I crossed that damn road
I crossed that damn road. I found a tunnel running underneath. I wonder if non-human animals use it...?
across the road there are interesting observations on human influence I can make.
firstly, there is a reservoir which seemed host to the highest population of breeding toads I'd seen in... not sure, in a long time. Saw two males trying to mount one female. One male was clinging to her underside and was being dragged along the ground.
secondly, the road cut through a low-lying area, and across it the landscape sharply steepened. What started as a walk became a muddy climb. That led to a kind of well effect, where the sounds of traffic sounded almost as clear from far above. How might this impact the wildlife? Do those toads need to rely more on the vibration of their calls, maybe?
Lastly, what I found most interesting, is the view.
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| foreground: Vaccinium, midground: birkwood, background: pine wood |
Zoomed in on the birkwood/pine wood boundary |
what you can see here is a hard border between a protected forest and an un-protected one. The protected forest is birchwood, purplish in the winter with its leaves dropped. Birch is usually an early pioneer of the forest, growing on the advancing edge of a forest. It grows fast then gets pushed out by other trees. not in this case: the soil is too poor for most other trees.
Behind this purple is the green of conifers, likely pines. Pines grow fast and tall in this poor soil, and so this forest is likely the remains of a tree farm. It is now also within a national park, just that it's outside this specific protected habitat. The national park status means it's not used for lumber, but the legacy of a lumbermill is preserved as a "wilderness."
does this preserved lumber-farm risk encroaching on the protected birkwood, if left un-maintained? Maybe. There's a reason the birkwood is birches, and it's the soil, and there's likely a gradient to more fertile soil somewhere beyond its borders. Maybe the pine won't grow so well: for lumber, you only need it to survive 'till it's good to harvest. But pine is happy to grow in poor soil, anyway.
maybe next time I'll try and see if I can traipse the hard birch/pine border and see if a natural gradient is being given the space to develop. I imagine if the pine encroaches into the birkwood, they'd be cleared by the reserve, maintaining a hard border. But if the birch pushes into the pine wood, the gradient-border might establish.
In any case, I would like to see how the understory differs. Birch bark hosts a range of acid-loving lichens which pine-trees do not. Vaccinium grows preferentially under birch. fungi are super-specialists. The border, inherently, melds both conditions into something suited to, both, neither, or something else entirely.
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