nonfibre values – lessons learned in the double helix

I wrote this essay [for my now-discontinued column in the S&W Report] at the Westboro Medical Clinic in the Loblaws Superstore, on Richmond Road, in Ottawa, as we waited for physicians to be available to renew prescriptions as we set out on the Maritime leg of our 30-years-later expedition. The last time we were there (45.393N 75.749W), on the 2^nd of March 2010, we were delighted to see a Dryocopus pileatus (Pileated Woodpecker) steadily working halfway up a big streetside Ash tree, high above passing Dogs and pedestrians. It had given a trumpet-like flicker call when it flew in, and then was silent until it left, half an hour later.

These Crow-sized Woodpeckers used to be a shy species of the deep woods, but they're not surprising anywhere anymore, as hundreds of cellphone photos attest. One feature of eastern Ontario is that the trees in settlements are larger than those in the countryside, because urban lawn trees were valued as amenities, and urban woodlot trees were neglected, in the decades when the rural trees were only valued as fuel and lumber. This means that there's plenty of habitat for Pileateds in the city, once they'd gotten over their fear of being shot by anyone who noticed them.

The vernacular English name for Dryocopus pileatus was “Logcock,” which reflected the 18^th and 19^th Century practice of shooting and eating them at every opportunity. I've never tasted Dryocopus, but during my graduate student days as a bird collector, I did sample the related and also ant-eating Flicker (Colaptes), and can affirm that there was plenty of culinary motive for shooting at Woodpeckers – and Dryocopus was the only species that would provide a meal for an entire family.

One of the theories about why surviving Ivory-bill Woodpeckers, the other big North American Woodpecker species, are so hard to discover is that they're descended from those that were excessively wary of People, and preserve an inherited skittishness. The same selection for wariness would have applied to Pileateds in the decades when they were culinary trophies.

Among big Birds and Mammals, wariness is a combination of culture and genetic heritage, and over the past 30 years it seems to me that it has noticeably decreased in many species, though of course it's very hard to find any quantitative evidence to test this idea, or to disentangle the genetic and cultural components of the supposed change. We first woke up to this on our 1994 survey of the Toronto Waterfront, when Woodchucks, in a camp in a fenced parkinglot in an industrial harbour where they'd never been offered handouts, were, to our rural minds, recklessly bold.

This set us to thinking about our observation, on our honeymoon trip to British Columbia in 1973, that west coast Great Blue Herons were strikingly less wary than their Ontario relatives. We attributed this to the BC birds having been shot at for only a fraction of the time (1860-1940?) that the Ontario populations had been subject to (1780-1960?). But by 1994, and even more strikingly now, Ontario Herons are as bold as the western birds used to be: in a recent visit to the Lynde Shores estuary in Whitby the Herons got out of our way very reluctantly, and below the Oxford Mills Dam on Kemptville Creek they even seem sulky when an artist displaces them from their fishing spot on the shallow bedrock flats below the dam.

Once People stop shooting at big Birds, those that aren't skittish save energy by not fleeing every time they see a Person. As the conservation lesson has been learned by the human population, there are not only increased populations of big Birds, but also much better opportunities to see them. Ravens fly over the Westboro Medical Clinic, Turkeys peck at the very verge of Highway 416, Turkey Vultures rock along over the highways looking for the slain, local broods of Canada Geese loiter in the Ottawa River between the Champlain Bridge Islands under the hovering wings of Ospreys – and these are just the big birds I've seen in the past few days which wouldn't have been here thirty years ago. Even the Ring-bill Gulls that cruise the Ottawa River were brought back by the protection of the Migratory Bird Convention – the egg & feather trades had made Gulls rare in late 19^th Century North America

Of course, there are other contributing causes in many of these cases: cessation of DDT and nesting platforms for the Ospreys, dumps and by-catch for the Gulls, roadkill for the Vultures, and intentional releases of the Turkeys and Geese – but in each case the Birds today seem far less wary than they were in the past, and it's hard not to think that both culturally-transmitted learning and selection for genes for boldness have contributed to the increased populations.

Not shooting at a spectacular Bird when it's illegal to do so is a relatively easy lesson to learn: the observer himself would prefer not to be shot, so it's easy to infer that the Bird is similarly appreciative (though it's important to remember what a boost to status bringing back an unusual or edible trophy used to be).

Overall biodiversity and ecosystem integrity are larger problems that require more complex understanding from the human population, but perhaps not an impossible level of understanding. [When I wrote this] we were just back from Whitby where we found that the streams to be perplexingly barren, but with banks thronged by alien plants, and we were stunned by the extent to which the Pink Jewelweed, Impatiens glandulifera, Jerusalem Artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus), Bishops- or Gout-weed (Aegopodium podagraria), the amazing Dog-strangling Vine, Vincetoxicum, and Colts-foot (Tussalago farfara) have taken over the valleys of streams that drain into Lake Ontario. ...but that's another story.

Quiet Curatorial Time

The story is told that C. S. Lewis once compared ordinary moral standards to those in a caricaturedly brutal English boys boarding school. He speculated that the boys who were scorned in the school for hewing to the moral standards which they'd be expected to exhibit as adult English gentlemen were analogous to the few saints in the wider community who hewed, much more closely than the general population, to the Golden Rule, and that when we learned how it would have been appropriate to behave, we'd find that the saints were just ordinary folks, doing what ordinary folks should have ordinarily done.

Of course, for Lewis, this revelation would have come in post-mortem conversations with God in Heaven, but calculations of the ecological footprint of humanity demonstrate that humanity is currently boarding on the planet Earth, but not really planning to live here, and that a wide range of our conventional ways of acting are barbarically inappropriate if we or various other species are to hope to persist, and that many of our attempts to slow the growth of our footprint are caricatures of what would be necessary to actually reduce it.

One of the signs of residency is knowing who the neighbours are, and this makes regional, provincial, or national natural history museums, where the identity and lifestyles of our non-human neighbours are worked out, the primary instruments of political sovereignty, and the place where humanity learns what's going on (by "museum" we mean mostly the collections and studies accessed by the back door of the institution, not the displays, administration, and programmes accessed by the front door).

The immediate duty of the natural history museum is collecting and curation: finding, preserving, labelling, and cataloging samples of populations of the neighbours so that it can be known who, where, and when they were. In my experience the most prominent feature of attempts at curation is interruption, so uninterrupted quiet curatorial time becomes an idealistic goal, where, like Buddha under the Bo tree, one loses oneself in the repetitive little details of work that is cumulatively critical for understanding the world. There's also a similar timelessness to this work, since specimens, and natural history data, are meant to last for as long as anything humanity can foresee, so that a mistake made today has the potential to propagate error centuries into the future.

I guess that Aleta and I were launched on this idealistic experiment when we resolved, around 1977, to work for the National Museum Canada required, regardless of the administrative incarnation the actual institution was subject to. Our duties in this position have included transCanada collecting trips through the 1980s, the attempt to found a local all-taxon biotic inventory project in the 1990s, and a regional natural history museum in 1999-2005.

We like to think that each of these ventures has taught us a little something about the interface between idealism and its ambient society, so perhaps the present venture of heading back, Thirty Years Later, to places we've visited before, documenting this with a-painting-a-day, and trolling for support for a national organization dedicated to long-term natural history monitoring, will be more effective than the other ventures have been, and will result in freedom to take at least a modicum of quiet curatorial time to deal with specimens, data, and writing-up of our results.