During this time of year, its animal central in my neighbourhood. Black bears are a regular annoyance, if not a hazard, though Ive only seen one up close. It ambled along in an ursine version of a pimp roll, casually batting over garbage pails and oblivous to the unholy racket from neighbours banging pots and pans.
Coyotes, raccoons and the rare cougar sighting round out the local wildlife scene. And squirrels, of course, which seem a bit thin on the ground here lately. The eastern grey squirrel is one of the more recent wildlife arrivals to the Pacific Northwest, originating from a small population brought to Stanley Park from New York in 1909. Since 1970, this generalist forager has expanded its turf into Lower Mainland residential neighbourhoods, often appearing in its black melanistic phase.
The eastern grey squirrel is recent enough to be called an invasive species. But when you get right down to it, many native species originally came from somewhere else, including us. Human beings are the invasive species par excellence, and we have catupulted other organisms across entire oceans, from tomatoes and potatoes to zebra mussels to eastern grey squirrels.
The term, invasive species has set off debates in academic circles lately, with a vocal minority of ecologists insisting that the phrase contains a conservative bias against recent, nonhuman immigrants. In any case, nature does not exist in balance, and never has, in spite of encyclicals otherwise from St. Gore and the Disney Channel. The right term is dynamic disequilibrium, with animal populations expanding and contracting over time. Humans didnt invent disequilibrium, although we certainly have managed to turbocharge it.
Consider the parable of the passenger pigeon. Passenger pigeons once filled the skies of the Americas, literally in the billions, raining enough excrement to force people indoors. Graceful and fast in flight, they were referred to as blue meteors. Gobbling their chow, they sometimes twittered in tones musical enough that people mistook them for little girls, observes journalist Charles C. Mann in his book Ancient Americans: Rewriting the History of the New World. The birds were ravenous eaters. As a boy, the naturalist John Muir said he witnessed a flock buzzsaw through thousands of acres of acorns perfectly clean in a few minutes. A hundred years later, the naturalist and artist John J. Audubon witnessed a sky blackened for three days by a single mass of passenger pigeons. The air was literally filled with pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse.
Far from being an annoyance, the tasty passenger pigeon was a sign of Gods grace to the New World colonists. In the lore of one eastern aboriginal tribe, the bird represented natures generosity, a species literally selected by the spirit world to nourish humankind, notes Mann. People cooked the birds in stews, smoked them over fires, and baked them into pies. They even plucked their feathers to stuff mattressses, and fed them to livestock.
Then one day, there were no more passenger pigeons. The last bird died in captivity in 1914. The symbol of natures bounty became an icon for human greed and shortsightedess. Yet the story doesnt end there. The passenger pigeon had an appetite for maize, making it a natural competitor with the human indigenous population. Yet archeological digs have found very few bones of the birds in pre-Columbian middens, even though such an abundant source of protein would surely be highly prized part of the native diet. The conclusion: the birds were not abundant prior to the first European arrivals. The avian throngs seen by Audubon were, in the words of one archaeologist, outbreak populationsalways a symptom of an extraordinarily disrupted ecological system.
The Edenic world seen by 19th century observers, teaming with gamemillions of bison, passenger pigeons, etc.is now suspected to have been a result of human interference, in itself. The first settlers may have decimated a numbers of keystone species, life forms that are central nodes for ecological dependencies, setting off a chain reaction of population explosions.
The parable of the passenger pigeon has become a bit more complicated. Yet one way or another, human beings always seem to end up eating crow. Or squirrel, if theyre hungry enough.
www.geoffolson.com
