forest for the blind

Today I gave a tour to a group of vision impaired folks; they crowded into the program theatre with dogs and canes and dark glasses and I taught them about the cottonwood forest. I told them about the trees of our river valley, the amazing geographical anomaly that happens around Lethbridge where balsam, plains, and narrow-leafed cottonwoods meet (like nowhere else in the world) and hybridize to create unique and individual leaf shapes. We ran our fingers around the edges of impressions of these three leaf shapes, the ridges and oblong patterns denoting the various species.

I showed them the bark, furrowed and rough, fingers in the creases, we imagined our hands as creatures making our homes in the outer folds of the tree; we touched the chewed roadways of barkbeetles, calligraphy scrawls on the inner wood of the tree, following their carved pathways with fingertips. I spoke about the lifecycle of the cottonwood trees; they time the release of their soft air-borne seeds for the season of the floods in the rivervalley. As the snow-like seeds land in the muddy floodplain, they find the perfect conditions to root and begin to grow. I passed around a jar of these seeds so that everyone could feel the soft cotton and search for the tiny tree-potentials inside.

We walked slowly through the woods and stopped to listen for birds -- yellow warblers, balitmore orioles, american robins, northern flickers. We listened to their calls and I conducted a symphony of bird mimicry. I described the birds by colour and shape and weight and traced the size of each bird into the palm of everyones hand. Then we felt nests: the blanket-like, knotted woven strings and grass and twine of the oriole, circular weave of mud and grass of the robin, the hollowed out tree of the flicker, and the cottonseed and spiderweb lined nest of the warbler.

we went further into the woods, listened for the hum of insects, we felt honeycomb, smelling the sweet memory off our hands.

I became self-conscious of the emphasis I constantly place on my sense of sight -- even in conversational descriptions: we see, we look, we show. Then to experience the woods through texture and sound and smell heightened my awareness to rich sensory weave of the forest.

As I guided them back to the nature centre, I asked everyone to walk alone for a moment and to be very silent, listening and feeling the forest. When we got back to the building, we shared some of our descriptions of the experience; the wind moving through the silvery-green leaves was described as peaceful, as musical, and felt as if the whole forest was a set of lungs, breathing all together, capillary motion punctuated by the mystery of moving creatures in the canopy.

moose and moss

I drove over the mountains this week; coast to the Rockies. On a long but beautiful journey, Melissa and I watched the shift between biogeoclimatic provinces, pointing out the first ponderosa pine as we gained easterly elevation towards the interior of BC.

I was travelling to go backcountry skiing, to work on a fauna species identification list, to soak in the Lussier hotsprings, and to give a presentation to a group of interpreters in Banff.

I talked about mosses; their ability to amaze me with their intriguing habitat requirements, their strange and unusual distributions, and of course, their richly detailed beauty.

Pointing to a simplified and well labeled drawing of a moss structure, I differentiated between the leafy vegetative structure found running along the forest floor in carpet-like clumps, and the more obscure reproductive spore producing stalk and head capsule. mosses produce this reproductive structure when conditions and life-cycle timing is appropriate, releasing small dustlike spores when the capsule is opened or disturbed. these microscopic spores travel through the forest on little gusts of air and winds to find themselves settling on the gnarled bark of trees, the fissures in moist rocks, the surface of decomposing nurse logs.

Mosses of the genus Splachnum are, however, very choosy about where they will grow. A relatively rare moss found in the northern spruce forests of western Canada, this variety grows almost exclusivity on moose droppings. Taking advantage of the nutrients in the ungulate waste, this little plant has had to develop amazing adaptations to ensure that its little spores are successful in locating its preferred habitat.

Splachnum moss

You will notice in this picture that Splachnum's spore capsules fan outwards in the shape of miniature parasols; these are covered in sticky little moss spores. Imagining a small pile of moose droppings with these tiny parasols fanning outwards, I showed my audience an approximation of this image in the form of a pile of brownies adorned with cocktail umbrellas.

 moose poo with Splachnum

I challenged my audience to imagine their hands as large flies, attracted to the sweet-smelling nutrient potential of the moose dung. Buzzing around they may, as they try to land on the dung, find themselves brushing past these little umbrellas. Perhaps they would rest for a moment atop the moss sporophyte, inadvertently attaching small moss-spores to their fly-feet. Acting as a transportation mechanism through the forest, the next pile of moose dung that these flies are attracted to would be propagated with Splachnum spores, completing this moss' beautiful little life-cycle and adding to the commentualistic community of the forest.

chief mountain

to be lost in the woods is to remember what hearing sounds like; is to forget fallen trees scraping the skin on your legs and for your feet to become paws hands grasping the ground more light and quick; is to have your toes think.
scree slopes, boulders and caves, fossils in the heat, we climbed fingers and feet and sweat through rock piles we could recognize from shed fallen away skin of mountain. the height the view i am not a bird and i quake and i faced a real possibility of gravity while the wind teased our balance.
we slide down the mountain; graceless skiing the scree. the rock turns to moss, to juniper bushes, to stream beds, the trees grow taller, the sun sets behind the next hill, and we drink from a spring, filling our waterbottles from the mountainside. we walk closer together.
cool nights looming trees; a path we cannot find, a bear we cannot see, in the the forest night, the moon is obscured, the pebbled underbrush of the ground has to imagine becoming a bed.
to be lost in the woods is to watch the sunrise, our creaking bodies pushing forwards our feet our feet our feet our feet to be bathed to be found to find our way out to know the mountain.

floating on the bearpaw sea

seventy five million years ago, once upon an ancient time, no more real than the imagination of a paleontologist, the oldman river bed was buried under the silty and muddy marshes of the bearpaw sea. this was a maritime region; lagoons of monstourous horsetail plants, leafy furns, hanging mosses, and the hum of giant insect wings hung in the pollen air.

canadian poet al purdy re-imagines this place in his poem "on the bearpaw sea," introducing us to a dinosaur lashing his tail about and feeding in the swamp, "stoking the huge furnace of his stomach / using some few hundred molars/ of his perhaps eighteen hundred teeth." he laments the imaginative promise of the ancient and the extinct.

on this side of the unborn rocky mountains, i needed my boat, my paddle, to explore the humid jungle. but a rift, tectonic rupture, and the rockies rose. the sea receded. the jungle burnt. volcanic ashes, a thick cloud, a millennial wintertime. so we froze, our calcium shells cracked, we were buried. and water, even as ice, still flows, but scrapes, carves, carries boulders and makes mountains shudder. "being alive in such a landscape as this one / is like staring at a grey weathered skull"

isopods, ammolita, a swimming sea, warm and thick, green and grey, silty bottomed, chasmosaurus, sycamore, magnolia, albertasaurus, all buried. slowly, slowly unearthed and revealed in the process of the wind and the the river cutting deep into the sandstone, the exposure in the soft and tedious carving.

this place is rocks and bones, the dry wind, dust seeing the sky for the first time in millions of years.

architects

i will pass around a robin's nest. the nine-year-olds are told that they have to look very close, to try to figure out what the bird makes the nest out of. they shout "sticks! grass! mud!" and i ask them how the robin puts the mud into the bottom of the nest. they throw out guesses: tail, feet, beak, wings. then  i will shake my head and tell them to stick their red robin tummies out and we giggle while we smear that mud into the nest.
we'll touch a yellow warbler's nest. it is soft inside, a tiny cocoon, i'll whisper the warbler's secret recipe for the cushioned and delicate lodge: cottonwood seeds and spider's webs.
then we'll run our fingers along the inside of a hollow tree, an abandoned honeybee's nest, brown and waxy. under the hot sun the wax gives off the smell of honey, it is sweet and wild and we all make little mmm sounds while we smell our hands.

robin's nest

paper wasp's nest

cliff swallow's nests

the buffalo, the grasses, and the way it used to be



I took a group of new immigrant kids out to the Waterton Park Front yesterday. It was beautiful -- dry, hot, and still, the gale-force winds I had come to associate with the place where prairies meet rockies were calm, the air was holding its breath for a thunderstorm and had paused its usual screaming down the steep mountainsides. We cooled off by running fingerfulls of streamwater through our hot hair.



white evening primrose



The school bus drove around the bison paddock, a small fenced-in area purposed to educate visitors about the ecological hertiage of the landscape. Bison, not too long ago, were a massive driving sustaining force in this land. The interpretive centre at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump illustrates the story in a cultural context, telling a poignant story of the Blackfoot relationship with the beast, the key force in sustaining their way of life, an entire culture dancing around the preparations and rewards of an epic hunt.

head-smashed-in buffalo jump

 I tried to convey to the twenty five kids, mostly new Canadians from Nepal and Bosnia, that this landscape, one hundred and fifty years ago, was very different, was in constant renewal through the grazing and the running and the wallowing of the buffalo. For laughter and education, I dressed up a ten-year-old boy as rough fescue grass and explained that the root systems of native prairie grasses, rough fescue, june grass, blue gramma grass, spear grass, are dense and deep, holding the soil against the constant blowing of the winds. I talked about responsible grazing practices, the role the buffalo played in keeping the grass healthy, the root systems strong.


roots systems of rough fescue grass -- the grasses on the left are sustainably grazed, dense and hold the soil in place. the grasses on the right illustrate the effects of poorly managed grazing.



I'm so accustomed to the giant cedars of the coast, touching a grandmother tree who was alive when sea cows grazed in the thick kelp and sailboats were frightening and foreign. For me, this conservation of the little plants, the grasses that create and sustain the foundation of this ecosystem, resonates little alarm bells of worry -- to me, the soil is the ocean of the prairies, the grasses move in waves with the wind, the buffalo grazing, a baleen whale, giant, warmblooded migrations, all at once symbol and sustenance, architect of their domain.



blossoming

 It's an unusually rainy year here. I'm used to the mist and fog of the westcoast, so I assumed this was normal spring weather in Southern Alberta. While the locals complain and wait for their grasses to turn brown and gold in the summer heat, I have no problem wearing my raincoat and sliding through the mud, rolling down the coulees with the the thunder, long grasses licking my legs. I'm sure the plants are enjoying it too -- the nature reserve has become a jungle and is keeping me from feeling too homesick for my coastal rain forests.

moss phlox

little mushrooms

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three flowered aven

chokecherry bush

waterton lakes national park

 An hour and a half southwest of Lethbridge is the gateway to Waterton Lakes National Park. I've been running a field trip for grade seven students to the park front, teaching them about rough fescue grasses, the transition from bison to ranching, and grassland ecosystem inhabitants. Guest speakers from Parks Canada and the Nature Conservancy of Canada reinforce a natural heritage ethic, talking to the students about sustainable grazing and managed fire. 

Introducing these city kids to their fantastic back yard can be challenging -- the ground here is soft and crawling, the wind strong, the sky frighteningly dynamic. So we make webs out of yarn mimicking relationships between the long toed salamander, cedar waxwing, creeping juniper, moss phlox, trembling aspen, moose, trumpeter swan. we draw ant hills and deer poo, we take photographs of mountains, of fungus, of lichen-covered rocks, we examine medicinal plants, we open our coats like kites and feel the wind. Yesterday, so fortunate, we watched a black bear run up a hill not too far from us and then later saw a mamma grizzly with her long legs and empty springtime belly walking her tiny golden cub across the road in front of the school bus.

these pictures were taken by Luke who is thirteen years old and enjoyed looking closely at everything growing around us.

potter's guild

Earthenware cermaics, wheel throwing soup bowls, the rhythm of the wheel; one of the first things I did when I moved to Lethbridge was look for a pottery studio I could join. I found the Oldman River Potters Guild in the basement of the Bowman Arts Centre, an ancient brick building across the street from the library.
Southern Alberta is nationally known for its ceramic heritage. Medalta clay, producing old style crock pots and mugs, table settings and stone jars, formed from the clay silt banks of the South Saskaschewan river flowing through Medicine Hat, made up over seventy five percent of the tableware in Canada until the nineteen-seventies.
There's something incredibly grounding about wheel-work: the muddy clay and and the upward gravity you produce with coaxing crooked fingers and pressure in flat-angles along the palm of your hand. The centering of the body, elbows to thighs, knees rigid, shoulders steady, neck long, chin tucked. The symmetry of form, the raising of walls, cylinder to sphere
Then to serve a meal, a bowl of spicy gingered-cardamom soup, or summer blueberry-almond steel cut oats; or that palm-warmth in a cup of tea, bergamont earl grey, or clear sea greenish, or lemon and to savor the whole circular experience of the vessel, body-to-body-to-hand-to-mouth-to-belly-to-bowl  -- well, yes:

pond life

I've been running a program for grade five classes this month at the Elizabeth Hall Wetlands. It involves a lot of exploring-time where I talk to the kids about animal signs, pond formation, and the importance of wetlands in the grasslands ecosystem. We spend most of the two-hours I have with the class in small groups looking very, very closely at growing things, dying things, breathing things. We start in the forest recording tracks, food sources, homes, and scat and then I hand out ice cream buckets and little nets and we try pond dipping. We've found all sorts of beautiful little treasures nestled under fallen cottonwoods and hiding in the watery sedge grasses. We've watched horsehair worms and whirligig beetles dance and twist. Last week we woke a porcupine from a summer-slumber in a bright green-leafed tree. We've found bones and mushrooms and broken robins eggs with the yellow yolks spilling out. muddy nests, turtle shells, ducklings, caddisfly nymphs, and waterstriders.

these are some snapshots taken while exploring the forest and the wetlands with ten-year-olds.

"they're glowing!" said Madison, peering at the underside of a bracket fungi
"this slug is so alive!" said Leah, while a tiny black mollusk crawled back into it's hollow-log home

coulee climbs

Luta and I frequent the riverside at Peenaquim Park. There are steep coulees to run up and down and she has been working on her coyote-jumping technique in mouse hunting. These pictures were taken on mostly south-facing slopes not far from the high running Oldman River.





narrow-leaved milkvetch

a member of the pea family, or the Leguminosae, producing two types of fruit, both legumes and loments. legumes, you may recall, are important contributors to healthy soil, using swollen nodules in their roots they work with bacteria to replenish the nitrogen content.





seinfoin

the species name, viciifolia, means "vetch-leaved"



sagebrush

the best way to experience this plant is to run your fingers through the soft leaves and then smell your hands.

buffalobean (also known as golden bean)

these were the first to flower en masse all over the local coulee. spring-yellows everywhere, vibrant and glowing. historically, a dye was made from the buffalobean to colour skin bags and arrows of the blackfoot tribes in the region. it is also important to note that these gorgeous little jewels are extremely poisonous and eating any part of this plant can cause respiratory paralysis.

perhaps few-flowered milkvetch

 



wormwood

an invasive species introduced in settler's gardens. this plant is used to make absinthe among other medicinal tonics. this picture is a dried-out plant from last year and these little bushes are all over the coulees.



 

 

leafy spurge

like the wormwood, leafy spurge is an invasive species brought to north america as a garden plant. it is poisonous to cows, but not sheep and goats who can help mitigate the damage by grazing it. with roots that can grow over ten meters long, it is a difficult plant to remove.

  

prairie crocus

first flowers of the season, their furry ear-like leaves poke out of the snow "listening for the first sounds of spring," as the story goes.