Can these be fruit flies inside balsam fir?

Tiny bugs inside balsam fir firewood don't look like winged ants but more like fruit flies.
 

Friendly Neighbourhood Coyote in action

 

I have gotten videos of most of the other wild creatures here in the past couple of weeks and felt bad that I didn't have a good one of our Friendly Neighbourhood Coyote. He is probably the most handsome of them all.  So here is one below.

What causes mysterious blue balsam sap?

 

Doc waits for me at my toboggan loaded with dry balsam lengths for firewood

Live balsam fir

When you spend as much time as me cutting and hauling balsam fir by snowshoe and toboggan, you notice things. Like, why does about one tree in a thousand ooze blue sap? These are live trees, of course. 

The best answer I can find on the Internet is not about balsam fir but other species and even then the experts are concerned with blue-coloured wood which is caused by a fungus.

I have cut down thousands of balsams over my life and I have never seen the blue wood inside. I think this is something different.

One possibility is something that occurs in Borneo.

There a latex-producing tree oozes blue sap that has been found to contain high amounts of nickel. Well, there is nickel around here too. About 15 miles from here there are serious nickel deposits that would be mined if the price for this metal was higher.

The balsams that ooze blue sap here on our property are along a rocky ridge. 

Our property is at the base of Silver Mountain which was mined for silver back in the late 1800s.

If a reader has any insights, I would love to hear them.

Seeing both the forest and the trees

 

I have been meaning to compare and contrast these two books for awhile now. It is interesting how two authors with impeccable credentials and love for the Boreal Forest can see it from completely different points of view.

Diana Beresford-Kroeger looks at it from the bio-chemical level and Malcolm Squires from the macro-economic. She is an academic and he is an industry forester. There is no right or wrong here, in my opinion. They are both right. 

Arboretum goes into fascinating detail how each species of tree and shrub in the Boreal provides a life-sustaining function to the entire planet. This is the largest forest ecosystem in the world. It goes completely around the globe at the northern latitudes. 

Few of us realize how trees filter the atmosphere, removing toxins and particulates. They do the same with water. If there is one thing most of know about plant medicine it is that willow bark contains salicylic acid which is a pain reliever. Think acetasalicylic acid -- ASA -- Aspirin. Well, other trees, such as alders, have this too. They all grow along creeks and marshes. As streams flow around these tree roots this chemical is released into the water and helps purify it. 

Trees such as pines and firs release aerosols into the air. That is how we can smell them, of course. Did you also know that these aerosols have healthy effects on us? Just by breathing in cedar and fir scents we help prevent diseases such as cancers. It makes me feel good knowing I have 65 acres of cedars and firs wrapped around our house here in Nolalu.

Needless to say, Beresford-Kroeger doesn't want to see the Boreal Forest cut down. She starts her book by telling how she was at a forestry conference in Northern Ontario where to her horror it was being discussed how to log off half the Boreal Forest! She might be a fine scientist but she is a poor journalist since she doesn't say where or when this conference was held. Well, there is only one forestry school in Ontario and that is Lakehead University right here in Thunder Bay so that must be where she was. It took some digging but I finally found on the Internet that the conference was in 2003. 

This explains why I don't remember this event. I was the environmental reporter for the daily newspaper here and also worked awhile in the forest industry from 1979 to 1992. But by 2003 I was back in the tourism business at Bow Narrows Camp in Red Lake. If this had occurred while I was here I would have been all over it. I live and breathe this stuff.

I'm sure Dynamic Forest author Malcolm Squires was at this same function. He was a senior forester for Abitibi-Price which had several pulp and paper mills in Thunder Bay and others elsewhere in Northern Ontario.

Knowing what I do about the forest industry I would guess that 50 per cent of the Boreal Forest in Ontario had already been logged by 2003. Did Beresford-Krueger misunderstand that they were talking about logging the remaining half? I don't know but this is where Squires book comes in although it is unrelated to the conference.

Squires spent his life cutting and regenerating the Boreal Forest. The title of his book Dynamic Forest is a clue to his perspective. The Boreal Forest changes if you cut it. It also changes if you don't cut it. It is continually changing. How can that be?

To understand the Boreal Forest you must first know that tree species are soil-specific. Guys like Squires can look at high-resolution aerial photographs and know what the soil is just from the species of trees growing there. Where is the best place to build a road? Right where there is a continuous stretch of jackpine. This will be a sand esker, a ridge of sand and gravel created when a glacier paused in its retreat at the end of the last ice age. Jackpine have taproots and therefore can go deep-diving in the sand for water. A good example of a road built along an esker is Hwy. 105 -- the Red Lake Road -- from Perrault Falls north to Red Lake.

A mature jackpine forest is just beautiful for camping. The trees are spaced probably 20 feet apart. About the only ground vegetation is blueberries. The trees are probably 80 to 120 years old. It is picture postcard perfect. But these well-drained soils also dry-out the quickest.  One lightning bolt and the whole place can burn down. This happens all the time. Eventually the fire goes out, of course. The forest is still standing there, now just blackened posts. The jackpine cones will have opened with the heat and now sprinkle seeds all around. The forest is renewed but for decades to come it will be impassable to humans as the burned trees fall to the ground. The blueberries love the extra sunlight and black bears love the extra blueberries. Woodpeckers, especially the black-backed woodpecker, appreciate the standing dead trees and their insects. The mature forest would have been great for woodland caribou since the trees would have been draped with lichens, their favourite food. After the fire there is nothing for them. Moose will increase a bit with the brushy vegetation that will temporarily increase with the extra sunlight but jackpine stands are poor moose spots. They want hardwoods.

So, speaking of hardwoods, let's look at areas with clay soils. The predominate tree species there will be quaking aspen, paper birch, white spruce and balsam fir. These areas don't get as dry as sand eskers  but eventually they burn up too. When that happens, the entire place comes back as quaking aspen. That is because the aspen send up hundreds of shoots from their roots. They are the fastest-growing trees in the Boreal. In the first year after a fire these saplings might be 10 feet tall. They shade out the birches and spruce although a few of those species will break through the canopy eventually. The fire will have wiped out balsam fir, temporarily, but this shade-tolerant tree will start spreading in from the edges of the burn or from unburned spots. If the area goes more than 100 years without burning, the aspen will have fallen over from old age and the balsams will predominate. Anyway, you can see how the Boreal Forest is anything but static. 

Logging imitates fire disturbance, to some extent. It doesn't recycle the nutrients, true, but it takes so long between harvests -- 60 to 80 years -- that it might take many centuries to see a depletion in soil fertility, if it happens at all.

Something that people like Beresford-Kroeger don't take into account is that unlike the destruction of the Amazon Rain Forest, no one here is converting the Boreal Forest into farmland. It is immediately regenerated back into more forest. In Ontario, for the past 40 years, forest companies and the Ontario Government have created agreements where the amount of cutting that can take place must match the amount of growth from regeneration. And they also try to take other user groups into account when doing their cutting. These can be First Nations, trappers, the tourist industry, regular hunters and fishermen, etc. It isn't perfect but for the most part it works pretty well.

The hardest places to regenerate are swampy areas and those with thin soils. The swamps contain the most-valuable species -- black spruce -- whose pulp is prized for its long fibers. This makes paper exceptionally strong. These trees can be more than 200 years old but might only be eight inches in diameter. How do you plant a tree in a swamp? It might have taken nature hundreds of years of blanketing the whole place with spruce seeds just to find the right spot for one to grow. You might think leaving seed trees would be the answer but these typically just blow over. I've been out of the business for a long time so maybe someone has come up with an answer by now.

When you drive through the bush of Northern Ontario it is easy to believe that it always has looked the same. The reality is it has done nothing but change. Lots of what you are seeing is second-growth after logging. It has all burned hundreds of times.

It does perform myriads of life-giving functions, just as Beresford-Kroeger explains. One of the biggest right now is extracting carbon out of the atmosphere and producing oxygen but there is much more as well. She is absolutely correct that the Boreal Forest is vital to the planet.

Today's double creature feature

 

Fox on the run.

Big lynx on the prowl for bunnies during a full moon.

Wolves are running night and day

 

This camera recorded wolves today at 8 a.m., 9 a.m. and this one at nearly 1 p.m.

 

Why Eggs Benedict this time of year?

 Because, of course, there's no place like home for the Hollandaise.

No dreaming of a white Christmas needed

 

Bing Crosby got his wish! We are certain to have a White Christmas in Northwestern Ontario.

There is now two feet of snow on the ground and more is arriving every day. 

Here is an actual headline from our local newspaper: "Snow and cold predicted for this winter."

Shades of the Hippy Dippy Weatherman: "Sunny today, getting darker towards evening."

If you are a Glass Half-Full person, you can see the benefits of lots of snow -- plenty of moisture for trees, less chance of forest fire next summer, etc.

If you are a Glass Half-Empty guy you can see that the snow is breaking the trees and we could be in store for another flood year come May.

If you are a household member who doesn't get involved in its removal, snow is, "Just beautiful!"

But if you are a member of the shovel brigade, snow means ibuprofen, heating pads and liniment.

Most of the creatures in the Boreal Forest figured out what to do long ago. They don't go floundering around with just their little noses peeking above the white stuff. No, they grew snowshoes to stay on the top.  

First Nations people took their clue from nature and made their own snowshoes, and toboggans. By the way, do you know how to say moose in Ojibwe? Oh, I guess you do.

I'm headed out now with our lab, Doc, to break trail, again, on our acreage in Nolalu. If I don't get back in time, Merry Christmas, everyone!

Look, Ma, No Smoke!

 This is in response to a comment I made a couple of blog posts back about how our high-efficiency Napoleon wood stove produces no smoke.

Incidentally, the clean-burn of these stoves also means less chimney-cleaning. I inspect our chimney annually but it has never needed cleaning. I have a friend with a much taller chimney than mine who also hasn't needed to sweep his chimney after switching to a high-effer. He used to clean his chimney monthly.

Fast Times at Chickadee High

 

When you're a chickadee, life is sped way up as this video can attest.

Images of a person's happiest days

 It's Sunday and that means I always read the obituaries in the newspaper.  Just about every week one of these will include a photograph of a person holding a fish. It always strikes me that the family who supplied the information for the obit thought the fishing picture best depicted this man's life. It was when he was at his happiest. It's how we always want to remember him.

Having watched thousands of fishermen at our former business, Bow Narrows Camp, I understand it wasn't just the fish in the photograph that made the man so pleased. It was the entire experience that came before and after. There is something about fishing that transcends sport. I wrote about this one time in my old blog at the camp. See Fishing, Spirituality and Us.

We realized over time how important fishing and the trip to camp was to some people. As one of our guests told me, "I'll be here next year the same week. If I'm not here you'll know I died."

And one year he wasn't there.

We also had several people who hung on just to make one last trip. They died almost immediately afterwards. That fishing trip was how they wanted to remember their own lives on Earth.

 

Time is short; fun climate program

 

Not many hours of sunlight now to harvest dry firewood. I'm scrambling to find enough dry balsam fir and spruce to supplement the couple of cords of birch I put away last spring. There was just too much snow for me to get more birch at the time.

I would like to recommend a new CBC show about nature and climate change. It is done by meteorologist Johanna Wagstaffe and I think most of you will find it fun and extremely interesting.

Just the name of the first show: What are Trees Saying To Each Other About Climate Change? should perk your curiosity. One of her guests is Suzanne Simard, the British Columbia forester who discovered how trees communicate.

Here's the link: Planet Wonder.

If you want a hoot, listen to this Bob Snider song about climate change.

Species dwindling except one that needs it

Just for a moment let's return to the fact that smallmouth bass are becoming established in Red Lake. No sooner was that fact reported than people started wondering what species they would replace. That knee jerk reaction shows that humans actually do know something about ecology and that we know it at the gut, instinctive level. There are only so many resources available in an ecosystem; if a new species shows up, another species must decline.

You can liken a lake to an aquarium. It's a closed system. There is a set amount of food available. If a new fish is added an old fish must go. 

"Please don't let it be walleye," everybody is praying. Walleye are just about everybody's favourite fish. They are good to eat and they are beautiful, which seems to be important.

"Let it be some ugly fish," they say, "like northern pike or, or that really disgusting fish -- ling." 

Ling (aka burbot, aka eelpout, aka mariah) are one of Red Lake's native pelagic (deep water) species. Others are lake trout, whitefish and tulibee or lake herring. Here's something that might make walleye fishermen sleep easier: all the pelagic species in Red Lake declined for some unknown reason decades ago. Except for lake trout, they never recovered. Lake trout are slowly coming back through a stocking program. 

Soooo, there was actually a void left in the food chain. It is looking like smallmouth bass are now filling it. 

"Whew!"

Now I would like to bring up what will seem like an irrelevant fact. Last year was my 50th high school reunion. I graduated from Kirtland High School in Ohio in 1971. "What does this have to do with smallmouth bass in Red Lake?" you are asking. Just give me a minute, would you? I'm going to tie it altogether in a couple of sentences!

Only one year earlier, April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day was celebrated. My class was the first to have a whole year to do something about the environment before we graduated. Do you know what we, the newly-minted ecologists, were worried about? The Population Explosion! There were what seemed at the time an incredible 3.6 billion people in the world, and it was theorized that this could eventually grow to six billion unless the entire world population started having fewer children.

Guess what? A couple of weeks ago the world population hit eight billion! And also guess what? Thousands of species have gone extinct and more are disappearing every day. The Earth, just like a lake, just like an aquarium, is a closed system.

We are the smallmouth bass of the world. Only, in our case, there wasn't a void that we filled. We are replacing everything else.

A study released today shows that one fifth of 50,000 species studied in Canada -- this includes plants, fungi and insects -- are in danger of extinction. 

My generation wasn't able to control our population and the whole world has suffered, just as we feared it would in 1970.

All the creatures are on the move

A lone coyote searches for prey among the cedars

 

Isn't he gorgeous?

What a beautiful sight

This beautiful buck seemed to be posing for a statue at our home in Nolalu

 

Nature notes 2022: bass and moths

My first fish, a nice smallie

The smallmouth bass population, it would seem, is increasing exponentially in Red Lake. Just about everybody we talked to from camp had caught at least one last summer. Many people had multiple catches. This is a new trend. We saw our first bass about 10 years ago.

A young lad from one of the cabins at the west end discovered his minnow trap this summer contained lots of young bass which would seem to indicate next year's catchable population will continue to grow.

Brenda and I only fished from the boat twice this summer since we were laser-focused on completing the exterior of our cabin. We can catch walleye off the dock but I have developed an allergic-like reaction to them that triggers painful pseudo-gout in my knees. Actually we have always preferred northern pike anyway so when we took off in the boat, we went looking for Esox lucius. On our first trip the cotton fluff from poplar trees was so thick on the lake surface it immediately jammed our reels and we came home empty-handed. On the second foray which was Aug. 21 -- the day I finished installing the metal roofing -- we actually fished for about two hours.

My first fish was the smallmouth bass that you see above. The pike really weren't biting very well but we eventually got a couple in the low-20 inches which we took home for supper. In addition to the two boat trips I did catch a few pike off the dock over the summer and we feasted on those as well. And a couple of friends from camp also donated us one.

Last year I caught an enormous smallmouth during the few hours that I fished for pike.

In other news, all of Northwestern Ontario seems to have been invaded this summer by Gypsy moths.

The moths were a plague inside everybody's cabins, coming in every time you opened the door at night. At home in Nolalu I discovered several inches of dead moths in our wood-burning stove this fall.

We saw defoliated quaking aspen trees from the lake but curiously, nobody seems to have seen the caterpillars. Hard to figure, that one. 

On a sad note, no loons successfully fledged this year. Apparently the record high water ruined all their nests.

Glad to finally be off scaffold, roof

Front of the cabin needs the deck to reach the door

 

Double-decker scaffold, homemade sheeting lifter at center

Kitchen-diningroom-livingroom at front, bedrooms, bathrooms to rear

All our buildings: main cabin, shed, dockhouse

Scene from hill behind main cabin

After rough start, a beautiful summer

Early evening shows a crescent moon and the lights of camp

 The summer started out with record high water. If you remember, lots of the highways were flooded and we had to find detours to reach Red Lake.

Then as the summer progressed there was at least one rainfall just about every day, sometimes a deluge. But there were also lots of sunny periods and the weather was very warm. In fact, our weather station at the cabin recorded a high of 52.8 C or 127 F. I don't know the date for that as I didn't set it up when I activated the station this spring. That was the temperature in the sun. Had it been in the shade it would have been a Canadian record.

It figures that once I had the roof put on our cabin, about mid-August, it barely rained again. 

By the time we pulled out in mid-October, the lake was nearly record low. That was caused not only from the lack of rain but also because the water control dam at Snowshoe Dam was wide open so repairs could be made to it. Those repairs were finished and the logs replaced just as we left.

Out of the bush; cabin exterior done

Main cabin is at left in this scene as we towed our dock over to the camp for the winter

We've been home for a few days now. We succeeded in completely finishing the exterior of our cabin -- steel siding, aluminum fascia and all. The interior is left to do next year. At least it will be out-of-the rain work. 

There is no cell phone reception at our cabin which explains our lack of posts this summer. However, I have discovered one spot about 200 feet behind the place that gets a bit of signal. We will work over the winter to see if we can get a system that will bring that down to the cabin. Meanwhile, I can resume blogging this winter from our home in Nolalu.

Still beavering away on the cabin

 

Roof trusses are up, thanks to all the BNC staff