The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature by DavidGeorge Haskell Read Free Book Online Page B

American forests have experienced fifty million years of browse, followed by ten thousand years of drastically reduced mammalian herbivory, then one hundred strange years of no browse at all. Might the ancient forests have been patchy and sparse, kept trimmed by herds of wandering herbivores? Certainly these herbivores had enemies of their own, which are now gone, or almost so. The sabertooth cat and the direwolf are extinct; the gray wolf, mountain lion, and bobcat are rare. In the western United States, the giant American lion and the cheetah both preyed on the plant browsers. The existence of these many species of large carnivore is further evidence of the abundance of herbivores. Giant cats and wolves need giant herds of food. The only places in the world that sustain large populations of carnivores are well endowed with browsers. After all, carnivore flesh is just plant matter passed up the food web. So, abundant fossil evidence of large predators is strong evidence for heavy browse on plants.
    Humans have eliminated some predators but have lately added three new deer-slaying creatures: domestic dogs, immigrant coyotes invading from the west, and automobile fenders. The first two are effective predators of fawns; the latter is the main suburban killer of adults. We face an impossible equation. On one hand, we have the loss of tens of species of herbivores; on the other we have the replacement of one type of predator by another. What level of browse is normal, acceptable, or natural in our forests? These are challenging questions, but it is certain that the lush forest vegetation that grew in the twentieth century was unusually underbrowsed.
    A forest without large herbivores is an orchestra without violins. We have grown accustomed to incomplete symphonies, and we balk when the violins’ incessant tones return and push against the more familiar instruments. This backlash against the herbivores’ return has no good historical foundation. We may need to take the longer view, listen to the whole symphony, and celebrate the partnership between animal and microbe that has been tearing at saplings for millions of years. Good-bye shrubbery; hello ticks. Welcome back to the Pleistocene.

February 16th—Moss
    T he mandala’s surface is a tumult of water, crackling as the clouds fire volleys, pause, then loose more artillery. Battalions of rain blown in from the Gulf of Mexico have assaulted the forest all week. The world seems made of flowing, exploding water.
    Mosses exult in the wetness. They arch into the rain, swollen green. Their transformation is remarkable. Last week they hung parched and bleached on the mandala’s rock faces, beaten down by winter. No longer. Their bodies have tapped the clouds’ energy.
    My own wintertime desiccation has created a thirst for wet, green renewal that moves me to a closer look. I lie at the mandala’s edge and lean my face to the mosses. They smell of earth and life, and their beauty rises exponentially with nearness. I am greedy for more and pull out a hand lens, pressing my eye against it as I creep closer.
    Two types of moss intermingle on the rock face. Without removing them to the laboratory to examine the shape of their cells under a microscope, I cannot definitively identify them, and so I observe them without naming. One species lies in fat ropes, each rope wrapped in closely spaced leaflets. From a distance the stems look like living dreadlocks; a closer view shows the leaflets are arranged in repeating graceful spirals, like green petals repeated over and over. The other species stands erect, its stems branching like miniature spruce trees. The growing tips of both species are green as baby lettuce. Color darkens behind the tips, shading into the olive green of mature oak leaves.Luminosity dominates this world; each leaf is one cell layer thick, so light dances and flows through the moss, giving it an internal glow. Water, light, and life have united their powers and broken