The River Landing

In Defense of Territory

December 10, 2018

        As I stepped outside to begin my morning trail walk, the first sound I heard was a calling red-headed woodpecker.  The call came from a black locust stand at the northwest corner of my 3.7-acre rural property. The last time I had heard such a call, sounding like a short trill or “qrrr,” was ten days before, when I nervously watched a ¼-mile-wide tornado slowly moving northward along the Illinois River valley about seven miles to the west. Over the years, I have learned to interpret the “qrrr” call as either a low level territorial warning or a serious alarm, depending upon its intensity and volume. This call only seemed a bit agitated. So I continued on my walk and forgot about the calling red-headed woodpecker.
        About fifteen minutes later, as I approached the black locust stand, I heard the loud, harsh alarm call of a northern mockingbird. When I looked upward, a barred owl crossed my field of view just below the tree canopy; it flew only a short distance, though, before landing at the top of a black locust tree. The mockingbird was immediately on the owl, calling and jumping from branch to branch. The owl, of course, seemed bored, slowly turned its head and stared directly at me. In a few seconds, two red-headed woodpeckers appeared, excitedly uttering their “qrrr” alarm calls at peak volume; they joined the mockingbird mobbing the owl, but also seemed to be distressed with each other. Over the last few weeks, I was aware of only a single red-headed woodpecker overwintering territory, but I now suspected that the owl was perching in a tree near the boundary of two territories. Red-headed woodpeckers store mast (acorns, for example) for the winter in caches usually placed in standing dead trees; and while mobbing the owl, each was drawn away from protecting its cache, which then would have been vulnerable to plunder by squirrels and other birds such as red-bellied woodpeckers and gangs of blue jays that are never far away.

 

Woodpecker hole in black locust snag, likely with a cache of acorns

        So I was not surprised when several blue jays soon formed an uneasy alliance with the woodpeckers to continue harassing the barred owl, who calmly looked around a bit, but was definitely more interested in keeping its eyes on me. The added attention, though, must have been too much, so the owl flew toward a larger tract of woods on the neighboring property. With the owl gone, all of the mobbing birds rapidly disappeared into the background. A gentle breeze once again became the loudest sound. And I thought back nineteen years to a conversation I had with a conservation-minded friend just after I had purchased this property, who said, “The first thing I would do is cut down all those invasive black locust trees.” I am certainly glad that I did not listen.

 

 

Impermanence and Deep Time

        On a recent visit to Dickson Mounds Museum in Fulton County, Illinois, I spent some time on the rooftop observation deck. Here I found myself picking out distant landmarks along the Illinois River valley, repeating what I had done many times in the twenty-seven years since first traveling to the area for a job interview. With the sun’s direct rays on my face, I tried to imagine what the scene before me might have looked like a thousand years ago.
        Over the last three decades, I have spent considerable time learning about the ecological changes that have occurred over central Illinois since the last Ice Age ended roughly 10,000 years ago: how the climate changed from the Pleistocene cold to a long, warm and dry period (when prairie first became established); then changed to cooling, warming, and cooling again (see page xi in Theler and Boszhardt [2003]); and how plant communities tracked these changes, from tundra to forest to prairie grasslands and savanna. Humans, who had been in Illinois for around 12,000 years, certainly witnessed all of those changes. Their stories are well told in the museum’s exhibits; in fact, a great deal of what is known about prehistoric Native American cultures came from the Illinois River valley. When I view the river valley from the museum’s rooftop, their stories, with only a bit of imagination, come alive.

 

Dickson Mounds Museum and Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge (foreground)

        One landmark barely discernable from the rooftop is probably unknown by most folks viewing the river valley; it is a small, native sand prairie at Henry Allan Gleason Nature Preserve, ten miles to the northeast of the museum, across the river in Mason County. This is the site where Gleason himself, in the early 1900s, conducted foundational research on plant communities and succession. During this recent museum visit, the skies were clear and calm, and so I had little trouble finding the ridge of sand dune with golden brown prairie grasses that stood out against the surrounding forested hills. And I wondered whether Hopewell or Mississippian inhabitants of this area would have gazed toward the distant prairie as I did; or from the other direction, sighted a direct line to the village that once existed where the museum now stands.

 

Henry Allan Gleason Nature Preserve, early 1990s

        I also thought about the influences human-set fires might have had on the wholesale plant community changes of prehistoric times until the prairies became fully established—those same prairies, like the one at H.A. Gleason Nature Preserve, that greeted the first Europeans who entered the Illinois country. We know from historical accounts that Native Americans burned the prairies, and tree ring analyses show evidence of frequent fires sweeping through savannas as well as forests. Today, experience has taught us that Illinois’ grasslands will eventually change to forest in the absence of periodic fire because the current climate—together with all of its variability over hundreds of years—favors forest. When did the practice of burning the landscape begin? Were people during the Archaic Period, roughly 10 to 3 thousand years ago, burning the landscape as the historic Native Americans did? Was this the ultimate factor which ensured that prairie would persist in central Illinois? Viewing the Illinois River valley before me from the H.A. Gleason Nature Preserve or from the Dickson Mounds Museum observation deck, I think that the answers to these questions lie scattered before me in thousand-year-old burial mounds and former village sites; artifacts from a martial, state-like society that vanished well before Europeans ever ventured into Illinois; and by the small, remnant prairies and other natural communities that have survived. Or maybe they more than likely have been scattered by the winds and erosion of too many years.

 

Ogden-Fettie Mound (Havana Hopewell - 300 B.C. to 300 A.D.)

        All of this has given me a thoughtful appreciation of deep time and how the modern era is merely a data point on a long continuum of change, and my lifetime is even less. But some might ask why expend the effort to think of such things when planning for the future is what we should be doing and there are so many pressing issues of the day that demand attention. Concerning that viewpoint, I recall the classic bored high school student’s question about history: Why do we need to know this? I counter with a question: Why does anyone need to know anything? Louis Pasteur once said that Chance favors only the prepared mind. One can never know how a miscellany of facts may combine to produce an insight sufficient to shift a paradigm. Perhaps knowledge of the past may alert us to dangerous pitfalls before it is too late.  Has it really been such a long time between the Clovis point and smartphone?

 

Selected References

Berkson, A. and Wiant, M.D., editors. 2001. Discovering Illinois archaeology. Illinois Association for the Advancement of Archaeology and the Illinois Archaeological Survey.

Gleason, H.A. 1926. The individualistic concept of the plant association. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 53:1-20.

Pielou, E.C. 1991. After the ice age. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.

Struever, S. and F.A. Holton. 1979. Koster: Americans in search of their prehistoric past. Waveland Press, Inc., Propect Heights, Illinois.

Taft, J.B., R.C. Anderson, and L.R. Iverson. 2009. Vegetation ecology and change in terrestrial ecosystems. Pages 35-72 in C.A. Taylor, J.B. Taft, and C. E. Warwick, editors. Canaries in the catbird seat: the past, present, and future of biological resources in a changing environment. Illinois Natural History Survey Special Publication 30. Champaign, Illinois.

Tallis, J.H. 1991. Plant community history. Chapman and Hall, London.

Theler, J.L. and R.F. Boszhardt. 2003. Twelve millennia: archaeology of the upper Mississippi River Valley. University of Iowa Press, Iowa City.

 

Related Posts on The River Landing Blog

"Woody Vegetation Regrowth Following Fire"

"An Illinois River Hill Prairie Fire" 

"Change and Comfort in Nature"