News
ENLARGE
VAIL, Colorado — In “A Sand County Almanac,” famed conservationist Aldo Leopold records his visit to a river valley in northern Mexico with an essay titled “The Song of the Gavilan.” As it turns out, the song he hears is far more then the tune created as water cascades over rocks and flows through riffles. And this song isn't easy to hear.
“To hear even a few notes of it you must know the speech of hills and rivers,” Leopold says. “Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it — a vast pulsing harmony — its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.”
So what is this vast pulsing harmony? Have you heard it? This week our students will be studying forest ecology — the science of how organisms react with each other and interact with the environment of a forest ecosystem. They will be listening for the gentle hum of everything working together through thousands of connections.
Much like an orchestra, the forest has a myriad of members. From the trees that we can easily identify and hear swaying in the wind to the tiniest insect munching on a pine needle, everything in the forest plays notes in a grand symphony.
So what should you listen for? Let's start with our smallest members of the forest, the decomposers. These guys quite possibly have the most important job in the forest. As one of our students observed, “If we didn't have decomposers, there'd be piles of dead stuff everywhere, and it would smell bad.”
Decomposers encompass a great number of organisms that we call the FBI — fungus, bacteria and invertebrates. These guys are everywhere, but you have to listen really close to hear what they are doing.
Fungus is constantly spreading through the soil with mycelium, sometimes popping through the soil to spread spores via mushrooms. Invertebrates are collecting, scraping, filtering, shredding and chewing organic material as it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. Bacteria take care of the leftovers.
The connections we are listening for in a forest can be quite complex. One of my favorite connections to study is the relationship between the lynx and snowshoe hare.
At one point the predator–prey relationship between them was thought to be rather simple — as snowshoe hare population increased so did the lynx until there were too many lynx and the cycle started over.
However, the quiet, unsuspecting plants that the snowshoe hare feed on play a major role in regulating the populations. As the snowshoe hare population increasingly overgraze, the plants fight back with toxins. These toxins are found in the buds and juvenile stems with concentrations sometimes 25 times greater than in mature stems.
Usually we think of the larger animals and the trees as controlling what goes on in the forest, but in reality some of the smallest members have the largest impact. A good example of this is the many different species of lichen. You can't walk far in a forest without seeing lichen-covered boulders, and if we had more sensitive ears, we could hear them slowly breaking down the rock by chemical and physical means.
You may also see lichen hanging from trees. Usnea, commonly called old man's beard, seems harmless when pick it off a tree and make an awesome green goatee, but it has the capability to kill entire stands of trees.
As winter fades to spring, go out and explore these connections and listen for the “vast pulsing harmony” of the forest. Maybe, you can write your own song of the Sawatch or Gore ranges, the Eagle River, or even your backyard. The forest holds enough mysteries and music to last a lifetime.
The Gore Range Natural Science School's Curious Nature column appears Mondays in the Vail Daily and on www.vaildaily.com. Brian Morgan is a Graduate Fellow in Natural Science Education at the Gore Range Natural Science School where he shares his passion for the forest and teaches children about to listen to its pulse. (www.gorerange.org)
“To hear even a few notes of it you must know the speech of hills and rivers,” Leopold says. “Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it — a vast pulsing harmony — its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.”
So what is this vast pulsing harmony? Have you heard it? This week our students will be studying forest ecology — the science of how organisms react with each other and interact with the environment of a forest ecosystem. They will be listening for the gentle hum of everything working together through thousands of connections.
Much like an orchestra, the forest has a myriad of members. From the trees that we can easily identify and hear swaying in the wind to the tiniest insect munching on a pine needle, everything in the forest plays notes in a grand symphony.
So what should you listen for? Let's start with our smallest members of the forest, the decomposers. These guys quite possibly have the most important job in the forest. As one of our students observed, “If we didn't have decomposers, there'd be piles of dead stuff everywhere, and it would smell bad.”
Decomposers encompass a great number of organisms that we call the FBI — fungus, bacteria and invertebrates. These guys are everywhere, but you have to listen really close to hear what they are doing.
Fungus is constantly spreading through the soil with mycelium, sometimes popping through the soil to spread spores via mushrooms. Invertebrates are collecting, scraping, filtering, shredding and chewing organic material as it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. Bacteria take care of the leftovers.
The connections we are listening for in a forest can be quite complex. One of my favorite connections to study is the relationship between the lynx and snowshoe hare.
At one point the predator–prey relationship between them was thought to be rather simple — as snowshoe hare population increased so did the lynx until there were too many lynx and the cycle started over.
However, the quiet, unsuspecting plants that the snowshoe hare feed on play a major role in regulating the populations. As the snowshoe hare population increasingly overgraze, the plants fight back with toxins. These toxins are found in the buds and juvenile stems with concentrations sometimes 25 times greater than in mature stems.
Usually we think of the larger animals and the trees as controlling what goes on in the forest, but in reality some of the smallest members have the largest impact. A good example of this is the many different species of lichen. You can't walk far in a forest without seeing lichen-covered boulders, and if we had more sensitive ears, we could hear them slowly breaking down the rock by chemical and physical means.
You may also see lichen hanging from trees. Usnea, commonly called old man's beard, seems harmless when pick it off a tree and make an awesome green goatee, but it has the capability to kill entire stands of trees.
As winter fades to spring, go out and explore these connections and listen for the “vast pulsing harmony” of the forest. Maybe, you can write your own song of the Sawatch or Gore ranges, the Eagle River, or even your backyard. The forest holds enough mysteries and music to last a lifetime.
The Gore Range Natural Science School's Curious Nature column appears Mondays in the Vail Daily and on www.vaildaily.com. Brian Morgan is a Graduate Fellow in Natural Science Education at the Gore Range Natural Science School where he shares his passion for the forest and teaches children about to listen to its pulse. (www.gorerange.org)
