Re-establishing the natural balance - Americas and Exotics

[Janne]

Yes it is! I have lived in several countries, and travelled all around the World, and think British Isles overall are the most beautiful.
The only thing lacking are proper mountains and fjords. The rest is there!

Remember, you guys are the ones in the frontline in keeping it beautiful!

 

[Robson Valley]

I'll predict that if you ever did eliminate the grey squirrels you would next have some overgrowing vegetation problem.
Birds by their nature and behaviour wouldn't have had much of a chance to compete with any mammals.

There must have been a great ebb and flow of species 10,00+ yrs ago during the most recent ice age.
Britain was connected to the continent by "Doggerland" yes? When sea levels were lower?
Might that imply extinctions at the hand of paleo man after the Ilse became isolated? Rats & rabbits?
What's in your paleo middens for bones?

On the west coast of British Columbia, it's been proposed and generally agreed to that sea levels were as much as 300'
below what they are now, during the last ice age. That puts a land bridge from Haida Gwaii to the mainland.
The Columbia Blacktail deer are little and not powerful swimmers yet they are damaging the plant ecology if Haida Gwaii and a cull is underway.

Those lower sea levels also present a coastal route of opportunity for human migration out of Asia, via a stall of 10,000 years on Beringia.
You want to hear yelling and screaming in debate? Get migrators of different opinions in the same room.

 

[Janne]

Doggerland and the southern part in Kent to Cornwall were connected to France.

Sea was much, much lower. Must be huge mounts of archeology along the old, now beneath the sea, coastline.
Doggerland is full of it.

 

[Janne]

There is an Archeologist here on the Forum that knows everything of this!

 

[Robson Valley]

I've seen several maps with imagined lowered sea levels.
Doggerland must have been a temperate zone rain forest in places.
Part of Tasmania and parts of British Columbia are good examples.

Same here in British Columbia. With the sea level lowered 300', the entire coastal landscape is unrecognizable.

 

[Janne]

Yes. Swamps, rivers, brooks, marshes. a heaven for wildlife.

They fish up Mammoth bones, giant deer bones, and such.

Plus stone tools.
I believe it was in Doggerland they fished up a very beautiful harpoon some years ago?

Toddy is our resident Archeologist, and that subject is her specialty? Botany?
She can tell us how the area Britain looked like just before the intrusive species Homo Sapiens came?

 

[Janne]

One of the least touched biospheres in Europe is in Poland(/Bielarussia) called Bielowieza forest/ nature reserve.
Large parts of Europe looked like that.

 

[Robson Valley]

The Boreal Forest Biome is circumpolar. For land area, look no further than all across Canada, coast to coast.
Bigger than any single forest and every bit as desolate as you can imagine. Yeah it's green. Big deal.
Much of it gets burnt over (aka natural fire cycle) every 70-100 years.

The niches in the climax seral stage are so narrow and sophisticated that few animals are capable of living there
UNLESS there's been some sort of disturbance as the regeneration following big wild fires. How about that?
For many decades here, there's been a compulsion to put out ALL wild fires. Now? No people? Let it go.
Just wreck the place with a wild fire. Wait 10 years and watch the wildlife jumping around.
Yellowstone fires have been the perfect example of an accessible showcase.

Southern BC got burnt pretty bad last summer. The regeneration in the next few years
will be a sight to behold.

 

[Janne]

European ( and Northern Asian?) firests do not need fire to rejuvenate.
In Sweden, the untouched forests ( mainly in state parks) rejuvenate when large trees get blown down and seedlings root in those sunny small glades.

 

[Robson Valley]

Fire is good for light and for the mineralization of stagnant biomass for natural regeneration.
Fire triggers the seral stages in succession which quickly encourages animal occupation.
The animals will never appear as long as their niche does not exist.

Conifer forests, pine forests in the Boreal Forest Biome have serotinous cones which are opened by the heat of the wild fires.
Must be other kinds of forests over there.

For us to do this artificially for the purposes of reforestation which is required by law after harvest,
the resulting seed, such as Pinus contorta, is worth more than $4,000 per kilo.

I'll admit that there's so much land here that there's never any attempt to restore a landscape.
Not even in your back garden. If you haven't got the correct mycorhizal associations in the soil,
no amount of any known fertilizer can fix it.

Reforestation here after fire or harvest is a pulp fiber crop no different than growing wheat.
The chief difference is the wheat might be 100 days, the spruce will be 70 years.
Nobody cares what niche diversity exists. Every other living woody tree is a weed.
I guess that mixed stands could be planted on ideal sites. That's just a nuisance to harvest.

 

[santaman2000]

One wonders how mankind has ever been responsible for a species extinction by hunting.....

Some species are more susceptible than others. Squirrels are just to prolific. As opposed to the species like the Kiwi.

 

[santaman2000]

There's very clear fossil evidence of a great diversity of mega fauna ( mammoths, etc) all across North America.
Many thought to be extant less than 10,000 years ago. Did Paleo Man drive their extinction or not?
Paleo Man was certainly very well established by 14,000 BCE. Then what?.....

About the same time as the end of the last ice age so climate change probably also had a hand in it.

 

[santaman2000]

......My problem with the rewilding debate is if we just take our hands off the wheel and let nature do what it wants would we end up with a better result than if we set a target and crafted the land back to a better state of health based on our current ecosystem.....

That presupposes that you're also willing to accept some extinctions as well. Over here our Flying Squirrel seems to be declining and could go way unless we intervene.

 

[Janne]

The Eurasian pine conrs open when they dry.
Squirrels contribute a lot too, they drop the odd seed, or the winter stash gets forgotten or left.

I know of one large area in northern Sweden, about 5x5 km, that I was told was burned sometime in the 1930’s.
Last time I walked through it, in mid 1990’s there were still only low bushes, lingon berry and blue berry covered areas.

 

[Janne]

Extinction and the emergence of species is normal and natural. ( not man caused extinction of course).

As we are still in the tail end of the latest ice age and the Earth is still naturally warming, we can expect more species to die.
The human caused increased warming will accelerate this process.

But we will get more warm loving species moving in.

 

[Robson Valley]

Interesting comments from the Russians in the Far East, places like the Kabarovsk Krai.
They claim the the Boreal Forest Biome is creeping northward, about a kilometer per century.

We had a long cold spell, back about 500 years ago. Changed some wood anatomy properties in tree growth
but little else.
In much of the temperate zone, prolonged drought is the greatest game changer for plant and animal diversity.

 

[Janne]

I have seen it myself. When I started going to the Lofoten Islands 35 years ago, I had problems finding birch trees close enough and high enough to provide me with cover (to be hidden) when I put up my over night camp.
Today I have a roof over my head, and the birch trees are dense and high.
Perfect for you young bucks to go and camp in!

Last summer I had a discussion with my friends wife Inger where to pick cloud berries. She told me when she was a young girl she and her mum went to a fjord nearby but as it is now covered with birch trees the cloudberries are gone.
That was in the early 1930’s as she is now 90 years young.
The cloudberries are now growing much higher up.

 

[Robson Valley]

Might consider thinning the birch so you don't get a field of sticks with clusters of laves at the top?
Anybody there doing much sap collecting for syrup & candy?

The easiest thing for us to do is to transplant wild berry bushes to the back yard.
I have a sneaking suspicion that some large independent garden centers do that for sale.
Pot them up, hidden behind a green house for a couple of years, then trotted out onto a sale bench.

 

[Robson Valley]

Rubus chamaemorus. One of 6 species of Rubus which grow across northern Canada.
Wild raspberries and salmon berries are the most conspicuous and common.
Fire disturbance seems to be good site prep for the raspberries.

A neighbor of mine brought home buckets of fire soils to establish a hedge of wild raspberries

I read that Cloud berry is (oddly) dioecious, you need both the male and the female plants.
I read that there's probably no more expensive fruit ever available for sale in Scandinavia.
But, May cuttings root very easily. Bring 50 home in a pot of water and get busy!

I use styrofoam "Superblocks" which have 45 holes, each 350 ml, for starting seeds or cuttings.

 

[Janne]

No sap or anything is taken from it.
These days it is not even used for firewood, as it is cheaper to buy properly sized Birch logs for Russia!

I should have about 7 square yards in the cellar, dried, split and ready to go into the woodburner!
We buy them from an organisation that employ ‘unemployable’ people, people with mental or physical handicaps.
Cloudberries are imported from Russia too, for the jam factories.
We pick about one gallon each summer. Hard work.

In the sub Arctic there are no invasive species. Only one up there is the Kamchatka crab ( Red King crab) that has invaded the northernmost Norwegian coast.
Good income for the fishermen!