Great column yesterday in the New York Times about the role that wolves play in creating habitat for beavers, who in turn create habitat for everyone else.
An example of this can be found in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park, where wolves were virtually wiped out in the 1920s and reintroduced in the ’90s. Since the wolves have come back, scientists have noted an unexpected improvement in many of the park’s degraded stream areas.
Stands of aspen and other native vegetation, once decimated by overgrazing, are now growing up along the banks. This may have something to do with changing fire patterns, but it is also probably because elk and other browsing animals behave differently when wolves are around. Instead of eating greenery down to the soil, they take a bite or two, look up to check for threats, and keep moving. The greenery can grow tall enough to reproduce.
Beavers, despite being on the wolf’s menu, also benefit when their predators are around. The healthy vegetation encouraged by the presence of wolves provides food and shelter to beavers. Beavers in turn go on to create dams that help keep rivers clean and lessen the effects of drought. Beaver activity also spreads a welcome mat for thronging biodiversity. Bugs, amphibians, fish, birds and small mammals find the water around dams to be an ideal habitat.
If you’re more of an auditory learner, allow me to recommend that you listen to my interview with Suzanne Fouty on this very topic.
And since we’re following other species today, lets talk about the fastest bird in the world who was nearly destroyed by DDT and is now making enough of a comeback to show up at the coast where I haven’t seen him in 15 years. This is a peregrine falcon who was flying back and forth between two craggy ocean perches and somewhere around the corner are the piled bodies of a hundred sanderlings or oystercatchers that he is feasting on. Tennyson springs obviously to mind.
Alfred Tennyson The Eagle (er…peregrine)
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.
