I Was Raised to Hate Porcupines

Young porcupine at a rehabilitation center in Colorado.

 

When I was a boy, my dad was a US Forest Service district ranger. That meant he was in charge of a "district" within a national forest, a forest having usually four to six (or more) districts, depending on geography. He had a crew chief and a crew whose size varied seasonally, a half-time secretary, and a full-time assistant ranger (also with a college forestry degree). 

This is not my father, but it could be.

He was an old-school forester. Recreation, etc., was all very fine, and grazing was OK if regulated, but his job first and foremost was to grow trees, to mark timber sales, and to see that the loggers cut only what they were supposed to cut. 

At least once I heard him say, "I'm a tree farmer," probably while comparing his job to those "pressed pants" park rangers at the nearby national monuments.

And if he was a tree farmer, then porcupines were agricultural pests. As the Colorado Parks and Wildlife website says, "Several evenings of eating bark can severely damage a tree."

They damaged "the crop" by nibbling all around a pine tree, cutting the flow of nutrients.

When he saw a porcupine up in a tree, out came the .22 rifle or whatever he had. When I got to be old enough, he would pass the .22 rifle to me. Since I believed that "Dad knows best," I would sight in and start shooting until, eventually, whomp!

Not was 15 or 16 did I start to rethink porcupines' place in forest ecology. Maybe they did not all have to die, even if they "girdled" a pine tree, ate wires on a camper's car, or left their quills in a inquisitive dog's nose.

One time we were backpacking in the Lost Creek Wilderness (Pike National Forest) when he spotted an unusual light-phase porkie across a pond, fired a .22 revolver at it, and missed. I did not ask for a chance to shoot or volunteer to go after it. Maybe he felt my silent disapproval. That was the porcupine encounter that I had with him.

But when my dog Jack was "quilled" one time, he did share with me a useful trick. Don't just grasp the quills with pliers and pull them out. When you do that, the pliers squeeze the air inside the quill, forcing the barbs out and deeper into the dog's flesh. Instead, cut the quills' ends off with scissors, wire cutters, whatever and then pull. It's kinder to the dog.

Likewise, if he saw this "porcupette," he might even be moved by its juvenile cuteness. Porkies have only one offspring at a time, so they reproduce quite slowly. This one was seized this summer from a wildlife "hoarder" in Colorado Springs and brought to a rehabilitation center where it will spend the winter. 

Next spring, just to be on the safe side, I'll suggest releasing it in an area where no logging is going on. 

The Last Big Beetle-Killed Pine

Early January 2024: the blue stain of the
tree-killing fungus is all over the big pine's sapwood

My wife told me she could feel that big pine hit the ground from our house, maybe 200 yards away. 

I had had my eye on it as a firewood source for several years, and because I had been more the Grasshopper than the Ant during late 2024, I needed more wood now. And there it stood, dead for several years, another victim of the Mountain Pine Beetle and its hitchhiker, the blue-stain fungus.

The Mountain Pine Beetle is always present somewhere in the Rockies. (And in the Black Hills, where Dad, then a USFS district ranger, supervised several essentially useless spraying campaigns in the early 1960 —but that is what he was told to do.) It hits ponderosa pine in patches and lodgepole pines in huge swathes. Anyone who travels in Summit, Gunnison, Conejos or other counties where lodgepole grows has seen the mountain sides covered with dead trees.

Lodgepole pine killed by pine beetle fungus. (Colorado State Forest Service)

Meanwhile I was seeing  beetle (actually fungus)-killed ponderosa pines in little clusters. Some were right near the driveway. One fell on a power line (fortunately "de-energized," i.e. turned off). Since they were close by and mostly uphill, felling and bucking and moving the wood was fairly simple. Some were farther away, up the ridge, but I was not going to push any more road into the "back 20" than the previous owners had done, and helicopter-logging is a little too pricey.

Ponderosa pine killed by pine beetle-carried fungus
and left for the birds.

I left a couple of big ones standing because I realize that cavity-nesting birds need some dead trees. That means that woodpeckers need to make holes while looking for bugs, and then the nuthatches etc. can enlarge them.

The dead pine pictured is up back from the guest cabin. Flickers (which are woodpeckers) are always attacking its cedar siding, so I hoped that having a nice dead tree would attract them away. Results have been . . . mixed. Apparently "natural" is not always better. But I will leave it there until it falls over

When I look around, I don't see any more new beetle-killed pines. Maybe the infestation has run its course — for now. Future firewood planing will have to take a different course.

This big tree was about a century old, which places its start to when someone named William Funderbunk owned this land, apparently part of a little ranch that was never too successful. He must have had other income as well. There were others before and after him.

The original homestead claim was "proved up" in 1879, and according to the abstract of title, the land was sold for taxes a couple of times in the 1940s, when not being used for collateral on loans, until 1958, when an enterprising Arizona couple purchased 26 acres with foothills home sites in mind.

That's the history of the land in a stack of 46 little papers, fastidiously typed out and held together with a brass fastener. It covers 84 years, 1879–1963. We bought it decades later from the middle-aged daughter of that1963 purchaser. Back then, this tree was still growing up on the mountainside.

Maybe a century is a pretty good run for a pine in this arid setting. As I swing the splitting maul, I will think about its life.

Travels: The Great Dismal Swamp and a Rebellion

Last April, while visiting the Virginia coast for my wife's family reunion (more on that below), I held out for the one thing that I wanted to do — to see at least some of the The Great Dismal Swamp.

Despite the name, no Goths were spotted.

How could I resist that name? I have been reading about it for years. I kind of half expected that it would summon the Goth kids to drift through the cypress swamps, but evidently they prefer urban graveyards.

Even though the  112,000-acre Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge and the adjacent Dismal Swamp State Park in North Carolina (14,432 acres) cover the heart of it, much is gone, drained for agriculture and logging. Part of that draining started in 1763, directed by one George Washington, who had enormous land holdings in Virginia, at least on paper. Canals and railroads were built to bring out timber.

The refuge was established in the mid-1970s on land donated by timber companies, and restoration work has been underway since then. North Carolina's park was created about the same time, with assistance from The Nature Conservancy.

M. and I tossed our day packs in the rented Prius and set out. Disappointment: the visitor center was closed, on a weekday. So no trail maps, natural history exhibits, or whatever the USFWS was hiding in there. No explanation was given online or by a sign posted on the door — just  closed.

Instead, we strolled a level path through a grove of loblolly pines. If I remember right, these were planted in the 1970s, so they have done well in fifty years. They are known for fast growth.

But the swamp! So we studied the signage at the parking lot and set out on a road toward the center. There is a large, fishable lake there, Lake Drummond, but since we were staying adjacent to Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, we were not looking for big water.

This was more like it: a boardwalk. While a few old cypressess remained -- they had been heavily logged -- most of what we saw were younger trees planted in the 1980s in wetland reshaped with heavy equipment. But they are doing well.

Early April was a good time to visit. The temperatures were mild (in the 50s F.), the sun shone, and there were no mosquitoes.

More loblolly pines on a nature trail.

The center tree is one of few old-growth cypress.

 

Cypress marsh.

Another walk took us down a straight-line former railroad beside a drainage canal.

Can't have a swamp without basking turtles.

Red maple is also common in the Great Dismal Swamp.

Mostly zebra swallowtails, I think.

We could have done more, but it was time to head back to the coast and rendezvous with the siblings-in-law for a seafood dinner in Norfolk, and since I came all this way, I was ready for more softshell crab.

Two of M.'s siblings have moved to Virgina over the years, but whose ancestors got off the boat somewhere along the James River? Mine. 

So I detoured another day through Surry County, on the more rural south bank, to take in the sights and snack on local peanuts, whose packaging indirectly commemorates Bacon's Rebellion (1676–77).

Go back and read it about it, and the rhetoric may ring a bell: "The coastal elites don't care about us and our problems! We're fed up! We're marching on the capital!" 

And so they did, torching the House of Burgesses in Jamestown, which was still the colonial capital.

You call January 6, 2021 an "insurrection"? That was an insurrection — and it was eventually suppressed with bloodshed.

The "Bacon's Castle" on the package was not Nathaniel Bacon's own house, but another manor that was occupied and looted by his supporters. It's not far away.

Hoping for a Mast Crop

Male catkins mix with new leaves on Gambel Oak.

Walking around, I see a pretty good mix of leaves and flowers on the scrub (Gambel) oak. Because it grows in clone clusters, some are already mostly leafed while others are just beginning. 

I suppose that the biologists would claim that there is evolutionary advantage there: if the early bloomers are hit by frost, the late-bloomers might still be safe. 

I just remember last year driving past miles of frost-killed catkins—which meant few if any acorns formed, so many calories of wildlife food were just not there.

When a wildlife biologist refers to "the mast crop," I get warm tingles, because that word goes way way back connectimg our Colorado forests in a sense to the forests where Old English and its predecessors was spoken.

"Fallen nuts or acorns serving as food for animals." Old English mæst, the collective name for the fruit of the beech, oak, chestnut, and other forest trees, especially serving as food for swine, from Proto-Germanic *masto (source also of Dutch, Old High German, German mast "mast;" Old English verb mæsten "to fatten, feed"), perhaps from PIE *mad-sta-, from root *mad- "moist, wet," also used of various qualities of food (source also of Sanskrit madati "it bubbles, gladdens," medah "fat, marrow;" Latin madere "be sodden, be drunk;" Middle Persian mast "drunk;" Old English mete "food," Old High German muos "meal, mush-like food," Gothic mats "food").

Dealing with "Covid Contracture"

 I have been trying to come up with a word for what has happend over the last fourteen months. M. calls it "languishing" — even if you are perfectly healthy, your ambition and sense of accomplishment just s-l-o-w d-o-w-n as the days all drift together.

My offering was "Covid Contracture." Even if you have no travel restrictions, like those Australians forced to offer "a reasonable excuse to leave home," you find yourself going out less and less.

For me this was wrapped up with my dog Fisher's last year, when his decreasing mobility meant that the twenty-minute walk before breakfast became shorter and shorter, until it was maybe 200 yards or less and finally just to the end of the driveway and back.

M. and I broke out in July, hauling the pop-up trailer down to the Conejos River for a few days. Gone three nights, and it felt like two weeks. I had no idea how "contracted" I had become.

Soon we will be off for northern New Mexico for a bit, a trip postponded from June 2020.

I posted a few pictures from July on Instagram, where you can find me as as chas.clifton. Here are a few more.

The willows have filled in nicely — which is to say you can hardly push through them — and it's a great place to fish the Conejos River along FSR 250.

 Effects of the spruce beetle along Colorado in the La Manga Pass area. In the long run, this is OK for the forest. but meanwhile . . . 

. . . salvage logging takes care of some of it, but there is no way that all the dead trees will be used in this commercial way.

"It looks like the South," M. gasped, thinking of Spanish moss. But this is usnea, useful in certain herbal medicines that she makes, so she went away with a bag full.

Habitat Improvement at Spanish Peaks SWA

 

This work might be special interest to turkey hunters.

What's Wrong with Arbor Day?

Born in southern Colorado, I spent much of my childhood in South Dakota, living where the Black Hills met the prairie. When it came to trees, the ethos was Trees Are Good — Absence of Trees is Bad. 

One Arbor Day we pupils at Canyon Lake Elementary School in Rapid City were herded out on the front lawn to watch a tree-planting. As best I can tell from Google Maps, that tree is still there, although its top looks a little drought-damaged.

Two hours south of Rapid City is Chadron, Nebraska, gateway to the Nebraska National Forest, "the largest hand-planted forest in the U.S." Not-coincidentally, the first Arbor Day in America was held in Nebraska and marked by massive tree-plantings throughout that state.

President Theodore Roosevelt thought that Arbor Day was a splendid idea and issued a national proclamation to that effect in 1907.

Trees Are Good, right? Or as the bumper sticker has it, "Trees Are The Answer."

Yet even in Nebraska, not everyone thinks so.

Chris Helzer, who is the Nature Conservancy’s director of science in Nebraska, speaks out against the Trees Are Good attitude beyond Arbor Day, when it affects prairie ecologies, in a blog post titled "The Darker Side of Tree Planting in the Great Plains."

Euro-American cultural attitudes, once again, collided with ecological realities, he writes,

In 1907, a combination of those [western Nebraska] tree plantations was designated as the Nebraska National Forest, something many Nebraskans were and are proud of.  I’ve always seen that whole process as a kind of sad appeal for respect (‘See, we DO have forests in Nebraska!’)  It’s like an accomplished and popular actor, musician, and philanthropist feeling inferior their whole life because they’re not good at basketball – and repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) trying out for teams. . . .

We have a lot of work to do if we’re going to get the public to support prairie conservation. Tree planting isn’t the problem, and neither are the people and organizations who advocate for it. Trees are very nice. Some of my best friends have trees.

The problem is that tree planting is linked to an unsavory and unfortunate legacy in the Great Plains that still colors perceptions today. We need to separate the reasonable practice of planting a tree for shade, shelter, or fruit from the concept that white Europeans have a God-given right and duty to convert barren prairie wastelands into neat rows of corn and trees. I’m sure most people aren’t consciously making that connection as they dig a hole for their new apple tree seedling, but that doesn’t mean the cultural influence isn’t lurking in the background.

He makes a good argument: healthy prairie ecosystems are wonderfully complex, and yes, they do store CO2, if that is on your mind. We could let prairie be prairie without "improving" it  — although even Helzer admits that shelterbelts are OK around farmsteads.

Woods Work — The Firewood Scramble

I feel like I was more the grasshopper than the ant this wood-burning season. I blame that on 2020 and on repeated bouts of Influenza B — or whatever it was.

Last spring we got a bonanza of scrap wood, free for the hauling, but really it amounted to only about one cord, good until Christmas or so. The trouble was that I was feeling easily fatigued and lung-congested. The fall season was pretty much of a waste for hunting, wood-cutting, anything.

I got better after the new year, and by then we were about out of wood, so it was time for quick scavenging of Gambel oak, dead junipers, whatever. I located a nice beetle-killed ponderosa pine that I had overlooked, felled it . . . . and while the tip section was dry, the butt section was still too moist to burn. 

A smaller pine lasted ten days through the mid-February cold snap, when the lowest temperature was -16° F. — warmer than out on the High Plains, though.

And then I remembered a larger Douglas fir that was back in an oak thicket, another windstorm casualty. It had lots of forearm-size branches that make for that perfect intermediate size log to transition from kindling to big chunks. 

It might get us through March, and then April is anyone's guess.

Here is the butt section (about 16 inches diameter) of a Douglas fir that toppled
in a windstorm several years ago.

When I started splitting, it was primo — perfectly dried.

The little dirt road up back is too muddy for driving on,
so the load comes down one wheelbarrow at a time.

'Winter Burn' on Ponderosa Pines

"Needle drop" is normal with ponderosa pines and other conifers. The pine's needles last two or three years before falling off in a normal way and becoming "duff" on the forest floor. Usually the dead needs fall from the interior of the canopy while new growth occurs at the tips of branches.

On this pine, however, and some growing near it, you can see that the dead, yellow needles are at the tip. A recent news release from the Colorado State Forest Service suggests a reason:

A cold snap in October, coupled with last week’s [mid-April 2020] extreme temperature fluctuations, injured ponderosa pines, other pine species and spruce trees in the Douglas and Elbert county areas, including Castle Rock, Franktown, Parker, Elizabeth and Kiowa.

I  don't live in one of those counties, which include the part of the Black Forest area NE of Colorado Springs, called that for its stands of pine trees. But we had the weather: On April 14, a neighbor's weather station recorded a low of 2° F. (-16° C), following a week of warm temperatures.

Damaged pine and spruce trees may appear grizzled and possess white or straw-colored foliage, referred to as “winter burn.” Other symptoms may include the tips of needles appearing rust-colored while the base of the needles remains green.

The tree I photographed is rooted in a small gully, which means it gets a little more moisture, so it has grown taller than the pines around it. On the other hand, that gully is a conduit for cold air rolling down the slopes.

Unfortunately, little can be done for trees that have sustained winter burn damage, according to Meg Halford, a forester in the Colorado State Forest Service’s Franktown Field Office. However, “the buds on these frost-injured trees may have survived, and they may produce new growth this spring,” Halford said. “Don’t count them out just yet.” 

Some others are showing dead needles that might mean more pine beetle kil/fungus infection. We don't lose whole mountainsides of trees, as has happened with the lodgepole pines further north. It's more a question of a few here and a few there. There is not much I can do about that. The standing dead trees mostly become firewood.

A Sawmill Helps a Small Town, Elk, and a Private Forest

Workers at Blanca Forestry Products (Colorado Sun photo)

I visited the huge Trinchera Ranch once, in the early 1990s, when it was still owned by the Forbes family—I had wrangled a free trip to "observe" their hunting program (Ranching for Wildlife plus a "public hunt" for the locals) because I was writing for the Colorado Wildlife Federation's newsletter.

I actually had met Malcolm Forbes, the publisher, while on a journalism fellowship in the '80s; frankly, he did not seem like the outdoor type. Now the ranch's new owner, Louis Bacon, is doing some large-scale ecological restoration:

These kinds of projects at Trinchera regularly draw scientists, land owners and federal land managers seeking insights into fire mitigation, fire recovery, pest control and protecting wildlife alongside hunting, grazing, logging and other resource development. 

“I think Trinchera is managing at the cutting edge of a lot of science in forest management. In many ways, ranches like Trinchera are really creating new science,” says Lesli Allison, the executive director of the Western Landowners Alliance, whose members have attended several workshops on the ranch in recent years. “When a ranch like Trinchera shares the knowledge they have developed and experienced through the lessons they have learned, it saves time, money and unnecessary mistakes for other landowners.”

Scroll down to the video of the small but high-tech saw mill now operating in the San Luis Valley town of Blanca. A few dozen industrial jobs in Blanca is a huge improvement. What was there to do before, clerk in the liquor store?

As today's mills do, this one relies on artificial intelligence to pick the best cuts from each cant. No more husky guys moving the logs with cant hooks (I still have one!), nor even what I remember seeing as a kid — a sawyer sitting in a little booth positioning the log ahead of the saw with hydraulically operated hooks. Now, lasers! 

Pine Trees, Electric Lines, and Fire Fears

A small Stihl saw dangling from his harness, Jesse nips bits of the problem
branch from between the electric lines.

All summer I had been noticing that some branches from one of our pine trees were becoming entangled with the electric wires coming from the nearest pole to our meter. Some heavy wet snow, and the branches might force the wires into contact with each other.

In early October, I took a photo and emailed our local electric coop. I heard nothing until today, when I got a phone call, and 40 minutes later a truck pulling a wood chipper rumbled up the driveway.

The two young guys aboard were tree-trimmers, not properly "linemen." They both said they were waiting for lineman apprentice positions to open up. They wanted to become qualified—one said he hoped some day to be an engineer, and his buddy laughed and said, "Nah, you'll be a lineman."

"Get that certification, and you will never be unemployed," I said.

They grinned and agreed.

There are miles and miles of electric lines running through pine forests in southern Colorado. You have heard about PG&E lines starting fires in California — we have had the same problem on a smaller scale.

I have seen scorched branches on my place, and helped to put out fires started by electric lines. The worst one, seven years ago, took out fourteen houses nearby — not exactly Paradise, California, but still pretty shocking in a smaller community.

The then-fire chief of Rye, Colorado, once told me he lost count of how many fires they have had started from power lines (none really bad so far).

Unfortunately, my pruning saw is only 12 feet long, and I lack professional tree-climbing gear, not to mention the aptitude. So I was happy to see Jesse and Bill arrive, do the job, chip the limbs (biomass, always so much biomass!), and head off to their next assignment.

One less thing to worry about.

Chemical "Stewardship" and Vanishing Shelterbelts

Hunter walking a North Dakota tree row.

Beginning in the 1930s, government programs helped prairie farmers to plant shelterbelts (a/k/a tree rows or windbreaks) in order to reduce wind erosion and to protect isolated farmsteads across the Great Plains.

In the program's best years, the 1950s–1960s, hundreds of thousands of trees were planted. North Dakota alone had 55,000 miles of shelterbelts planted since the 1930s. They are not all there now.

“Those windbreaks still play a huge role out there. They do a lot to encourage protection from erosion, up to 10 times the distance of their height. They increase row crop productivity by 10 to 25 percent, and livestock sheltered there see improved weight gains of 10 percent,” [Larry Kotchman, head of the North Dakota Forest Service] said. “A farmstead will see energy savings of 20 to 30 percent in less heating and cooling.”

Shelterbelts changed the environment for wildlife, providing more habitat for songbirds and encouraging whitetail deer to move into more areas. Thanks to the increased deer population, eastern North Dakota—where I am writing this—now even has a few mountain lions.

Trees can also provide an important refuge for wildlife. Two years ago, [when]  the snow was very deep, wildlife suffered when their grass and food plots were buried, [Diane Erickson, district conservationist in Clark County, S.D.] explained.

“Deer and pheasant loss was high,” Erickson said. “Shelterbelts or thick tree plantings are their main source of shelter and even a good food source. Wildlife needs habitat, and tree belts are the best winter habitats.”

Today, government agencies still encourage and fund shelterbelt planting, but more and more are being bulldozed in the name of "stewardship," which means profit. An agricultural-business site reports,

Fields often are divided into quarter sections (160 acres) and "80s" (80 acres.)

Decades ago, one or more shelterbelts often were planted on a quarter or 80.

That divided a single field into several -- for example, an 80 might have become two 40-acre fields -- and protected topsoil in all the fields from wind erosion.

Now, many farmers are removing shelterbelts to combine fields into a single, bigger one.

Shelterbelts did what they were supposed to, but times have changed, [Terry Weckerly, president of the North Dakota Grain Growers Association] says.

Most farmers today use production methods that leave more organic matter on the field and disturb the soil less, greatly decreasing the need for windbreaks, he says.

Shelterbelts often become "a nuisance, an obstacle," he says. For example, branches breaking off trees and falling into fields complicates farming, he says.

More significantly, shelterbelts make it more difficult to apply chemicals properly, he says. (Emphasis added)

So let's review this. Shelterbelts, once established, provided all their agricultural benefits for free while benefiting multiple species.

But "Being a good steward of the land is more than just putting trees in the ground."

Evidently, "being a good steward" means cutting the trees to gain a few more acres, then spraying all kinds of herbicides and insecticides on the ground, which run off with the snowmelt and also filter into the groundwater. That is what "no-till" farming requires: lots of honeybee-killing Roundup and the like.

(See the picture-perfect farmstead with the neatly painted house, the huge metal equipment sheds, the rows of stately trees—they don't cut the ones by the house—and the perfectly mowed lawns? Who knows what is in its well water?)

Plus convenience: "Another reason farmers have wanted to take out windbreaks is to make it easier to turn equipment. In the wet years two and three years ago, when sloughs took over parts of fields, tree rows made it harder to navigate tractors and combines—especially since equipment is all larger than it was years ago."

Nevertheless, the financial incentives to plant new shelterbelts and replace dying trees are still there, through various agencies. Those staffers keep making the same recommendations that they made in the 1950s—and they are still good ones.

And the same farmer who defends today's methods—who says that he needs them to pay off his loans—will sit across from you at lunch and agree that there aren't as many sharptail grouse as there were even ten years ago, that there aren't as many big whitetail bucks as there used to be, that there aren't as many birds in general.

No contradictions, nope.

How Much Heat Is in that Firewood?

Split into six or eight or ten pieces, each round might last a mid-winter day.

A big (by foothills standards) ponderosa pine blew down several years ago, breaking into two with the top section hung up in some big one-seed juniper trees. I spent a lot of time last winter freeing and getting it onto the ground without killing myself, then cut it into rounds, rolled them down a little hill, split them, and moved them to the house.

In process, I ended up with a lot of juniper too, most of which has been drying through the summer, and I am moving it now. That is a one-seed juniper in the background.

Meanwhile, the butt section of the pine tree, which had been soaked by snow, is now dry, so I finished cutting it up today. (That small chunk next to the saw is from another tree.)

Intuitively, I thought the juniper offered more value as fuel, but it does not come in convenient pieces like pine.

But pine surrenders gracefully to the saw — juniper wants to hurt you. If it can't pinch the chain, its rigid twigs will rip your shirt.

Back in 1913, the eight-year-old US Forest Service was answering that question. "The object of the investigation is to determine the heating values of the woods commonly used for fuel in New Mexico and Arizona, including about 10 different species."

They compared them to coal, since many people burned coal for home-heating back then, and also to "Bakersfield crude oil."

The tests were conducted using a "bomb calorimeter." I would like to own one of those just for the name. ("Professor Murcheson will now demonstrate the bomb calorimeter.")

The big winners were alligator juniper and the bark (not the wood) of Douglas fir, both of them delivering more than 10,000 BTUs per pound, or 76 percent as much per pound as Cerrillos anthracite coal. (The area around Cerrillos and Madrid, N.M., used to produce a lot of coal.)

One-seed juniper was almost as good, 9,900 BTUs/lb., equivalent to 75 percent of Cerrillos anthracite.

Ponderosa pine sapwood produced 8,856 BTUs/lb., while the bark produced 9,275.

Aspen (quakies), incidentally, came in at 8,555. They did not measure Gambel oak, but another source placed it almost as high as the one-seed juniper, which fits what I feel standing next to the stove. Piñon pine, 8,629. Some people would that it burns hotter than ponderosa, which I always thought was true. At least one other site supports me.

Another site calculates heat values in million BTUs per cord, a cord being a tightly stacked pile of wood measuring 4 x 4 x 8 feet. (The method of measurement is not specified.)

Here we see ponderosa pine at 21.7 million BTUs/cord; cottonwood, 16.8; aspen, 18; Douglas fir, 26.5; white fir, 21.1— and they don't measure Gambel oak, one-seed juniper, or Rocky Mountain juniper.

What this means, in the end, is that I will pick up any piece of juniper that is as big around as my wrist.

Bird Festival, Cattle-Rustling, and Elk in Beetle-Kill Forests

• Plan now for the Mountain Plover Festival.

• You’ll get the chance to mingle with farmers and ranchers who choose to live in the local community and learn about their lifestyle.
• Eat home-style food at every meal. Most meal are prepared by the community non-profit organizations.
• Saturday evening includes a chuck wagon dinner with authentic Western entertainment.
• Learn about conservation practices and history of the area.
• Tour Private Land that would normally not be accessible.
• Make new friends! Here's the website.

Sounds perfect if you are allergic to cities.  

• Cattle-rustling still happens in 21st-century Colorado.

But even keeping a close eye on livestock sales doesn’t prevent Colorado ranchers from experiencing their share of losses. Annual reports of missing or stolen livestock — the vast majority being cattle — average a little over 100, with losses ranging from a little over 400 to more than 650 head over the past four years. But that’s where the numbers get a little fuzzy.

• Pine beetles and the fungus they carry have killed huge amounts of lodgepole pine forest in the northern Rockies. As the dead trees drop their needles and become just standing trunks, more grass comes up between them. So that would be good for elk, right?

The evidence, however, is mixed. Some species do benefit, but not much the elk.

Looking at elk daytime use during the summer in Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest in south-central Wyoming, [University of Wyoming researcher Bryan G.] Lamont’s team expected to find mixed results. The loss of canopy would likely mean a loss in thermal cover, and more downed trees would make it difficult for the elk to move, forcing them to expend more energy. On the other hand, with new understory growth, elk would have more vegetation to forage. They expected elk might avoid the densest areas of downed trees but take advantage of the forage in other places.

Instead, elk tended to avoid beetle-killed areas overall, resulting in much less forest habitat that the elk use to keep cool during summer days. Beetle kill, researchers found, was different for the elk in important ways from wildfires or other disturbances.

 Time on the elk's side, however, as the dead trees start to fall and decay. Read the whole article here.

The Cult of "Ute Prayer Trees"

A small pine has grown in a U shape, trying to reach sunlight from inside
a thicket of Gambel oak. I could show you the same thing on my place,
but this photo was lifted from the What's Up, Archaeology? blog.

Finally, a take-down of the whole "Ute Prayer Tree" legend that has been getting too much of a hearing up and down Colorado, particularly in the Ute Pass area (west of Colorado Springs, e.g., Woodland Park, Divide, etc.)

"Bent Trees Part 1: Pseudo-archaeologies" was published last week on the What's Up, Archaeology? group blog. The author, Holly Kathryn Norton, is the Colorado State Archaeologist, and this is only Part 1 of her fisking of this contemporary "old Indian legend."

As you walk through a forest in Colorado, or anywhere else, really, there are trees that have not grown straight. In Colorado, particularly in the Pike’s Peak region of the Front Range, a contemporary mythology has grown around these trees. The myth takes many forms but the foundational logic is that these trees were purposely bent by the Ute Tribe, and the name given to the trees hints at why proponents of the practice think the Ute bent the trees- Prayer trees, burial trees, spirit trees, grandfather trees, marker trees, vortex trees, trail trees. The names change as the loosely formulated hypothesis are challenged by both professional archaeologists and the Ute themselves.

A little basic forestry combined with knowledge of history disproves a lot of it. I have made this same challenge to "prayer tree" proponents: Take a forester's increment borer, pull a core, and count the rings. Any ponderosa pine tree "modified" by the Utes on the Eastern Slope of Colorado ought to be at least 150 years old. If it's only 70 years old, then forget it. And if you know pine trees, you will know that many of the trees so described are far too young to have been modified by old-time Ute people.

There have also been serious questions about the age of individual trees that have been identified as “Ute Trees.” Core samples taken a couple of years ago on a tree that was identified as a “prayer tree” aged the tree to 67 years old, well after the Utes were forcibly removed from the Front Range to reservations in the Southwestern part of the state, nearly 8 hours away by modern car travel. I was personally told that this age is not accurate because “bending trees causes the DNA in a tree to change, so modern dendrochronology no longer works for aging a tree.” These kinds of arguments are just false, but no amount of fact-checking can refute such a blatant disbelief in scientific information.

And yet . . . and yet . . . this desire to see Ute Prayer Trees (or for some people, trees modified by Bigfoot) is what people have always done, seeing the spiritual side of nature and trying to put a name and face on it, whether it's dryads or Druids or you name it.

A "Wolfy" Aspen Tree

"Wolfy" aspen tree, Wet Mountains, Colorado

A "wolf tree" has nothing to do with Canis lupus. It is a tree that has grown larger and broader than normal for its kind.

A New England definition:

These trees are large individuals that have a large diameter trunk and a widely spreading crown. There is also a good chance that a wolf tree will have some or even extensive damage. This may be a large limb that has broken away from one side of the tree or the top being blown out, usually from a lightning strike.

Wolf trees are the result of having grown in an open area. In many cases these trees were once in or at the edge of an open field. Wolf trees were initially left when forest was cleared to create a pasture or they got their start in an existing pasture and somehow managed to remain despite their cleared surroundings. Since a wolf tree once grew free of competition with other trees they were able to grow wide, broad crowns.

A Michigan definition:

If you have ever seen a tree in the forest that seems out of place because it is much larger than the trees surrounding it, you may have seen a wolf tree. A wolf tree is defined as a tall forest tree with large girth and great, spreading branches. Wolf trees are usually surrounded by smaller trees, signifying that the tree was once the only tree in the area and that the smaller trees have grown up years after the wolf tree was established. 

The Rocky Mountain definition that I learned as a kid was closer to the first — a tree, typically a conifer, that grew alone, broad and bushy because it did not have to grow up and up in search of sunlight.

Dad, a forester, scorned them because they did not produce as many board feet of useful timber as they would have when growing in a denser stand.

On the other hand, once retired, he turned landscape painter and depicted a few wolf trees.

Range conservationists also will use the term: "The grass in that pasture is old and wolfy. It needs to be burned."

What I Found in the Woods on Wednesday

First there was the jawbone. I went to check the cameras at Ringtail Rocks (more coming from them — you saw the sexy skunks, right?) and there on my usual route was this mandible. The size and shape said "fox" to me, and the Internet tells me that is probably from a red fox, not a gray fox. Both live on that the ridge.

"Digested" grass.

At another time, I was coming down with The Dawg, not taking our usual path, when I saw this large clump of partially digested-looking grasses (compare to pine cones). My first thought was "stomach contents of a deer or elk," but there were major problems with that.

No one has been hunting up there during bow season. Second, if there had been any carcass or gut pile, said Dawg would have smelled it and run like an arrow straight to it, because there is nothing he loves more than Dead Things. That close to our usual path, I would have smelled it too.

So where did these tightly clumped grasses come from? They had a look of nesting material too. Had someone — perhaps someone of the ursine persuasion — dug out a wood rat's nest? I looked around but did not see any such disturbance.

Sorry about the backlighting, but the sun was not yet
over the ridge to the east (behind me).

Aha. The grass was part of a disintegrating squirrel nest, probably Abert squirrels, since they are all over these pine woods. Here's a great read on the relationship between squirrels, fungus, and trees.

The only difference is that 98 percent of our Abert squirrels are the black (melanistic) color phase, not the two-tone variety seen in Arizona and New Mexico.

Gnawing at Memory on New Mexico 21

The Tooth of Time at Philmont Scout Ranch.

New Mexico Highway 21 is the platonic ideal of a foothills road, climbing, turning, and dipping, but never  so much as you can't enjoy the scenery. On the right (west) side as you're going south lies the huge Philmont Scout Ranch, which reaches from the High Plains up into wooded mountains.

On the left (east) side, is the big Express UU Bar Ranch, managed for cattle, hunting, and vacations, and owned by Oklahoma businessman Bob Funk (I've met him) a self-made land baron who owns a swath of Colfax County, including the outlaw-haunted St. James Hotel in Cimarron, and operates through a subsidiary the municipal airport at Raton.

A few yards from the asphalt you can spot the ruts of the Mountain Branch of the  Santa Fe Trail. South of Raton Pass, it hugged the foothills, presumably for better access to water, grass, and firewood, while today's railroad and Interstate 25 run further out on the plains.

Once at some event I talked with a National Park Service staffer from the Santa Fe office. He had bicycled the trail — whether the whole thing or just from Bent's Old Fort down to Santa Fe, I don't recall.

He talked about the Tooth of Time — everything at Philmont is the Tooth of Time This or That. People traveling on US 64 get a glimpse of it, but when you follow the Trail, he said, you stay in sight of it for at least a couple of days, traveling at bicycle speed. For the teamsters walking alongside their laden freight wagons, it meant that only a week of travel was left before reaching Santa Fe.

Stay on the Trail, and you can end up in the Mora valley. In the old days, people were always coming and going from there to Fort Pueblo and other places—its agricultural products were sent north and south. Now, Mora is out of the way; it's a place that you have to want to visit, whereas it was on the main route of the Santa Fe Trail.

Rayado at Philmont—I think the dining hall was in the farther building,
and we slept in wall tents on platforms back beyond that.

I stopped at Rayado. It's kind of dangerous to go back to some place that you last saw when you were 14 years old. But I did not have to worry about a golden haze of nostalgia—Rayado looks better now than I remembered. Lusher and irrigated. A thicker riparian forest.

Because it was Labor Day weekend, everything was locked up and deserted, which made the visit feel more dreamlike — just me and the landscape of memory. I could have told it like, "I dreamed I was in this valley — there was a long adobe building . . ."

I was there for some kind of "conservation camp" (two weeks?), not the usual Philmont backpacking trek. (Now there is a Roving Outdoor Conservation School, which combines the two — fieldwork and backpacking. Sounds like fun, but you have to be 16.)

So what did we do? There had been a flash flood earlier that spring  — I think we built check dams, etc. Do we get any credit for the improved riparian area?

There was a little classroom time — basic forest ecology and so on — and one shorter backpack trip into the high country where we cut dwarf mistletoe out of pine trees with pruning saws, probably a useless exercise.

I remember the poker games after hours in the tent, but not the organized activities. That figures.

Fire Thoughts in Spring

Pasque flowers.

There's a rumble from the state highway down the valley. It is the second warm weekend day in a row, and "the hatch is on," as we say. Everyone in Colorado Springs or Pueblo with a motorcycle wants to ride it into the mountains. Some don't make it back, and then Flight for Life is landing at what I call Motorcycle Death Corner, an almost-hidden downhill switchback that sneaks up on the happy weekend rider.

But on to happier things. We are not on fire, at least not right now. The prairies are, however. Red Flag Warnings in ten states, including our part of Colorado.  Big blazes like the Rhea Fire in Oklahoma, now more than 286,000 acres. Quite a few smaller ones too — southeastern El Paso County and eastern Pueblo County (Colorado) seem to be getting hammered.

At the Wildfire Today blog, Bill Gabbert labels the OK Bar fire in southern New Mexico as an "under the radar" fire.

The fire is being managed by New Mexico State Forestry using a less than full suppression strategy. Fires not being suppressed do not receive the same exposure from the public agencies as conventional blazes, and this one may get even less in the next few days. After it grew by almost 5,000 acres on Friday, the national Situation Report for Saturday described the fire like this:

Extreme fire behavior. Last narrative report unless significant activity occurs.

Just two weeks ago I was on an Amtrak train chugging through the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. For one thing, there was more snow on the ground than around my house! (It had all melted six days later, on the return trip.)

Since you are usually seated opposite strangers in the dining car, you have these conversations about topics such as train travel or the weather or where you live as compared to where they live and the natural hazards associated with each place.

It's true, people in the East just don't "get" wildfire, or the community PTSD that sets in after one after another after another have come knocking at your door. That's OK, I don't "get" hurricanes.  (Tornadoes, yes.)

I look at our the window at the leafless, grey Eastern deciduous forests passing by and think, "If it's true that the Indians used to burn these woods agriculture or attracting big game, how they manage to do it? Wait for the perfect day in September? Because they always seem too moist."

More Fungus Beetles, Please

Cast-off exoskeletons of the pleasing fungus beetle pupae (Gibbifer californicus),
Imagine them hanging straight down — I turned them up to catch the light.
They are not quite an inch long.

A number of ponderosa pine trees around the house have died from mountain pine beetle infestation, the real culprit being the blue stain fungus that the beetles carry.

I had my eye on one large dead tree as a firewood source, mainly because it was next to the little dirt road that goes up in back. The woodpile was shrinking early last spring (the snowiest time of the year in this area), so I felled it. Just its top and thick limbs were enough to get us through — the rest I cut into rounds and stacked by the road.

Pleasing fungus beetle (Jeff Mitton)

Then warm weather came, and I procrastinated on bringing the rest down until last month.

Whereupon I found these cases on one of the split pieces — but what were they? I turned to What's That Bug, linked in the right-hand sidebar under "Resources."

Very soon I learned that they were the cast-off exoskeletons of the larvae of the pleasing fungus beetle, Gibbifer californicus, of the family Erotylidae, Pleasing Fungus Beetles. (Don't ask me, "pleasing to whom?")

The pleasing fungus beetle develops on soft conk fungi on aspen, ponderosa pine and other logs in forested areas. The biology of the insect is largely unknown; some apparently spend the winter in the adult stage laying eggs in spring; others survive as larvae within the fungus.

The larvae feed on the fungus during late spring and early summer, consuming large quantities. When full grown the larvae hang from the underside of the logs and transform to a pupa, often in groups of several dozen. With this habit, a grouping of pupae may appear some what like a miniature bat roost.

As larvae, they look like this. You can see how that matches the photo above.

As adults, they "feed on nectar, pollen and the bracket fungi growing on rotting logs. Larvae feed exclusively on the bracket fungi, so if you want to see adult and larval pleasing fungus beetles, search rotting logs with bracket fungi," writes University of Colorado biology professor Jeff Mitton.

I am pleased to know this now.