone: on the suet, on the driveway, under the feeders, on the feeders—two lounging in ash, breasts to the sun, wait to compete. Otherwise, most birds perched against the morning, balls of feathers facing the harsh wind.
Victor Shelford (1877-1968) left the University of Illinois in 1946 to found The Ecologist's Union, known today as The Nature Conservancy. In the first half of the twentieth-century, heavyweight biologist Shelford integrated animal and plant ecology, terrestrial and aquatic ecology, and developed the biome concept together with Frederic E. Clements. A biome is a broad geographic region defined by the similarity of native communities of plants and animals: desert, tundra, grassland, deciduous forest, boreal forest, montane forest, rainforest. I prefer the name jungle, which evokes images of Tarzan, a literary hero.
Shelford wrote The Ecology of North America, published in 1963, by the University of Illinois Press, which divides North America into biomes and subdivides each biome into respective components, which he discusses at length. Five hundred pages of exquisite detail. Shelford splits the temperate deciduous forest biome into the northern and upland and the southern and lowland. We live in the maple-beech-hemlock association of the northern deciduous forest. Within the chapter "Temperate Deciduous Forest Biome (Northern)," Shelford considers life in a hypothetical 10-square mile circle, circa 1600, based on academic research of dozens of colleagues.
Here's a distillation of who lives in that hypothetical circle: 750,000 trees, 786,000 seedlings, 2,810,000 shrubs, 230 to 460 million wildflowers. These plants, writes Shelford, usually have their leaves nipped, skeletonized, perforated, deformed, and their sap sucked by a myriad of insects belonging to 10 to 20 species. During the two months when birds are nesting, nearly 26 billion invertebrates, primarily insects and spiders, roam the plants, canopy to roots. Almost 4 billion are gall-forming insects, gall wasps, gall flies, and plant lice.
About 7,680 pairs of small birds nest in ten square miles during leaf out, approximately one pair per 90 to 95 trees. The adults and young consume about 386 million insects, almost 500 insects per nesting pair of birds per day. The number of mice, mostly white-footed, varies year to year from 160,000 to 320,000, or about one per two trees.
Other stats for ten square miles of northern hardwood forest:
Gray squirrel and southern flying squirrel, 10,000 to 20,000 (each)
Wild turkey, 200
Raptors, 2 to 5 per 75,000 trees
White-tailed deer, 400
Catamount, 2 to 3
Wolf, 1 to 3
Gray fox, 30
Black bear, 2
Shelford does not list fungus, shrews, moles, bats, small mammal predators, waterfowl, wading birds, shorebirds, goatsuckers, swifts, reptiles, or amphibians. Of course, they were there, too . . . and in likely astronomical numbers. (Circa 1600, there were no red foxes or coyotes in the deciduous forest.)
Though diminished since 1600, our woodlands are still awe-inspiring, no less than the stars in the sky. And they stretch to the horizon, just beyond the front door.
Amazing, thanks!
Thanks for these statistics. WOW!