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.