Fur Bearer Specialist Report
Often times the MTA Furbearer Specialist has long periods of time when not much is going on for him to work on and as a result has little or nothing to report. This has been the case since the passing of the Lynx emergencies. It is at times like this that the poor fellow tends to wax philosophical and joust with windmills of a more theoretical nature. This is such a time. Please bear with him and be aware that he wouldn’t hold it against you if you didn’t bother to read his scribbling.
I was told, as a young lad, that it all started when Adam and Eve were evicted from the Garden. It was, so to speak, the first known example of the fledging of young (or newly created) from a safe and comfortable nest into a cold cruel world. This is one account of the event that compelled humans to forever after fend for themselves and solve their own problems.
Today, archeologists go to their African and South American digs to analyze the remains and artifacts of the past. They tell us our earliest ancestors were hunter-gatherers. The use of brawn and physical endurance was the key to that early human survival tactic. But it has gradually given way, they say, to an increased reliance on brain power. So that may be why a more docile and comfortable world has resulted. Now, there is danger in growing too smug about being the smartest species on the planet. After all, this kind of egotistical viewpoint stems from a highly biased self-assessment. Some of our neighboring species might not give us the same evaluation score.
There are many examples of our past ‘improvements’ available to us if we know how to look for them. They show how we modern humans have used brain power to mold the physical world to our advantage. But a problem arises to complicate any critical analysis of the new and improved world because we ourselves are an integral part of this highly modified environment. In short, we have problems “seeing the forest for the trees”. But, it is something only we can do for ourselves. We really need to set ourselves apart and view our world from a new perspective in order to understand more about the consequences of our past and future actions. And then we have to relate our new found knowledge and viewpoints to the politicians if we are to get anything meaningful accomplished. Lord help us.
When another species, the beaver, modifies the landscape for its own benefit, they cause the instantaneous destruction of many local upland plants and animals. Even though remnants of their ancient dams can still be found perched high and dry on hillside slopes in Minnesota woodlands, changes caused by beaver activity incur only very limited and short term consequences. Human activity, by way of contrast, can do greater damage by its permanence.
We have come through time to the present day and we may be poised at a critical crossroads; partly because human nature drives us to immediate fixes whenever we perceive a problem. Hunger, for example, is premier amongst the myriad of problems we have faced. Over the years we have spent billions exporting food as a temporary humanitarian fix. But that solution ignores certain inescapable ecological and biological realities; the underlying factors of prolonged drought and excessively high human populations. Drought results from natural processes we can not control and overpopulation is driven by a web of complex factors for which there is no foreseeable fix.
World demand for various forms of power continues to grow. We are now looking at wind and solar power as options for the future. Solar is probably the least invasive environmentally but is proving to be very expensive to develop. Wind power seems at the first look to be friendly to the landscape but I shudder to think of the prairies and mountain valleys covered with windmills and draped with power lines. Vertical tower structures mimic forest shapes and may exclude some prairie and grassland species that avoid nest sites adjacent to woody cover.
Power lines along oil and gas well access roads have provided perches from which avian predators in places like the Western Dakotas and non-mountainous regions of Montana can hunt. Previously, only creek bottoms or other wetter sites supported tree growth and the widely spaced fence lines were the only other vertical structures available as perches for birds like the magpie, a very effective nest predator. Once a road is in place it continues to provide access for human disturbance long after the well has dried up or the wind tower is abandoned. This is something engineers don’t understand and planners don’t like to deal with when they locate projects sites and stipulate post project restoration requirements.
Minnesota will see some wind tower development and there are certainly future projects of unknown number and impact that will be brought to us by currently untested technologies. We could well see population increases that we wouldn’t have dreamed of a few years ago. Can the lakes, prairies, forests and streams we value as outdoors enthusiasts take the pressure? There develops a thin line between the world most of us enjoy and the world most of us would just as soon not see. We are walking an environmental tight rope. Get involved.
Con