Winter Ticks and Moose Population

Picture a Moose with white patches of fur covered in thousands of grape sized ticks. This is a reality for moose in northern latitudes including New Hampshire and Isle Royale. Warmer shorter winters have resulted in exploding tick populations in these regions.  

Moose pick up the ticks grazing on vegetation. The moose attempts to remove the ticks by excessive scratching and pulling of its fur. This leads to what many animal control agencies call a "ghost moose," white in appearance due to lack of fur, exposed skin and anemia. Moose die of anemia at the hand of thousands of bloodsucking ticks. Not exactly the way I would want to go.

Moose populations have seen a decline of upwards of 51% in some regions. Currently the Adirondack park officials are determining if Adirondack Moose are experiencing the same issues as Moose from Isle Royale and New Hampshire. Estimates of the current moose population in New York range from 500-1000. These concerns have launched a recount to determine if the moose population in New York is growling, declining or shrinking. Cornell University, the Department of Environmental Conservation, the State University of new York College of Environmental Science and Forestry,  and the Wildlife Conservation Society are all teaming up to tackle the project.

Methods for the recount are extensive including aerial counts utilizing helicopters, DNA evidence from moose scat, and GPS satellite data from tracking collars. Currently two moose are wearing the GPS collars but that is extremely cost intensive. The project which will have a duration of three years.

This Moose tick issue sheds a light on the consequences of global warming. I think  people like to think of global warming as something that is a distant problem. Yes, they may be right that the greatest effects of global warming will occur in the future but what many do not realize is we are feeling the effects now.

Sources: 
http://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2013/10/adirondack-moose-winter-ticks.html
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/10800/20141201/moose-die-offs-prompt-population-count-in-adirondacks.htm
http://www.ithacajournal.com/story/news/local/2014/11/30/adirondack-moose-count/19700609/

The "Big Blow-up"

On November 25, 1950, a brave hurricane crossed the Appalachians into the western Adirondacks where, in a single day, it blew down more than 800,000 acres of forest.  This storm system, dubbed “The Big Blow,” sparked the largest debate since the foundation of the park in the 1890s over whether lumber companies should be allowed to conduct salvage—harvesting the millions of fallen trees to decrease fire risk in the park and to protect our country from Korea.  This dispute was aptly named “The Big Blow-up.”

Still haunted by the fires of 1905 caused by sparky rail roads and large amounts of brush left behind by sloppy forestry practices, the pro-salvage advocates initially won the debate.  While the Conservation Department officially insisted that the decision to remove the fallen trees stemmed from the fire danger, the fact that the spruce (the most prized species for lumber that was in short supply by this time) was the most strongly affected tree in the park seems to have played more heavily in their decision.

The lumber industry had attempted more than 30 times to gain access to the trees in the preserve since the founding of the park, and the Big Blow gave them the opportunity to change the tone of their argument: rather than harming the park by harvesting valuable trees, they were “saving” it from the strong possibility of its spontaneous combustion.  Because of the severity of the threat of fire, the Conservation Department bypassed the constitutional amendment procedure and gave lumber companies permission to salvage the trees.  Voices of dissent from environmental groups urged the Conservation department to give the document stronger wording to prevent the lumber companies from turning this special circumstance into the norm.  They eventually settled on limiting the trees collected to “fallen or seriously damaged trees to the extent necessary to provide for the safety and preservation of the Preserve.”

These fears proved to be well founded.  By 1951, less than a year into the salvage operation, the Conservation Department began running articles in New York Conservationist criticizing the limit on logging in the park and advocating for more widespread access for lumber companies.  By 1952, a proposal to open 70 percent of the park to logging was being seriously considered.

Luckily, the salvage operation didn’t pay out as much as the lumber companies were hoping.  By 1954, most of the spruce knocked down by the Big Blow had decayed too much to be sent to the mills.  Also, the spruce that had been extracted had flooded the market and significantly lowered the price of spruce, limiting returns on its extraction.  In the end, only a little more than half of the contracts offered to the companies were completed and nearly a fourth were never begun.

Today, scientists acknowledge that clearing out the debris was not ecologically the right decision.  Storms and disturbance play an important role in the health and succession of forests.  Thus, removing the fallen trees likely stemmed from a fear of the past and the promise of future financial security.  On a positive note, at least the logging companies didn’t end up getting their fingers too far into the park, and ten percent of the profits from selling the salvage went to buying more lands for the park.

Picture and information courtesy of  John Warren from the Adirondack Almanack (http://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2010/11/natures-wrath-the-big-blowdown-of-1950.html)

The Immigrant Experience

Immigration is not a concept that is specific to the Adirondacks. As we discussed in class, we are all technically descendants of immigrants, although we often exclusively refer to immigrants as people of other nationalities that have most recently entered the country. However, the Adirondacks had a experience with immigrants that seems somewhat different than those in other parts of the United States. My ancestors came from various parts of Europe, most looking for a better life and new opportunities. Their long term experiences as immigrants were very different from those that immigrants had in the Adirondacks.

As we began talking about mining in the Adirondacks, I immediately thought of my great-great-grandfather, William Henry Button, an immigrant from Cornwall, who came to the United States through Ellis Island in hopes of finding mining work. William Button immigrated after the mining craze in the Adirondacks, but ended up moving to a small town in Utah called Eureka. Similar to mining towns in the Adirondacks, Eureka  was designed to be a family friendly town with a church, community centers and a school. William Button lived with a community of other immigrants from Cornwall, a few of them relatives that immigrated a few years earlier. His initial experiences in Eureka seems very similar to that of miners in the Adirondacks; a few conflicts emerged between ethnic groups and work was hard and dangerous, but life was still better than it was back home in Cornwall.

                                                            

Similar to mining towns in the Adirondacks, Eureka went through a booming period then eventually lost its industrial advantage as it was outcompeted by mines in other parts of the country. However, the primary difference between Eureka and the Adirondacks seems to be the pull of the area for these immigrants. William Button’s family stayed in the area long after the mines shut down, and relatives still live close by. These families found new areas of work as many new types of industries developed in the surrounding area. On the other hand, mining towns in the Adirondacks were generally abandoned. There are no Cornish or Italian communities that stuck around and continued to raise their families in this wilderness after economic opportunity was lost; they moved on. I wonder if these immigrants felt at all emotionally tied to the land in the Adirondacks, as I know my family now feels about the land in Utah. Although they obviously needed to travel to find new sources of income, did they regret leaving behind this beautiful wilderness?

The Importance of Human History vs. Wilderness

Forts in the Adirondacks are a huge draw for tourists who value American history, and the sites are well preserved and well managed by the state of New York. It seems to me that we are more moved to preserve historical sites than we are to preserve natural land.

Fort Ticonderoga was last used for a battle in 1777 (during the Revolutionary War) and in 1785, the site was given to the state of New York. (I’m assuming it was given to the state from the federal government, which didn’t exist before the end of the war anyway, so the idea of ownership before 1785 is a little hazy.) In 1803 the site was jointly owned by two colleges, Union and Columbia, and in 1820 it was bought by a wealthy private owner, William Pell. He built a hotel on the site in 1839 and attracted many vacationers until 1900. Fort Ticonderoga was restored by the Pell family and officially became a museum in 1909.

During the 1800s, when people were visiting the location of the fort where many famous battles occurred, private companies were logging all of the largest and oldest trees out of the Adirondacks and railroads were accidentally starting destructive forest fires. People were vacationing in the Adirondacks to escape the industrialized cities and they were visiting the fort to connect with the country’s history; however, loggers were exploiting the natural resources of the park for profit. The juxtaposition of the ease of preserving human history with the struggle to preserve natural resources is frightening.

Today, the forts in the Adirondacks are well preserved and the museums are well-run; they attract tourists and history buffs from all over who might not be interested in the ecotourism offered by the Adirondacks.

http://www.fortticonderoga.org/history-and-collections/timeline

Looking into Logging

(My apologies for the formatting - the text wouldn't align

to the left when placed above the video)

     In reading about logging in the Adirondacks, I realized that I knew very little about how logging actually worked. For instance, I knew nothing of the logistics of log driving. Were a few guys throwing logs into a river in the hopes that they reached someone down stream? How did they supervise the logs on their way down? As I caught a glimpse of more modern logging I only thought of more questions. What did a feller-buncher look like? How did it work? What about a skidder?

     To answer a few of these questions I looked for some relevant videos and images. Above is a video of a feller buncher. As shown in the video, it cuts trees near their bases and holds them while it cuts a few more. Eventually, these trees are placed down and more are cut. The video gives a sense of how powerful and efficient this machinery is. The trees begin to look like twigs as they are helplessly cut and dropped aside. I have used both axes and saws and this makes anything I've done look embarrassingly easy.

     Above is a skidder. As mentioned by Schneider, this machine pulls the logs away. The pincers grasp a logs that have been placed into a stack and, as I understand it, drag them away by holding on to one end. It seems that there are multiple types of skidders (ones with chains, for instance), but the basic idea is to drag piles of logs away.

     In looking into log driving, I found that the process involved a fair few moving parts. A group of men, divided into a boss, "log drivers", and a "rear crew." The boss would keep control of the group, particularly the more rowdy members. A driver's job was to keep the logs from getting stuck down the river. One log getting stuck could ultimately cause the formation of a small dam. Drivers used peaveys (poles used to prod and move logs) and even dynamite to keep things flowing. The rear crew were generally less experienced men, whose job was to push along any logs that fell behind for whatever reason. As demonstrated by Terrie, these jobs often had some risk involved, because of both the river and how the logs changed and interacted with it.



Sources:
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQmtEdOphy8
-https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2648/3755882369_d45de852ae_z.jpg
-The Adirondacks: A History of America's First Wilderness, Paul Schneider
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_driving

The Year of No Summer

The summer of 1816 convinced many residents of the Adirondacks, John Brown Francis in particular, to give up on the land and find fortune elsewhere. While Herreshoff refused to give up on his tract, he did move away from agriculture to pursue the mining industry. That particular summer saw heavy snow in June and ice throughout July and August, which, unbeknownst to people like the Browns, were caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora. Mount Tambora is a volcano in the Indian Ocean and its eruption in 1815 was the greatest volcanic explosion to occur in ten thousand years, affecting climates around the world and creating “the year of no summer.”

When Tambora erupted, volcanic ash entered the earth’s atmosphere, which blocked sunlight from reaching the surface of the planet. The lack of sunlight caused colder temperatures, cloudy skies, and even snow/ice across Europe and North America. Because these weather patterns coincided with the growing seasons of many crops, farmers lost much of their harvest and food shortages were reported. Many farmers who were already struggling in the Adirondacks chose to leave the area and head West, hoping to find a better life there. However, Mary Shelley did write the classic Frankenstein during this gloomy period, and many other writers used the circumstances as inspiration for darker works. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until the 20^th century that the eruption of Mount Tambora and the year of no summer were linked to each other.

Examining what pushed settlers of the Adirondacks to finally call it quits can be an interesting topic to explore. Throughout the history of the park, many industries have thrived before collapsing and becoming abandoned completely. The year of no summer, along with repeatedly difficult and hardly profitable years residents spent pursuing agriculture, led to an increase in migration to the Western United States from the Adirondacks. Finally, the agriculture industry grew smaller until it reached the point it’s at today, with local farms and community gardens dominating the niche and large commercial farms supplying many grocery stores and restaurants within the park.

Source:

The Year Without a Summer Was a Bizarre Weather Disaster in 1816

Early Concerns of Deforestation in the Adirondacks

Author Jerry Jenkins' book, The Adirondack Atlas, offers an interesting perspective on the history and current state of the Adirondacks, as a large percentage of the book consists of evidence presented through maps.  In a recent reading of The Adirondack Atlas, one map in particular truly struck me.  This map shows the change in the Adirondack forests from 1800 to 1885 (Jenkins, 100).  On the first map, from 1800, the vast majority of the land is shown as "virgin forest," meaning that it is essentially untouched, and still wilderness.  The adjacent map, from 1885, shows a completely different forest.  Unlike the last map, only 29.1% of the forest is "virgin forest".  Most of it has been altered by human interactions.  During this time, as Jenkins explains, agriculture and logging became prevalent in the Adirondacks.  The astonishing aspect of the change in the maps is the fact that all of these changes occurred within 85 years.  Jenkins explains that, in the 1880's, "...there was a widespread perception that Adirondack forests were in trouble... The sporting press, which hadn't figured out that deer love logging, magnified the reports into a general fear that the Adirondack wilderness was about to vanish" (Jenkins, 101).  Thus began one of the first concerns regarding deforestation of the Adirondacks. 

I was very interested to learn about this relatively early act of environmental concern and preservation.  In a Geology/Environmental Studies course I took last semester, we studied the overuse of natural resources.  A general trend we discussed was that one of the major issues humans will need to face in the near future is a former lack of concern for the overuse of natural resources.  As environmental movements were not active until the 1960s, I was fascinated to learn that the people within the Adirondacks have been concerned about issues such as deforestation since it began occurring in the park.  In many ways, the Adirondacks were eighty years ahead of their time with beginning the environmental movements, and actively trying to stop deforestation before it negatively progressed.

Citation:

Jenkins, Jerry, and Andy Keal. The Adirondack Atlas: A Geographic Portrait of the Adirondack Park. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2004. 2. Print.

What The Trees Can Tell Us

When walking through the forests of the Adirondacks it is hard to imagine that some of the trees could have been “seedlings around the time Columbus was born.” While many of the trees in the Adirondacks are not this old, they still possess the ability to tell us a lot about the past.  As children, we all learned about counting tree rings to determine the age of the tree, but scientists are able to obtain so much more information from these rings. Dendrology is the study of trees and scientists are able to assess the variations in the tree rings to learn about past environmental conditions.

Dendrologists can go into the park, preferably looking at old growth forests, and take core samples. With these samples we can discover what years were conducive for growing. The rings would be wider because the tree had access to plenty of sunlight and rain. Alternatively thinner rings represent periods of drought. We could also see when the park experienced forest fires or insect infestations. Dendrology provides us with another way to model past climates and examine how they have varied throughout time.

Using this knowledge to learn about past climates, paired with written historical accounts could give us a more holistic look at the history of the park. These tree cores are like the personal narratives of the trappers or farmers who worked the land centuries ago. They tell a story of a harsh and wild land. Not only does dendrology illuminate the past, but also allows us to predict future climate models. There is a lot more to trees than their exterior shows. Next time you hike in the park, think about what the trees around you have to say, what they could tell you about their past and what might happen in the future.

The Adirondacks: The History of America’s First Wilderness, Paul Schneider

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/picture-climate-how-can-we-learn-tree-rings

https://www.internationalpaper.com/documents/EN/LearningCenter/TreeRings.pdf