Nature Notes
By Fiona Reid
Ponderosa pine inspires deep-rooted thoughts
M
mmm—the comfort of home. I’m always excited at the prospect of a trip somewhere, whether it be to a little escape getaway pad in Pine, Ariz., or to a distant land like South Africa or Zambia to visit friends and family. Road trips, plane trips, boat trips—there’s something about them that stirs the cells and elevates the heart rate. The mind roams, the journey speaks to us of discovery and exploration, the imagination conjures up pictures of cozy conversations, laughter and giggles; or the feel of the warmest, softest sand of any beach anywhere in the world; or gazing out onto never-ending ocean waves to a mysterious horizon that just goes on and on blessing your face with salt water drops. It’s almost impossible to imagine what it must have been like for the early explorers heading outward bound into unknown territory. Their feelings must have been magnified a million times. But I digress…. After it’s all over, the journey home, although sometimes long and tedious, is a gentler thing. The heart rate slows down as the environment becomes more familiar—the geography as seen from the air shows those familiar, rough, dusty-brown mountains you know lie just south of home; or the fact that you are now driving on the correct—for you—side of the road; the sound of your mother tongue. Then home. The kind of place you know so well you can walk to the fridge in the pitch dark and find the juice on the exact shelf you always leave it and you can walk back to the bedroom without crashing into anything and without spilling a drop. When you can’t stretch your feet all the way to the bottom of the bed because there’s a lump there, and you know it’s a cat, not a python. And, yet, I sit here at my computer, at home, surrounded by things that are either made in foreign lands by foreign people, or copied from things invented in foreign lands by foreign minds. It
still feels comfortable and friendly. Outside are a few trees that would feel more at home on the East Coast than here, but they provide shade and habitat for birds and people, so I like them anyway. I didn’t plant them, but I won’t cut them down. “Home” in this day and age is a mix of native and foreign everything. Made in China or Honduras or by a local artist; grown in Kenya or New Zealand or up the road in Paulden; designed by a Finn, built by an American with materials manufactured in Japan. Was life better for plants and animals, including humans, when everything within a couple of hundred miles was the only larder or pantry or “hardware store” or habitat? I don’t know. I suppose it depends on how one defines “better” and puts that in relation to our time on Earth. And I suppose it depends on how much one values and/or appreciates diversity. In the natural world, diversity is not only considered a good thing, but also it is a critically necessary thing. In the Prescott area, we are blessed with incredible diversity in the species of plants and animals that are our natural neighbors, but we know that many of them traveled here from distant parts. They crept in slowly, over millennia, but we proudly call them ours now. My mother was from Yorkshire on the east coast of England. Many folks from the “north country” of England have some Viking blood in their veins, which might explain why, on a visit to Scandinavia several years ago, I actually felt somewhat at home. OK, so I looked the part—blonde hair and blue eyes. And I did love the fjords, the coniferous forests, the Stave churches, the log houses, the strong coffee and the yummy Norwegian salmon. But I couldn’t live there. I can’t bear the cold. The low temperatures are below my lower limit of tolerance. And it’s cold for too darned long. I’m a sun worshipper. Perhaps being born a couple of degrees removed from the Equator has something to do with that. I can certainly tolerate much
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more heat with far less physiological stress than many of my friends. In fact, I’m energized by the heat, while my chums begin to look like badly wilted potted plants. Anyway, as I wander around our forest I feel very much at home as I recognize all the familiar “faces” around me—the tall ponderosa pines, the solid and strong ancient alligator junipers, the tough, almost indestructible chaparral species, the bunch grasses. We call them natives, but these were once the creeping foreigners, taking advantage of warmer or drier or simply better conditions for survival over millions of years. And we, all of us—human and nonhuman—love them. We love their grace, their green, their berries, their bark. We lean on them, we climb on them, make homes in them, raise our young in them; we munch on the cones and eat the nuts; we teach about them and we learn about them. On a crisp midmorning walk the other day I noticed a young ponderosa pine tree poking up from under the recent snowfall. The sun was at such an angle that the little tree cast a long proud shadow on the white snow. I wondered about the little one’s chances of survival. I wondered first about the chances of one of those tiny pine seeds, dislodged from its little bed in the pine cone, floating down on its long slender wing and settling up against a stone or a pile of dirt enough to cover it and protect it until conditions were right for germination and growth. That in itself is a wonder. The little rock-hard juniper seed has a much better chance of being “planted” —and fertilized!—because of coyote’s sweet tooth, as evidenced by the masses of berries in her scat. In any event, a lucky seed grows, and a new plant is born. Our lower latitude is pretty much the pine’s upper limit of tolerance for heat and, consequently, lower ground moisture level. Ponderosas grow at high elevations or on north facing slopes or in small gullies and valleys that have some cold air drainage and
more moisture. The alligator juniper, however, survives really well in a warmer, drier clime. If conditions become too dry for the tree it will, in fact, cease growth until there is more moisture. Much further north of here, though, and its limits of tolerance for cold would be stretched. I know how it feels. These natives have survived and they brighten our days with their diversity and provision of habitat for many species of animals. They live in a region within their thermal tolerance limits; there are probably large enough populations to supply the genetic diversity for survival; and in spite of drought and human restricted fire regimes and, in the case of ponderosa pines, massive bark beetle-related deaths, they have demonstrated considerable resilience and many continue to stand tall. But as I look at the little pondy pine snuggled into its blanket of snow the questions I ask and cannot answer have to do with climate change. What is the capacity of the local flora and fauna to adapt to change in terms of both evolutionary change over time and generations, and adapting to varying environmental conditions, for example a rapidly warming world? I think Darwin found out that all organisms have some intrinsic capacity to adapt to changing conditions, but I fear today those changes may be huge. We might ask a similar question of ourselves—what is our human capacity, in this changing world, to manage, adapt and minimize impacts on the natural environment? I hope and believe, because our resident native species depend on it, we do have that capacity. If our species is not sensitive to, or flexible and tolerant of making necessary lifestyle changes, then we will have to put up with a definite change of scenery, literally. Fiona Reid, education director at the Highlands Center for Natural History, is a passionate defender of nature and outdoor time with children. January 2010 • Page 31