Stumps and Rock Dumps in a Changing Forest

/ Mike Fitz / Leave a comment

If I knew I had only one day to live, then one of the few things I’d do is take a walk in the woods. So, everyday, I try to take a walk in the woods.

Many days I walk the same path out my back door where I maintain a rudimentary trail. I minimize the trail’s footprint by keeping it narrow and pruning plants at its edges only when necessary. Stepping stones and short boardwalks made out of scavenged lumber help keep my feet dry where the soils remain perpetually sodden. Sometimes I’ll saw through a tree fallen over the path. Then again, I might simply reroute the trail to let the tree rest in peace. After all, the trail’s purpose isn’t so much to ease the effort of travel, although that is a perk, but to allow me to move quietly. It is not a trail for a hurried hike.

Most days I don’t see any mammals larger than a red squirrel. With some luck and good timing, though, I’ve seen black bears, moose, white-tailed deer, martens, fishers, ermines, voles, mice, and hares. A lynx passes through about once a winter; its presence revealed only by tracks in the snow. I’ve documented dozens of bird species using the forest to migrate, court mates, defend territories, and breed. I’m also learning that the habitats here support orders of magnitude more insects than I initially realized.

I greatly enjoy sharing this space with wild creatures, yet I rarely go to find something specific. The daily sojourn is my basic effort to let the world show me something. While the stories of wildlife change daily, it is the trees who are my constant companions. The organisms who1 breathe life into landscape, as well as the topography where their roots gather sustenance, record an evolving forest’s history of change.

View of forest floor and lower parts of trees on sunny day. The trees are a mix of conifers and deciduous trees. There is a moss covered boulder at lower left.


East of me, Katahdin and the Traveler Range loom over what was once a largely trackless landscape. Slightly closer to my home, the Penobscot River and its tributaries offer routes south to the Gulf of Maine or north to the Allagash, Aroostook, Saint John, and eventually the Saint Lawrence or Bay of Fundy if one knows where to portage.

While forests are never static—their structure and species composition are always in flux—industrial logging and settler-style agriculture drastically altered Maine during the last 200 years. Timber crews used the landscape’s climate and characteristics to their own advantage. Winter was the season for felling trees. Spring and summer were the seasons to drive the harvest downriver to mills and market.

When Henry David Thoreau first visited Maine in 1846, Bangor had already established itself as a major lumber port. As Thoreau moved upstream on the Penobscot to the Katahdin region, he passed through the frontline of settler land clearing. Near Mattawamkeag, a town named after a major Penobscot River tributary, Thoreau observed,

“The mode of clearing and planting is to fell the trees, and burn once what will burn, then cut them up into suitable lengths, roll into heaps, and burn again; then with a hoe, plant potatoes where you can come at the ground between the stumps and charred logs; for a first crop the ashes sufficing for manure, and no hoeing being necessary the first year. In the fall, cut, roll, and burn, again, and so on, till the land is cleared; and soon it is ready for grain, and to be laid down.” (Thoreau, The Maine Woods, pg. 16-17.)

Almost no place in Maine was spared the heavy-handedness of lumberman’s axe or the farmer’s plow. Those changes soon encroached on the land I call home.

Land deeds for my home trace back to about 1890. The earliest of them cover a tract of about 160 acres (65 hectares). Lumbering almost certainly took the old growth trees prior to the 1900 allotment, but those records aren’t captured in the language of the deeds. Subsequent land sales subdivided the original parcel into many, which is partly how I find myself caretaker to about 15 acres, most of which grows trees who represent a rapid return to form for this place. I often think about this as I wander my trail or take an hour to sit under the greening canopy. Deeds record who owned the land. The documents don’t speak to how people depended on it or what they did to it, which is why I began reading into clues presented in stumps, soil, and the life that rebounds in the wake of disturbance and abandonment.

Middle spring in my nook of northern Maine is one of the best times of year to explore the forest. Yes, the ground is muddy and the vegetation has only begun to wake from dormancy, but with the year’s new leaves still tucked into swelling buds and the previous year’s leaves compacted by months of snowfall, visibility is as good as it will ever get.

At the farthest north section of my acreage, the trees are composed mostly of maples, balsam fir, white spruce, paper and yellow birch, and white and black ash. The soils there are sloppy with year-round surface water. A gentle slope sheds the water east to a small stream. Inattentive footsteps result in boots filled with muck. The trees are young, though, and a few yellow birch appear to be walking on stilts. This growth form is not unique to this location but had long confused me when I was growing up in Pennsylvania. I couldn’t compute the cause of it. Had erosion undermined its roots? Was it a genetic anomaly, a virus, or something else? The answer is simpler and reveals a chapter in the story of past human activity.

According to the U.S. Forest Service in Silvics of North America, yellow birch is a prolific seed producer, dispersing 1-5 million seeds per acre in an average year and up to 36 million(!) per acre in a good year. Yet such profusion comes at a cost. The mother tree invests little energy in an individual seed, and much luck is needed if the fragile seedling is to survive. The reproductive strategy prioritizes abundance of offspring over energetic investment in individual offspring.

Most every birch seed is doomed. When fate brings a birch seed to leaf litter, which is likely, then germination is possible but survival is unlikely. A layer of dead leaves creates a barrier that the seedling’s roots and stem cannot pierce. Many die as the litter dries in summer’s heat or are smothered by the next layer of fallen leaves in autumn.

Forests are structured to offer seedlings more than one opportunity, though. Logs and stumps shed fallen leaves. Decaying wood sponges and holds water during dry weather. Tip-up mounds at the roots of wind toppled trees expose bare soil germination sites. Humans can contribute to these processes too. From the seed’s perspective, a rotting stump left by an ax or chainsaw simply another possible place to grow; another opportunity for survival.

Faint wheel tracks in the soft soil and a series of foot-high, well-rotted stumps reveal that someone decided to harvest small trees here many years ago. The stumps became a platform for a few birch seedlings above the more challenging conditions on the ground. The roots remained perched as the stump decayed underneath leaving a stilted root system to be admired.

  • Moss covered stump is surrounded by live trees.
  • Stilted roots grow into the ground around a dark colored rotting stump.
  • Stilted roots are perched above the soil surface. An open cavity is visible under within the roots and below the trunk.


So I know that tree harvesting continued in the few decades after the first wave land clearing. A plow couldn’t have turned the soil here. The ground is too wet, but the stumps disappear as I walk south from the swampy soils even though I never leave the forest. A major difference is present in the plane of the land. Although sloping, it becomes smoother and lacks large stones and boulders on the surface.

Forest view of trees, mostly fir trees growing on leaf covered ground. Most trees lack leaves on their lower branches and the ground is relatively flat without noticeable rocks.


Rocks are piled in mounds.

Trees on the left of the image grow out of a pile of moss covered rocks of different shapes and sizes.


The smoothed ground also has an abrupt edge.

View of forest. Leaf litter is compacted and a patch of snow is visible at right. There is an abrupt drop in the soil surface at the middle of the photo.


All of Maine was glaciated during the last ice age, and nearly all soils across the state are rocky due to the erosive and depositional power of the ice sheets. But glaciers don’t pile rocks in tidy, convenient piles, nor do they typically plane the surface of the land in such a smooth manner. A different force created these characteristics.

Imagine yourself as a farmer trying to plow soil. Rocks get in the way of this backbreaking labor, so you remove them into piles or build walls with them to outline fields and pasture. The work of plowing also tends to smooth out irregularities on the soils surface over time. Gravity assists with plowing and can result in a plow terrace forming on the downhill side of a cultivated field. The evidence I see suggests that I’ve walked from forest growing where plows never broke soil into forest growing on an abandoned field.

Was a farmer cultivating potatoes or another cash crop? Small farms in the early 1900s were far from homogeneous. Few of the stones in the rock dumps are fist-sized or smaller, however, which is another clue. The work of freeze-thaw cycles and plowing would bring small stones to the surface regularly, which would then have to be removed by hand lest they get in the way of plowing or, in the case of potatoes, harvesting. In Aroostook County, northeast of my home, farmers continue to remove rocks from their fields after 100 years or more of continuous potato harvests. Maybe this section of the farm was first modified by forest clearing, large rock removal, and plowing but not for potatoes. The terrace and an abandoned machine are silent witnesses to the work of the farmer.

Tucked at the very edge of the field-reverted-to-forest, a century-old machine rusts under the deep shade of spruce and fir. Upon first glance, it is a confusing mess of gears and sheet metal.

Rusting farm equipment in forest setting. Small trees surround the machinery. Internal gears and handles are visible.
Rusting farm equipment in forest setting. Small trees surround the machinery. Internal gears and handles are visible.
Rusting farm equipment in forest setting. Small trees surround the machinery. Internal gears and handles are visible.
Side view of rusting farm equipment in forest setting. Small trees surround the machinery. Internal gears and handles are visible.


This, as far as I can tell, is a horse-drawn harvester and bailing machine. The operator sat in the rear. Horsepower turned the gears and blades. Grass was cut at the front, carried upward, then tied with twine. All automatic!

black and white photo of hay bailing machine. Two horses pull the machine to the right. A person stands on the rear of the machine. They are in an open field.
Thanks to Museums Victoria for including the photo in their public domain collection. Here and here are additional photos of these harvesters.

It must’ve been less labor to operate than using a scythe and binding your hay, grain, and straw by hand. Yet, this machine also looks amazingly hazardous—a device that leads to mangled fingers, limbs, and questions like, what happened to him? “Twas using a newfangled harvester. Told ‘im that’s a tricky device. Be careful, I said. He wasn’t. Now we call ‘im 7-Fingered Mike.”

Walking further, I move onto topography that becomes immediately lumpy where the trail dips off the plow terrace. More than a few large rocks dot the surface, so this was never a cultivated or plowed field. The trees are the expected mix of conifers and broad-leaved species for the area—white spruce, balsam fir, white ash, red maple, sugar maple, striped maple, mountain maple, big tooth aspen, and white pine. In late spring, the spring ephemeral wildflower diversity in this little patch is higher here than anywhere else on the property.

Deciduous forest on a sunny early spring day. The canopy is bare of leaves and there are no green plants sprouting from the ground.


Springtime ephemeral wildflowers aren’t a botanical grouping.2 They come from a diverse suite of taxonomic plant orders and families. Their commonality, then, is in the timing of their flowering. A full canopy of summertime foliage intercepts most direct sun. What remains is a speckling of light and shadow, a sun-dappled place which restricts photosynthesis rates and stunts plant growth. Some shade-tolerant trees such as beech, sugar maple, and hemlock, for example, can spend decades as sapling-sized plants before a canopy gap forms above them and they grow upward to fill it.

Springtime ephemerals are herbaceous. They don’t have the ability to reach the canopy, so they utilize an annual, live-fast strategy. Their leaves, stems, and flowers emerge from dormancy early in the growing season, often when the night air remains frosty and well before bud break on the tree branches above. Their flush of green leaves and vibrant blossoms are a much welcome sight after a long winter.

photo of wildflower. Single flower with three white colored petals faces the camera. The petals are red near the center of the flower. Three equal sized leaves grow beneath the flower.
Trilium undulatum
photo of wildflower. Single flower with three magenta colored petals faces the camera. Three equal sized leaves grow beneath the flower.
Trilium erectum
photo of wildflower plant. Flowers grow in a raceme above simple leaves.
Maianthemum canadense


I suspect that the springtime wildflower diversity is highest off the the plow terrace, because those soils experienced less disturbance. The duff, the seedbed, and mycorrhizal associations were better preserved. The tree composition differs too from the formerly plowed areas. Balsam fir and aspens predominate upslope of the plow terrace. Their seedlings establish rapidly in open conditions as long as soil moisture is adequate. Fir and aspen grow downslope as well but alongside more maple and ash. Coupled with the well-drained nature of the east-dipping hillside, the tender May and June flowers can thrive. I tread lightly in their company.

As I continue south, the soils become wet again and the vegetation, both in species composition and structure, changes dramatically. The contrast is stark.

photo of shrub thicket. Dense tangle of bare, brown-gray branches fill the scene. A few scattered trees grow among the shrubs
A honeysuckle thicket.

Bush or Morrow’s honeysuckle (Lonicera morrowii) is an introduced, yet common understory shrub on the landscape surrounding my home. It grows with such vigor and at such densities that even I, someone who enjoys a good bushwhack, avoid it. Without the benefit of a trail, you’re sometimes forced to move on top of the thickest stems, which is a strategy that succeeds for a few feet before gravity wins and the brittle wood buckles under your weight. Relatively few trees rise above the honeysuckle compared to the surrounding forest. The thickets contain almost no springtime ephemerals, but they do harbor a scattering of multi-trunked apple trees. It’s hard not to wonder why this plant community grows as it does when you struggle to move through it.

silhouette of multitrunked apple tree. Several trunks originate from the same point on the ground.
One of the several multi-trunked apple trees that grow within the honeysuckle thicket.

Both the apple trees and the honeysuckle’s density are clues in their own right. Both are introduced species in North America. Both grow best in full sunlight, and the honeysuckle establishes best in disturbed soils. Almost all the apple trees are multi-stemmed. They are different sizes, spaced irregularly, and each grows a different variety of fruit. I sample them as much as I can in September and October. The timing of ripeness and the taste of the apples vary widely on different trees. One tree has such bitter fruits that even my very omnivorous dog ignores them. These qualities suggest that the apples were not planted as part of an orchard.

One honeysuckle thicket also borders a prominent, east-west trending rock wall. Rock walls, like rock dumps, weren’t accidental constructions. They were frequently built on the edge of fields. If the field was a harvested annual crop, then the rock wall became a convenient area to dispose of bothersome stones. Walls and fences can also be used to keep things inside their boundaries.

Photo of low linear line of small boulders trending through a forest from the bottom of the photo to the top. Patches of snow cover much of the ground with some open patches of dry leaves
The remnants of a low rock wall trends east-west borders the south side of the honeysuckle thicket.

A muddy overgrown two-track trail can be followed to and from the honeysuckle thickets, suggesting that vehicles traveled this way with enough regularity to leave a lasting footprint. I’ve also pulled remnants of split rail fencing out of the leaf litter along the rock wall. The posts and rails appear to be made from northern white cedar, which produces perhaps the most decay resistant wood of any forest tree in the area. Fences can serve an aesthetic need, of course, although I doubt this was the fence’s sole purpose. I suspect the farmer built it for livestock, perhaps sheep or pigs.

If the fence kept livestock in, if their hooves turned the soil, if their grazing or rooting prevented most trees from growing, if the farmer had to transport feed to fenced-in livestock, if their manure contained apple and honeysuckle seeds, and if their sudden disappearance allowed apple and honeysuckle seeds to germinate and grow without competition, then old pasture is a likely explanation for the enduring thickets.

That’s a lot of ifs, I understand, but nearby trees offer an additional set of clues that point toward pasture rather than cropland. A large yellow birch along the rock wall has a silhouette unlike those in the surrounding forest.

Silhouette of large yellow birch tree. The branches spread wide across the forest canopy and the tree is multi-trunked.
This yellow birch’s growth form is a product of the open, sunlit environment it used to experience.

This birch has the largest diameter trunk of any tree on the property. At chest height, its two fused trunks stretch approximately 50-60 inches (127-152 cm) wide. Its branches spread across a 30-foot (9-meter) diameter, which is far greater than the other trees nearby. In fact, no other nearby trees come close to matching this birch’s size.

Only trees who grow in open areas achieve this architecture. Trees growing among other trees are usually forced to compete for access to sunlight. For them, growing tall rather than spreading wide is the more lucrative long term strategy.3

The large yellow birch has its feet within the rock wall, and it may have sprouted not long after the wall was constructed. A white spruce with a similar open growth form occupies the honeysuckle thicket too. The farmer might’ve let the birch grow along the rock wall if the thicket area was cropland, but I doubt he would’ve tolerated the white spruce shading a large part of a plowed field or haying meadow. The trees could’ve, though, provided valuable shade and shelter for livestock and left to grow within a pasture.

Silhouette of spruce tree. Many branches are present on the trunk from the ground to the top of the tree.
This white spruce near the rock wall has branches present from the ground up, a sign that it too once grew in an open environment where it didn’t experience competition for sunlight. Note the equally tall aspens at right. They have no branches near the ground, which indicates they sprouted after the spruce and had to compete with other plants for access to the canopy.

When were the fields and pastures last worked? When were they allowed to go fallow? None of the trees on the land are especially old, not even the aforementioned yellow birch along the wall, Wandering across the adjacent properties, which were once part of the farm, I’ve found that the forest is fairly consistent in its age and structure. The canopy is roughly the same height everywhere, and trees tend to be about the same size. The fields extended west of me to the top of a gentle hill where stone walls mark the boundaries of other former fields. But subdivisions and different landowners lead to different visions for the land and its non-human occupants. This is where the disturbance history of my parcel and the neighbors’ begin to diverge.

In summer 2020, a logging company harvested trees on the property that borders the west side of my forest. They weren’t selective, taking trees that were barely 12 inches in diameter at stump height and leaving few standing trees. There’s a wide variety of tree harvesting strategies employed in Maine, but this appeared to be one of the less sustainable approaches. That is, unless the goal was to maximize profit and create a poplar thicket in your wake.

photo of intact forest at left. To the right is a recently cutover area with small saplings.


The timber harvest, despite my criticism of the methods, granted me an opportunity to investigate when trees began to reclaim the land, because the adjacent cutover acres were part of the plowed field. I counted growth rings on several stumps. All had about 50 growth rings or fewer. Many trees remain small for several years after sprouting before they gain enough height to lay down growth rings that would be visible in a stump. So, maybe a farmer last cut hay from the field 60 years ago.

Sixty years isn’t a long time for most trees. Even photosynthesizing rock stars like balsam fir and aspen, species who tend to live fast and die young, can have much longer lifespans, but the forces of time, age, and weather never cease. They’ve already begun to take their toll on the regenerating forest. A few trees topple in the wind every year, which is fine with me and, I’m sure, the forest. I use a few trees for firewood and leave most to return to the earth. Their bodies will create structure and habitat for wildlife. They’ll be colonized by insects and fungi. They’ll enrich the surrounding soil and increase its carbon and water-storing capacity. In death, they’ll be filled with more life than when they were alive.

Although the specific details differ, this farm-to-forest story is not unique. Statistics buried on page 14 of Maine’s 2025 State Wildlife Action Plan reveal how common the reversion from farm to forest has been: “By 1880, approximately 34% of Maine was cleared for farming, but that pattern reversed dramatically via reforestation during the 1900s. By 1997, only 6% of the state’s land area was in agricultural use.” The return to a largely forested landscape has been even more pronounced in other parts of the Northeast U.S. You can find it nearly anywhere you go from Pennsylvania north.

Older forest stands, which I define as those with a high proportion of trees greater than 100 years of age, remain uncommon in Northern Maine, however. The landscape is often cut over, even after the collapse of the region’s paper industry. If I’m able to care for my forest over the next few decades, then it will form one of the area’s older stands. Perhaps that will be my stamp on a forever changing plot of land.

FOR FURTHER READING:
Anyone interested in teasing out the land use history of their home or community should consult Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England4 by Tom Wessels. This was a formative book for me when I first attempted to understand the influences and relationships that people have on ecosystems. I still have the original copy I purchased in college. The book focuses on the Northeast U.S., although many of the techniques in it could apply to other regions.

  1. Grammatically “who” was traditionally reserved for people (the esteemed naturalist, Mike, who…), while “that” was used for non-human organisms (the trees that…; the owl that…). I think the old who vs. that rule needs to die. Restricting who for humans is an othering of non-human life. It is one of the many, almost unconscious micro-aggressions we make toward other organisms. ↩︎
  2. Neither are trees, BTW; a tree is a particular growth form achieved by certain woody plants no matter if they are coniferous, deciduous, evergreen, broad-leaved, needle-leaved, produce annual growth rings, lack annual rings, or something else. ↩︎
  3. For the record, I’ve seen no evidence that trees care at all about their appearance. Possessing the adaptability to survive local conditions is far more important and explains why trees are so plastic in their growth forms. ↩︎
  4. Published by Countryman Press. Know any other good books from that publisher? ↩︎

Marathon Creatures

/ Mike Fitz / 5 Comments

Before I began training for a marathon last winter, my running efforts were casual and rarely exceeded six miles. I ran when I felt I needed to maintain a modicum of fitness and when the weather was too poor for the other activities that I typically find more enjoyable such as bicycling or long hikes. I’ve walked more than 20 miles in a day at least twice and ridden a few century rides on a fully loaded touring bicycle, but—as I discovered—running a marathon is not those things.

Reactions of friends and family toward news of my marathon goal were two-pronged. First, I received a quizzical you-might-regret-it look. The conversation then shifted to the inevitable question, “Which marathon?” My own, was my simple reply. The thought of running an organized marathon seemed much too stressful. What if I wasn’t feeling well the day of the race? What if I didn’t sleep well the night before? What if I didn’t want to be around other people? Running on my own time at a place I chose solved those dilemmas.

That’s how I found myself in April 2025 running the Northern Maine Mike Fitz Memorial Fun Run 42K Act-like-a-tough-guy Marathon Classic. By using quiet roads during Maine’s infamous springtime mud season, my marathon became a solo event where I avoided anyone else on foot. It also gave me a lot of time to think.

On training runs I often wondered about other organisms that regularly achieve amazing feats of endurance. Who could I compare my efforts to? After feasting all summer in Alaska, humpback whales migrate to Hawaii or the Pacific coast of Mexico. Bar-tailed godwits fly for eight days without stopping between Alaska and New Zealand. I’m on the other side of the continent, however. A local connection would be more appropriate. Wood frogs endure winter frozen like an ice cube in the leaf litter of my woods. But that’s a slow endurance, maybe even best considered a tolerance for challenging conditions. Black bear hibernation wouldn’t be an apt comparison either, since that process revolves around energy conservation and limited movement. White-tailed deer make local migrations to wintering yards with thinner snowpack like under a dense canopy of conifers, but that is a bit of a browse-as-you-go strategy and may not cover long distances. What about a migrating songbird such as a thrush, warbler, wren, or vireo? They are small-bodied, energetic, warm-blooded, and achieve amazing migrations. There are many I could’ve compared my marathon with. My area of Maine hosts at least 22 species of wood warblers. All of them migrate south for the winter. One warbler makes the journey unlike any other, however.

Dear Blackpoll Warbler,

What do you feel when you leave Maine in October? What forces draw you south to fly non-stop over the Atlantic to the north coast of South America? Are you nervous or anxious to begin? Is it anything like wanderlust or it is more powerful? Do you feel relief when you arrive? Do you feel hunger along the way? If so, does it feel different than normal?

A warbler with a black cap, white cheeks, white wing bars, and a white breast streaked with black feathers stands on a spruce twig. Photo taken by Oliver Patrick. 11 Jun 2021. Penobscot, Maine, United States.


Blackpoll warblers (Setophaga striata) are smaller-than-sparrow-sized, primarily insectivorous birds. Summers are spent nesting in coniferous forests of northern North America from Alaska to Nova Scotia. In my area, I find them among dense stands of spruce and fir trees, especially on mountains like Mount Chase, but they also breed at sea level in conifer-dominated forests along Eastern Maine’s coastline where the ocean temperatures chill summer’s heat.

Blackpolls are part of an explosion of migratory songbirds that breed in Maine every summer, and after a long quiet winter I long to hear the forests filled with their shouts again. Unlike some of the bouncier and louder songs of sparrows, other warblers, and ruby-crowned kinglets, the blackpoll’s song is easy to miss. Its frequency range is among the highest known among birds. Whenever I hear it, I know I’ve entered a boreal place.

A male blackpoll warbler’s song recorded on Mount Chase in Maine on June 19, 2023. M. Fitz’s audio.

Their migration routes vary, although their month-long northward journey in spring typically utilizes many overland stopovers from South America across the Caribbean to Florida and the mainland U.S. The southward migration is when the birds express their greatest endurance. Blackpolls in Maine and Nova Scotia frequently launch due south in early fall on a route that takes them directly over the Atlantic Ocean. They follow prevailing winds out past the island of Bermuda until trade winds bring them back toward the Caribbean shore of South America. The three day trip is one of the longest, non-stop overwater flights yet known among migratory songbirds.

A warbler with a black cap, white cheeks, white wing bars, and a white breast streaked with black feathers stands on a birch twig with bright green leaves.
A male blackpoll warbler perches on a birch twig. Photo by Cephas, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Humans are well adapted for running. Sweat shunts body heat to the skin where evaporation carries it away to prevent overheating. Our upright posture offers an efficient stride and improves our line of sight, all the while freeing our hands to carry tools and other objects. In contrast, long-distance running is hard for lots of other animals, so their running efforts are usually measured to take advantage of their particular suite of adaptations. The white-tailed deer, moose, and black bears that I share my forest with can easily outpace me in a 100 or 1000 meter dash (among mammals, humans are not great sprinters), but those species also overheat quickly, especially on a warm day, while a person could still be trotting along, sweating, yes, but also clearheaded enough to consider tactics and communicate with other people.

It would’ve been a mistake to attempt my marathon without training, so I started building running endurance about 16 weeks before I ran the full length. Following the recommendations outlined in The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer, I ran three times per week. The two shorter runs were of equal length and the long run was about 1/3 longer. Total mileage increased each week. I had to get used to eating and drinking during the longer runs and pay attention to my stride to prevent injury from repetition of movement.

The blackpoll prepares for migration in his own way too. Cues from day length calibrate his internal clock with the season so he knows to leave at the optimal time. Freed from the burden of chick rearing, he has the energy to replace old feathers with new plumage. He aims to double his body mass in the days leading up to departure from the Maine coast. To accomplish such rapid weight gain, he doubles or triples the amount of food he eats. His stomach, liver, and intestines increase in size too. It is a temporary change, however. Blackpolls migrating over the ocean have no opportunity to eat. He sheds unnecessary mass at the same time he sequesters fat by shrinking the size of his gut and liver during last days before migration. In late September or early October when he alights on a spruce crown hugging a rocky headland, overlooking waves crashing beneath, the bird is ready.

I broke my run into five sections, each punctuated by a short break to drink water and eat food. I divided the warbler’s effort similarly in my mind, although he does not stop or ingest any food or water while migrating over the Atlantic Ocean. The five divisions of his migration are merely an arbitrary method to frame the comparison. He weighs anywhere from 20-23 grams upon departing Maine. His species’ over-ocean route averages 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles). Radar observations of migrating songbirds have found a flight speed of 38 – 43 kilometers per hour. At a 40 kilometer per hour pace, the blackpoll will need 75 hours to arrive in Puerto Rico. If he decides to skip the Caribbean islands, he may fly non-stop for 88 hours. I aimed for a 5-hour, 42-kilometer (26.2-mile) run. It is not the same.

I felt ready for my run when I began on April 5, although I would also make mistakes along the way.

Mike’s Marathon. Section 1: 7.4 miles. Total distance: 7.4 miles.
I follow my short loop route from home plus a mile-long spur to increase the mileage on the first leg. I run a combination of town roads, logging roads, and ATV trails. The trails remain snow covered and a little squirrelly underfoot, but the snow is compacted and shallow enough that it isn’t a burden to run through. I feel fine at the end of the section, like this is just a warmup. Upon reaching home, I’m not very hungry or thirsty. Still, I fuel up with cookies, chocolate milk, and water knowing that I need the energy and liquids in my body later.

Blackpoll migration. Late September. Section 1. Total flight time: 21 hours. Total flight distance: 840 kilometers.
A passing cold front brings northerly winds. The blackpoll cannot be still. He expresses zugunruhe, a German word which means migratory restlessness. He relieves it at nightfall by launching over the Gulf of Maine. Challenges lay ahead, but he’s made for flying. Pneumatic bones offer reduced mass without compromising bone strength. His blood binds to and carries oxygen at higher affinities than mammals so he can better supply oxygen to flight muscles under challenging conditions. Importantly, the blackpoll breathes with an ease that I can’t match. Unlike my dead-end, mammalian lungs where inhaled air mixes with the previous breath, his respiratory system is unidirectional. He uses a system of air sacs to inhale and exhale. None of a bird’s nine air sacs contain blood vessels. They play no part in the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Birds have no diaphragm either, so the air sacs serve as bellows and air storage areas for the lungs in addition to connecting with hollow bones in their bodies. As the blackpoll inhales, half the incoming air fills one lung while the other half enters a pair of caudal air sacs. This breath also moves previously inhaled, deoxygenated air from the lungs to cranial air sacs. Exhalation pushes air from the lungs and the cranial sacs out through the trachea, while fresh air stored in the caudal air sacs moves behind the departing air into the lungs. The cycle ensures that his lungs always receive fresh, oxygenated air. It is an elegant, efficient system. I wish I had it. Despite his flight time and distance covered thus far, the bird still has 54 hours to go.

Mike’s Marathon continued. Section 2: 3.6 miles. Total distance: 11 miles.
I run to the east end of my road and back. The route undulates and this is no burden at this stage of the run. I remain energetic, although I am in no way pushing my pace beyond a comfortable level. It’d be hard to participate in a conversation as I run, but I’d have the breath to try. I eat and drink more upon returning home.

Blackpoll migration continued. Section 2. Total flight time: 31.5 hours. Total flight distance: 1,260 kilometers.
It is the second full day of his obligatory flight. The effort is directly tied to his survival. He cannot survive the cold temperatures of a North American winter. He could utilize an overland route to escape. Some blackpolls do, especially those in poorer body condition. Stopping frequently can reduce the risk of exhaustion, but it can also slow the pace of migration and increase the bird’s vulnerability to predators. One big leap over the ocean, so to speak, can save overall flight time and reduce the risk of predation. Natural selection has determined this is his best bet.

Mike’s marathon continued. Section 3: 5.4 miles. Total distance: 16.4 miles.
I run west from home to the end of the road and back. The road is straight and hilly. Navigating remains easy. I don’t even need to think about it, having run this way dozens of times previously. I only need to remember how far to go. I feel thirsty at the end of each section, yet I still pee about every hour. The cool weather helps reduce my body’s need for liquids. Between 25˚ and 35˚ F are the perfect temperatures for running, IMO, and that’s the weather provided today. Perhaps I should take better advantage of it. The original goal was a 20-mile training run, which the training book does not call for, after completing an 18-miler last week, yet my legs still feel good at the end of this section. I begin to believe I can finish the marathon if I commit to it. With the favorable weather and my body cooperating so far, I decide to get it over with.

Blackpoll migration continued. Section 3. Total flight time: 46.5 hours. Total flight distance: 1,860 km.
The bird has flown through another night. After dark, he becomes an astronomer by using the apparent rotation of the stars in the sky to determine direction. Has favorable weather eased the journey south or has it become a barrier to progress? Headwinds close to a bird’s flight speed can stall forward movement. Wind from the wrong direction can blow him off course or force him to use extra energy to stay on course. A tailwind, in contrast, would provide the extra push needed to get him over the last dangerous stretches of open sea. Is the blackpoll feeling different compared to when he started? Do his flight muscles ache? He’s been flying for two days, non-stop. A lack of sleep, surprisingly, isn’t an issue. Birds can sleep only one half of their brain at a time. Even when flying, they keep at least one eye open.

Mike’s marathon continued. Section 4: 4.6 miles. Total distance: 21 miles.
I go east again with a short detour off the main road to add an extra mile. I feel worked but not exhausted. The greatest discomfort exists at the bottom of my feet and toenails from the constant pounding of footfalls. I’m losing a toenail from a long run I completed a couple of weeks ago. I do not want to lose any more. I try to adjust my stride on the downhills to compensate. There is no flat section, however. Just false flats at best. I’m tired, but I also still think I can finish another five miles. At the end of this section, I eat and drink again. It won’t be enough as I’ll soon discover.

Blackpoll migration continued. Section 4. Total flight time: 60 hours. Total flight distance: 2,400 km.
The ocean and clouds do not provide reliable landmarks to aid his navigation. He’s not flying blind, though. Unlike me, the blackpoll does not rely on landmarks to follow his migratory route. Cells in his upper bill contain magnetite. Scientists theorize this allows the bird to sense the strength of the magnetic field. His retina includes special light gathering cells, known as a cryptochromes. Light at the blue and turquoise end of the spectrum excites electrons within the cryptochromes, which may allow the bird to actually see direction. It would be a stunning ability to possess. The blackpoll has flown far enough that he might be able to land on a Caribbean island if necessary. He could also choose to keep going to the north coast of South America. Do hunger and energy levels make the decision for him?

Mike’s marathon finale. Section 5: 5.4 miles. Total distance: 26.4 miles. Destination: Home.
The first few miles of the last section are tolerable. I’ve slowed considerably since the start of the run more than four hours ago, but at least my energy hasn’t bottomed out. Until it does. About three miles from home and my finish line, I feel gassed. Runners call it hitting the wall. Cyclists call it bonking or blown-out legs. No matter what, it sucked. I should’ve consumed more fuel at my last pit stop. I could use that energy now and I regret not carrying some snacks with me for the final leg. The bottom of my feet ache. Each trot is an effort. I am a little light-headed. There is a weird tingling sensation from my elbows to my fingertips. But the only choice is to move forward. Stopping would be worse. There’s little chance of hitching a ride if I quit. I see two cars in the last hour of running. I can’t remember if I needed to run all the way to the end of the road but do anyway so I don’t end up short of a full marathon when I get home. In between thoughts of food and water, with no alternative transportation other than my legs and feet, I set mini goals. Get to the next knoll. Get to the base of that hill. Get to that dirt road a few hundred yards ahead. Be glad you’re not at the start of the race. The last half of the marathon was harder than the first. The last five miles was harder than the previous five miles. The last three miles was harder still. The last mile was hardest of all. Cresting the last rise in the road, I can see the house. Near exhaustion becomes relief.

Blackpoll migration finale. Section 5. Total flight time: 75 hours. Total distance: 3,000 km. Destination: Puerto Rico.
My energy tanked when I failed to eat during the last five miles of my marathon. The blackpoll hasn’t eaten any food or drank any water since leaving Maine three days ago. Fat has been his primary fuel. The warbler used special enzymes to better mobilize stored body fat, specialized transporter proteins to carry fat through the bloodstream, and additional special enzymes to get fats into muscle cells and deliver it to the cells’ mitochondria. Burning fat also produces metabolic water, just enough hydration to keep him going. The blackpoll’s abdomen bulged with fat upon departure three days ago when he weighed about 20 grams. He now weighs about 13 grams. The effort cost him one-third of his body mass. He’s nearly emaciated as he reaches Puerto Rico. He’ll stay here for a few days to refuel before continuing to South America. He needed all his physiological and metabolic tricks to make the journey successfully. Does he also feel an avian equivalent of relief when sighting his final destination?

Running a marathon and then comparing it to the blackpoll’s migration has been humbling. I’m glad I finished the marathon, although I’m still not sure why I did it. Maybe I ran it just for the challenge, which I suppose is as good of a reason as any. The blackpoll, in contrast, migrates because instinct compels him. Nevertheless, my marathon was in no way equivalent to the blackpoll’s fall migration. I didn’t gain any immediate reproductive or survival benefits. The blackpoll did. I didn’t have to worry about drowning in the ocean if I stopped. The blackpoll did. I didn’t have to evade predators waiting to take advantage of my exhaustion upon arrival. The blackpoll did. I didn’t move non-stop for three days. The blackpoll did. I didn’t have to forage for wild foods when I finished. The blackpoll did. I don’t have to repeat the journey next year. The blackpoll does, all the while achieving feats of endurance no human can replicate.

References:

  • DeLuca, W. V, et al. (2015) Transoceanic migration by a 12 g songbird. Biology Letters. 11(4): 20141045. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2014.1045.
  • DeLuca, W., et al. (2020) Blackpoll Warbler (Setophaga striata), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.bkpwar.01.
  • Lovette, I. J. and J. W. Fitzpatrick, eds. (2016) Cornell Lab of Ornithology Handbook of Bird Biology. Third Edition. Princeton University Press.

A Sisterly Brown Bear Bond

/ Mike Fitz / 1 Comment

One thing I find fascinating about bears is the complexity of their behaviors. Bears are intelligent and mentally flexible. They understand who can be friendly and who is not. They recognize each other as individuals and, despite their asocial reputation, bears can also be quite social when the right mood and circumstances strike.

In 2022, I, along with millions of bearcam viewers, watched two sister bears, each with their own cub, form their own version of a bonded, extended family.

Although this was not unprecedented among brown bears, the bonding between bears 909, 910, and their cubs was something that I had never seen before. I was fascinated by the story—so much so that I wrote a paper for the peer-review journal Ursus. Please head over to explore.org’s blog to read more and check out the paper in Ursus.

Two young, independent bears sit in grass near a river. The photo is taken from in front and above them.
Bears 909 and 910 sit next to Brooks River in 2019, which was their second year of independence.

PS: Readers of my blog likely know that U.S. public land agencies and the civil servants within them are facing threats like I’ve never seen. Unjust firings of rangers and other National Park Service employees are gutting the NPS’s ability to protect and manage parks and extraordinary budget cuts may lead to the shuttering of park areas. The NPS may lose an additional 5,500 employees under the presidential administration’s proposed 2026 budget. Some members of Congress are also contemplating the sale of public lands.

Please contact your members of Congress and demand they oppose actions that are intended to harm public lands and public land agencies. Explore.org has set up some suggestions if you want to get started.

One of the difficulties that the NPS, among many federal agencies, is facing is the presidential administration’s freezing of funding that Congress has already appropriated. This is on top of the loss of thousands of employees already this year due to (often coerced) resignations and unjust firings. None of those actions were approved by Congress. Congressman Jared Golden, who represents my congressional district, has recently introduced the Protect our Parks Act of 2025 which would require the Secretary of the Interior to use funds that were already appropriated to complete NPS projects and fully staff national parks and reinstate employees that were unjustifiably fired. It is good legislation. A stop gap, for sure, but worth urging your member of Congress to vote for.

The Immorality of Extinction

/ Mike Fitz

North America was once home to the world’s most abundant wild bird. Although passenger pigeons could be found anywhere east of the Rocky Mountains, they concentrated their abundance between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, especially from the Great Lakes to the Mid Atlantic and east to Massachusetts. No one knows how many passenger pigeons roamed North America a mere two hundred years ago, but credible estimates suggest three to five billion—a population size that may have exceeded that of any population for any other bird species on Earth. Flocks of pigeons could be so numerous and so dense as to block the light of the sun “as by an eclipse” as John James Audubon experienced in 1813.

Passenger pigeons were also intensely social. Their roosts were communal. So many birds could alight on a tree that branches and sometimes whole trees broke under their collective weight. Their guano collected on the ground like snow. Successful reproduction hinged on a critical mass of birds finding suitable food. They were omnivores, yet fruits and seeds formed the bulk of their diet even when nesting. Masting species such as beech and oaks were preferred. A year with a good acorn crop could sustain breeding flocks that included tens of millions of individuals.

When men arrived with firearms, the pigeon’s sociability and flocking behavior proved to be their Achilles heel. Passenger pigeons lived a nomadic lifestyle—moving between areas with enough food to support their prodigious numbers—but when they settled in an area to breed, people flocked to them like the birds flocked to acorns. Hunters shot into flying flocks and as they roosted in trees, often killing and maiming dozens at a time. Nets and traps were designed to capture hundreds of birds at once. Nestlings, known as squabs, were knocked out of their nests with poles before they could fly or the trees with squabs were cut down or burned. Barrels of dead birds were shipped away and sold in city markets. They were often captured and used for target practice and shooting competitions. “Clay” pigeons in modern shooting sports are replacements for shooting live pigeons, including passenger pigeons.

The human toll was so intense that passenger pigeons went from the planet’s most numerous bird to extinct within one human lifetime.1 We’ll never experience them again. Martha, the last remaining passenger pigeon, died on September 1, 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo.

Black and white photo of a pigeon sitting on a branch. The bird is looking to the left and is facing away from the camera so we mostly see its back, left wing, and tail.
Martha, that last surviving passenger pigeon, photographed in 1912. Few photographic subjects are as sad as a photo of the last surviving member of its species.

Uncontrolled, unregulated hunting was the ultimate cause of the passenger pigeon’s extinction, although their demise coincided with intense deforestation across the majority of their range. By the late 1800s, all but shreds of forest were removed from the pigeon’s range. They faced unrelenting human pressure on two fronts: direct killing and habitat loss. I wonder if passenger pigeons could have survived the slaughter if enough undisturbed forest remained for them to find refuge and raise their young until market hunting was outlawed in the U.S. and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 provided formal protection.

All this makes a proposed regulatory change to the Endangered Species Act2 (ESA) all the more asinine. Segments of our society and culture have yet to understand the necessity of habitat in preventing extinction or realize the immorality of extinction.

Since its passage, the ESA has been the most powerful and impactful regulatory tool in preventing extinction in the United States. The ESA is not perfect, but it has helped prevent the extinction of more than 99 precent of threatened and endangered species under the act’s protection. It works well largely because the ESA includes habitat loss alongside hurting/killing of threatened or endangered individual organisms in its definition of “harm.” If, for example, an endangered plant lives in a wetland then you couldn’t excavate a ditch to drain the wetland. That would prevent the plant from surviving and reproducing. Draining the wetland alters the plant’s habitat negatively when the plant needs the wetland’s hydrology intact to survive. Current federal ESA regulations would consider such a scenario as “take” because draining the wetland would caused clear harm to the endangered plants. The ESA would prohibit altering the wetland even if no person went into the wetland to kill or damage the plants.

For wildlife and plants, habitat is equivalent to home. Protecting habitat is a logical and necessary step to prevent extinction. Often, it is the first step.

Yet the federal government proposes to redefine “harm” as it relates to the ESA so that habitat loss and destruction are not sources of harm for threatened or endangered species. The summary for the rule change states, “The existing regulatory definition of ‘harm,’ which includes habitat modification, runs contrary to the best meaning of the statutory term ‘take.’” In other words, harm to an organism’s home is not equivalent to harm to individuals. (The background and summary info then attempt to justify this point by arguing the ESA was never really meant to protect habitat, and “harm” should be limited to killing, capturing, or injuring. It cites Supreme Court cases and dissents about what “take” means. I’m not a lawyer or legal scholar so I won’t attempt to weigh an opinion on whether the cases are applicable to the ESA but, frankly, if there is any ambiguity then Congress should amend the ESA so that habitat destruction is “take” and “harm.” That’s an unrealistic dream in today’s political climate, I know.)

Limiting the ESA’s definition of harm to only killing and hurting individual organisms is a vastly unscientific and illogical decision. The consequences of the proposed change could be catastrophic for endangered species. It would allow the federal government to ignore the importance of habitat when evaluating development and other activities on threatened and endangered species. Building a dam that blocks endangered salmon from migrating would not be “harm” because the dam didn’t outright kill salmon returning to spawn; they just couldn’t spawn. Cutting down a condor’s nesting tree wouldn’t be “harm” as long the condors weren’t injured when the tree fell. Draining an endemic salamander’s stream wouldn’t be “harm” because you didn’t kill or capture any salamanders; they simply lost their home and food. Building an oil rig in a polar bear maternal denning area wouldn’t be “harm” if the mother polar bears aren’t in the dens; it wouldn’t matter if they couldn’t find denning habitat elsewhere. Building a parking lot on a sage grouse lek wouldn’t be “harm” because the grouse didn’t die during construction; they simply couldn’t court and reproduce. Polluting a river so that sea grass beds die wouldn’t be “harm;” it didn’t directly poison any manatees to death, just led to their slow starvation.

Perhaps with adequate habitat protections in place, passenger pigeons could still be part of our shared landscape. We’ll never know.

Since Martha’s death, extinction rates have accelerated due to human pressure. Market hunting may be a thing of the past in the United States at least, but habitat loss is not. A 2022 study found that habitat destruction was the main threat of extinction for 71 percent of endangered species worldwide. (Overexploitation, which is another way of stating human hunting/harvest was the main factor for 7.4 percent of endangered species.) The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists 28 percent of all assessed species as threatened with extinction. Humans and our livestock and pets outweigh wild vertebrates globally. Vertebrate animals populations have declined more than 70 percent worldwide since the 1970s. In North America alone, bird populations are reduced 3 billion compared to the 1970s—a stat that doesn’t include the loss of passenger pigeons. Most fish populations are overexploited and many are near collapse. We’re poised to mine the deep sea even though we have seen almost none of the life that exists there. All this has happened within my lifetime, and while people in our government argue with a straight face that habitat considerations should not be included in ESA’s regulations. The ultimate legacy of my generation and my parents’ generation may be to leave behind an ecologically impoverished planet. It is a moral failing.

I recently read Apocalypse Never, a book that, through a great deal of cherry-picked data, contends (unsuccessfully IMO) that climate change and biodiversity loss aren’t big deals. At the end of the book, the author Michael Shellenberger writes, “Scientists have long named self-interest as the reason for why humans should care about endangered species like the mountain gorilla. But if the mountain gorillas were ever to go extinct, humankind would become spiritually, not materially, poorer.”

In our short time on Earth, segments of humanity have been insulated from the material costs of extinction, largely because the nature supporting different groups of people wasn’t directly tied to the survival of any one species. When the last mammoth died, were people in Australia or Africa affected? When Steller’s sea cow vanished, did the farmer watching pigeons in Pennsylvania notice? When the last passenger pigeon died, did people in Japan or Bangladesh or Sweden mourn?

Yet extinction is an impoverishing event. We don’t know, and can’t know, how we’d value passenger pigeons today. We know that we are materially poorer because we’ve been denied the opportunity to integrate passenger pigeons into a possible sustainable economy—which, yes, could include hunting. Culturally and spiritually, we’ll never experience the joy and awe that some people must have felt as they watched pigeons blot out the sun like an eclipse. We don’t know what else they might have offered. We cannot truly understand or evaluate the possible effects that billions of pigeons had on temperate forests in eastern North America. We were denied the opportunity to know. Likewise, the extinction of mountain gorillas would affect communities in parts of Central Africa. What’s the value—materially, culturally, spiritually—of a gorilla? It is not our place to decide. It is our place to give future generations the opportunity to discover.

When sitting in a comfortable chair surrounded by material wealth it is easy to shrug your shoulders when a species winks out of existence, but allowing extinction is an immoral act. We should know better. Leopold in Sand County Almanac and Kimmerer in The Serviceberry have envisioned better futures. I’m not sure that we are wise enough to heed their advice.

It is immoral to deny future generations the wealth—however you define it—that non-human organisms provide. Moreover, humanity doesn’t own Earth or the organisms we share the planet with. Governments and corporations don’t either. Our non-human neighbors belong to themselves and the future. Morality compels that we don’t arbitrate whether a species is worthy of existence.3 We can continue to be complicit in extinction by allowing governments and corporations to sacrifice species for material wealth or we can build a sustainable future.

Nature is life. Earth is the Ark. We can be its caretakers or simply its takers.

  1. I recommend A Feathered River Across the Sky by Joel Greenberg you want to learn more about passenger pigeons. ↩︎
  2. The public comment period for the proposed regulatory change closed on May 19, before I published this post. ↩︎
  3. This isn’t an absolute. We can defend ourselves from organisms that cause us harm such as the Guinea worm or the protozoan that causes malaria. It is ethical to remedy the suffering certain organisms cause us. These are decisions to make on a case-by-case basis. ↩︎

A National Park Purge

/ Mike Fitz

I want to write about people if you’ll indulge me. This is a topic that I almost never delve into, since I find the human realm less interesting than the non-human and the overall behavior of my fellow humans to be disappointing. (“Hey let’s start another war.” “Hey, I don’t care if the climate gets warmer.” “The suffering of others isn’t something that affects me.” etc.) I’ll touch on politics too, which I loathe. Not that I don’t remain engaged on issues that matter, and I always vote, but I find politics exhausting. The rhetoric from elected leaders and pundits is often disingenuous at best and too often purposefully deceitful. Our media industry, especially social media platforms, uses it to monetize outrage and divisiveness. I want to avoid adding to the cycle that got us here if that is at all possible.

But to be blunt, we’re experiencing a purge of national park staff that threatens the stability of parks.

I worked in nine U.S. national parks, mostly as an interpretive ranger. Those are the rangers that lead programs, staff the visitor centers, and generally try to give people meaningful experiences. Although I no longer work for the National Park Service (NPS), I maintain close ties to parks across the country through family, friends, colleagues, the Katmai Conservancy, and my work for explore.org. Parks survive as places of significance through the support of the public and the work of NPS employees. The ability, however, of the NPS and other federal agencies to manage our public lands is facing a demanding, unnecessary challenge that will cause harm to these irreplaceable spaces.

By now, you’ve likely heard of the Fork in the Road, an attempt led by Elon Musk at the behest of the President to reduce the size of the U.S. federal workforce. Almost all federal civilian employees were offered a deferred resignation. Setting aside the confusion it sowed, its uncertain legality, and its ignorance of established regulations, the Fork was a not-so-subtle attempt to strong-arm employees into making a hasty decision about their careers. Those who didn’t take the offer were in no small way threatened that their jobs were not secure. “We cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency,” as the Fork in the Road email stated in reference to those who do not accept the resignation offer.

The total number of employees who took the offer hasn’t been fully tallied, but it is likely that a few tens of thousands of people did resign across the entire federal government. As part of his justification, Musk argues that unelected bureaucrats have too much power, even as he fails to understand that he is now the quintessential example of an unelected, unaccountable bureaucrat. It is the Spiderman meme for real.

Cartoon image. Two Spidermen are standing and pointing at each other. Instead of Spiderman wearing the Spiderman mask, their heads are replaced by Elon Musk's face.
Musk photo courtesy of Duncan.Hull – Debbie Rowe, Photographer, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=125330577

The Fork in the Road window is over, so to further reduce the federal workforce the administration is firing thousands of employees who were within a probationary period—a generally 1 – 2 year window that acts as an employment trial. Here is a good primer if you’re interested. During that time, your supervisor can decide whether your performance is acceptable. If it is, then great. Good work. Continue. We’re glad to have you. If it isn’t, then you could be fired due to poor performance. At least that is how it is supposed to work.

On February 14, about 1000 people lost their jobs in the National Park Service. That number could grow. Other land management agencies are targeted too such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (which manages wildlife refuges and endangered species), the U.S. Forest Service (which manages national forests and employs the nation’s largest wildfire fighting force), and the Bureau of Land Management (which manages large swaths of public lands that aren’t refuges, parks, or national forests). 

The Fork in the Road and mass firings are different from Bill Clinton’s methods to reduce the federal workforce in the 1990s. Namely, Clinton’s plan was approved by Congress and implemented over three years. The current administration’s plan is not Congressionally approved. Its tactics are different too. Probationary employees are being fired en masse without consideration of the value of their job, the benefits they provide to the public, the skills they possess, or their work performance. The justification for the firings is nothing more than “not in the public interest” according to the emails they’ve received. That’s not a rational justification. It is pure ideological fervor that harms real people.

How does this affect the national park that I am most connected with, Katmai? Although I’m hopeful that many of Katmai’s probationary staff may be exempted from the firings, a loss of just a few staff members at Katmai will have a disproportionately large negative impact. Katmai’s year-round staff includes perhaps 30 people. In contrast, Yellowstone has closer to 750 year-round staff. Absorbing staffing cuts is generally easier for parks with a larger staff. Additionally, the administration has implemented a hiring freeze for most seasonal positions. Reports indicate that the NPS is allowed to hire 5,000 seasonal staff, but the park staff that I’ve talked to remain unsure if they will be able to hire all the staff they need. Five thousand seasonal employees is well short of the typical 7,000 to 8,000 that are usually hired annually. 

The delay jeopardizes the ability of supervisors to hire, train, and get seasonal rangers in parks for the busiest time of the year. Katmai and most national parks cannot function properly without their seasonal workforce. 

The NPS at Katmai employs about 12 seasonal interpretive rangers for Brooks Camp. These rangers provide mandatory bear safety talks, manage access to the extremely popular Brooks Falls wildlife-viewing platform, help in bear management situations, operate the visitor center, and lead programs. Most of the maintenance, law enforcement, and bear technicians (rangers that manage bear and human conflict) are also seasonal employees. The federal hiring freeze has created extraordinary uncertainty regarding the NPS’s ability to hire seasonal staff and get them ready to run Brooks Camp. The purge of probationary employees may also lead to the loss of some supervisors for the seasonal staff. Due to the administration’s actions, we’re likely at a breaking point where park staff will not be able to keep up with the workload that already exists. 

For decades, the National Park Service has coped with too few employees for the work. Congress also saddles the NPS with perpetual budget deficits. I don’t think I ever had a supervisor in the nine parks that I worked at who wasn’t nearly or actually overwhelmed with work. Both Republicans and Democrats are at fault for this.

I wonder if you visited a park site if you would have noticed, because the NPS is really good at doing more with less. The NPS hides the stress and low morale felt by their employees and crumbling infrastructure behind smiling rangers wearing flat hats. Most people who aren’t employees don’t see the struggle to keep parks functional, the efforts made to ensure that people have good experiences despite ever increasing visitation, the knowledge and commitment necessary to study and protect ecosystems, or feel the day to day stress that comes with never being able to keep up. This spring and summer are likely to be some of the most challenging seasons that NPS employees have ever faced. People will still want to visit parks. They’ll still go to parks, but the NPS will lack the staff to provide for the best, safest experience.

The NPS shouldn’t hide the ramifications of mass firings and the seasonal job hiring freeze.

Layoffs don’t make the work of rangers go away. The public will see the results in the form of shuttered visitor centers, damage to park infrastructure, vandalism, increased emergency response time, wildlife harassment, poaching, road damage, campground closures, overflowing parking areas, and unclean bathrooms. Those things are difficult enough to address when parks are fully staffed. It is easier, cheaper, and more efficient to prevent those issues from occurring than to deal with the aftermath, just like it is easier to prevent infection through proper hygiene than to clean a wound of gangrene. Neglecting public lands now is a tax on the future.

“Where is the money supposed to come from?” you might ask. “After all, the national debt keeps going up and up and up.” If economics matter to you, then please consider that national park tourism generates more revenue than it costs the parks to operate and supports hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide outside of the NPS. The requested NPS budget in 2023, for example, was $4.75 billion, while the 2023 economic output of national parks was more than $55 billion. For every dollar invested in national parks, taxpayers get much more in return. I bet our Congress and President find money for more bombs in the midst of all this. There always seems to be money for more bombs. They might also fight to provide more tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy because the rich always seem to need more money to feed their greed. So let’s not pretend that firing hardworking and dedicated NPS employees is a true means to reduce debt or taxpayer burden or make government more efficient. It is driven by an ideological agenda.

Our public lands are the nation’s most cherished spaces. The tech billionaires and politicians want you to think that it is GDP, stock values, Walmart, Amazon, Tesla, and Facebook. In reality it is our shared democratic spaces such as parks, wildlife refuges, and national forests. 

Most everyone can agree that the U.S. government can spend its money more wisely and efficiently. I favor that. I would question the rationality of anyone who thinks otherwise. Scapegoating federal employees as the problem, however, isn’t a solution. The goal of elected leaders should be to make government work better, not break it. But here we are.

If you’ve read this far, you’re likely a Brooks River bearcam watcher. It remains to be seen how firings will ultimately affect the operation of Brooks Camp this summer. Yet more people than ever before visited Brooks Camp in 2024 (about 19,000 according to park statistics provided to me). Even if visitation declines overall, the nature of the Brooks Camp experience means that it will remain an intensely managed place. Katmai will be especially challenged to ensure that bears and people are safe at the park’s most visited site. The bearcams on explore.org will not be affected, thankfully, but that is of little solace to me knowing that friends and colleagues may be fired solely for ideology. It is not ethical. It is not in the best interest of the taxpayer. It is cruel.

Finally, there’s been a lot of talk of loyalty from the administration. Federal workers need to be loyal, etc. Loyalty for NPS employees doesn’t mean capitulating to a presidential administration’s ideology, which comes and goes on the will of voters. Loyalty for NPS employees means staying loyal to the NPS mission and purpose, which was established by Congressional law in 1916. It is in the U.S. Code. NPS employees cannot escape it nor should they. 

The NPS mission is somewhat contradictory and often frustrating to fulfill. I lived the contradiction as a ranger when struggling to determine how to best provide for enjoyment without impairing the things that make parks special. Ensuring that parks meet their Congressional mandates is where the loyalty of NPS employees truly rests. That’s how it is supposed to work. It safeguards parks against the whims of politicians.

I would still consider the current methods to purge the government workforce as wrong even if it were applied to areas of government that I disagree with on principle. Don’t hand the reins of power to an unelected billionaire bureaucrat. Consider how you’d react if you are on the other end of overreaching, unchecked presidential powers in the future. If you don’t like the way that the NPS operates, then work through Congress to change it.

If this is an issue that matters to you and you haven’t contacted your congressional representatives about it, please do. Calling might be better than writing, but this template has some good starting points to communicate. There are a lot of other reasons to write to them as well like their efforts to erase the existence of Trans people. We can get through this but not without holding elected and unelected people accountable, and not without reining in the powers of the presidency.

Tide Watching at Bay of Fundy

/ Mike Fitz / 5 Comments

Consider the plight of the northern acorn barnacle. They begin life as planktonic larvae drifting in the vast ocean, motile yet vulnerable. If one survives its many instar stages, it then seeks a more permanent home. The barnacle settles out of the water column and glues their antennae to a rock or other suitable location where they metamorphose into the shelly animal that we’re most familiar with. There’s no going back at this stage of life. The barnacle has become forever sessile with a head cemented to rock and legs filtering food from the water.

GIF from underwater video showing barnacles on a rock. The barnacles are open and filtering food from the water.
“How else would you attach to a rock?” the barnacle asks. “Certainly not with your feet. You could never eat.”

Many barnacle larvae never get the opportunity to make a permanent home. Predators or some other hazard culls their numbers. They must be choosy in their settled life too. A forever home needs to be close to other barnacles, since mating takes place between closely neighboring barnacles.

Once secured to the rock, flood tides carry life-sustaining nutrients as well as predators like sea stars and dog whelks. Ebb tides expose the barnacle to suffocating air, potential dehydration, intense summer sun, and winter’s freezing temperatures.

Still, their adaptations provide for success despite the risks. I described it as a plight earlier, and although their journey is filled with uncertainty, perhaps I am being unfair to them. Acorn barnacles are common in North Atlantic intertidal zones. Their shell resists the forces that work against them. The acorn barnacle is a tough critter built for enduring uncertainty and extremes of its intertidal habitat.

Tidal zones and the creatures that make a living amongst the habitat’s extremes have always fascinated me. I’m not aware of any habitat that changes its mood and appearance as much as the intertidal, which is why I found myself earlier this year at Canada’s Fundy National Park, wondering about barnacles and power of the ocean as I watched the biggest tides in the world.

sandy mudflats with a rippled surface border muddy water. Blue skies and tall headlands mark the sky and horizon.
Near Alma, New Brunswick at low tide. The headlands of Fundy National Park encompass the coastline.

My first opportunity to really pay attention to tides was at Assateague Island when, fresh out of college, I spent two summers working at the national seashore. Assateague’s modest three-foot tides never became life threatening (not even when I purposefully got myself stuck in quicksand up to my waist). When the tide got inconvenient, I could mosey away. An incoming Fundy tide demands attention, however. Twelve meters—forty feet—of water rise twice a day along Fundy National Park’s headlands. Places farther north and east can experience even larger tides, perhaps 16 meters or greater in height.

I wanted to watch the tides transition fully from low to high, so I planned the trip to coincide with mid morning low tides and mid afternoon high tides. On my first full day in the park, I set up a chair on the Alma Beach about 30 minutes before the predicted nadir of low tide and walked down to the water’s edge.

The outgoing tide opened access to vast mud and sandy flats, which are extraordinarily tempting to explore. After all, who doesn’t see a mile of mud in front on them and not want to be out in it? I had to remain cautious, though. I lacked knowledge of the shorelines topography and the water’s nuanced interactions with it. I worked to always keep an avenue of escape available.

A concrete platform standing on large cyclindrical concrete legs sits against a cliff. A sign on it in red letters says, "Emergency Use Only," and this being Canada, "Sortie d'urgence seulement."
Sortie d’urgence seulement. I found it easy to underestimate the rate at which an incoming Fundy tide swamps the intertidal. Although I avoided it, stranding by incoming tides must have happen often enough to justify the construction of an emergency platform at New Brunswick’s Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park. Respect the water.

An accident of geography allows Fundy tides to become so large. The bay’s shape accentuates tidal forces. According to NOAA,

“Liquid in a tank, or in this case a basin, will flow back and forth in a characteristic “oscillation” period and, if conditions are right, will oscillate rhythmically. In essence, a standing wave develops. The natural period of oscillation in the Bay of Fundy is approximately 12 hours, which is also about the same length of time for one tidal oscillation (a high/low tide cycle). This coinciding of the tide cycle and the bay oscillation period results in the much larger tidal ranges observed in the bay.”

A graphical map of Bay of Fundy. Header text reads, "Bay of Fundy: Approximate locations of the highest tides." Map shows southern coastal New Brunswick and parts of Nova Scotia. Lines mark the differences in tide levels.
Fundy tide graphic from Siddiqui et al 2015.

The shift from ebb to flood tide was easy to see at the water’s edge. Unlike the in-and-out rhythm of waves on a more exposed seashore with smaller tides, the water on the Fundy tide slapped upward with each successive wave once the tide turned.

During a low tide cycle the next day, I walked to the exposed headlands at the Point Wolf River estuary. The shoreline showed all the signs of extreme tides, of course, but I still found the height of the tides hard to fathom. I stood far beneath the lower limit of the acorn barnacles and the rockweeds hanging limp in the dry air. The twisting wrack line from the previous high tide was out of sight on the cliff above. I saw evidence of powerful winter storms that uprooted trees and eroded soils approximately 60 feet above me.

A rocky coastline with muddy water splashing against boulders at bottom center. Seaweed covered rocks lead upward to tall headlands with spruce trees at right.
Headlands at the mouth of Point Wolf River.

Within the estuary, the water rolled uphill at the pace of a slow walk.

Tides remain a force that humans cannot control. Like the barnacle, we can only adapt to them. In Alma, the small New Brunswick town adjacent to the national park, lobster boats could leave or enter the harbor only at certain tide levels.

  • boats rest on exposed land at low tide. A boulder field of riprap fills the foreground while a small river flows in between.
  • boats float against a pier at high tide. A boulder field of riprap fills the foreground while a small river flows in between.

Barnacles seem get on with the business of life no matter the phase of the tide. Yet I can’t help consider what their lives must be like secured to a rock for their entire adult lives, living in a habitat changing at a pace that even a lowly human can see. For them, the intertidal might symbolize perfection.

A Dammed Opportunity

/ Mike Fitz / 4 Comments

In Maine, Atlantic salmon are highly endangered. Prior to European colonization and, later, industrialization of the landscape’s rivers, hundreds of thousands of salmon returned to spawn in Maine every spring. Now, however, a so-called good year includes the return of 1,500 fish to the Penobscot River, which is Maine’s most productive salmon river, and maybe 2,000 fish total statewide. Maine is also the only state with runs of wild Atlantic salmon.

Kennebec River used to be one of Maine’s great salmon rivers, but its Atlantic salmon are nearly extinct. The recent 10-year average (from 2014-2023) of annual returning adult salmon at the Lockwood fish lift in Waterville, Maine is a mere 51 fish. Salmon fare so poorly in the Kennebec because they encounter four impassible dams between Waterville and Skowhegan. Even so, there’s an opportunity to save the Kennebec’s salmon run if we act now. 

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is considering relicensing operations on four hydropower dams on the Kennebec River. For decades, these dams have lacked any effective fish passage for salmon and have prevented salmon from reaching upstream spawning areas. If the dams are kept in place, even with improved fish passage efforts, we can expect the dams to continue to harm salmon and heighten their risk of extinction. 

Unfortunately, FERC’s draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for the dams calls for relicensing the facilities at the expense of salmon. At the end of this post, you’ll find the comments that I submitted to FERC about its DEIS. I found reason for extraordinary concern in FERC’s conclusions.

We know that dam removal works to restore fish runs. One of the first and best examples was on the Kennebec in Augusta. The 1999 removal of the Edwards Dam led to a great resurgence of shad, sturgeon, striped bass, river herring, and alewives to the lower Kennebec. Elsewhere in Maine, many people and organizations have worked diligently over the last few decades to restore Atlantic salmon with the largest success occurring on the Penobscot River. (This short podcast explores current efforts to restore sea-run fish in the Penobscot.) On the West Coast, the removal of dams on Washington State’s Elwah River allowed salmon to return in numbers not seen there in 100 years. In California right now, efforts are underway to remove large dams on the Klamath River to open hundreds of miles of river to Chinook and other salmon. In Washington and Idaho there is a growing chorus of support to remove impassible dams on the Snake River for the benefit of salmon and the species (including people) who depend on them.

The upper Kennebec River, though, remains imperiled because four dams block passage of sea-run fish. The few salmon that attempt to return to the upper Kennebec must be captured and transported by truck around the dams to reach any spawning habitat. 

In its DEIS, FERC proposes to relicense the dams of the Shawmet Project on the Kennebec. This seems to be another example of conservation minimalism, which was defined in a 2023 paper as “Any minimal standard [that] inevitably excludes some worthwhile conservation targets—values, obligations, and principles that ought to be upheld, or specific ecosystems and species that ought to be protected—by factoring them out as irrelevant to the specified minimum.” That is, humans taking everything but the bare minimum. We allow a species to persist only in greatly restricted ranges or low overall numbers or both. Regarding salmon, the cost-benefit analysis of dams are too often viewed through a lens that obscures the ecological and cultural benefits of fully restored salmon runs. That viewpoint does not allow for the restoration and maintenance of salmon at their fully realized ecologic potential. 

Too often, “balancing” the wants of people and needs of wildlife, including fish such as salmon, has meant a cumulative degradation and loss of wildlife habitat. Therefore, the so-called balance is not a compromise with wildlife but harm forced on wildlife and their habitats. These decisions eat away at our natural heritage, piece by piece, leaving each successive human generation with a more impoverished environment than the last. FERC is on the cusp of repeating that mistake on the Kennebec unless the FERC requires stronger, more effective fish passage structures for the Shawmut Project beyond what is already proposed in the DEIS or the dams are removed. These dams are not worth more than salmon. Extinction cannot be an option.

Please comment on the DEIS (docket 2322) if you can (which is not a simple process so see these instructions). But I realize this is a last minute request since the comment period closes today (June 4), and most people don’t have time to wade into a 400-page environmental impact statement. So if you can’t comment this time, then I ask you to keep salmon and other sea-run fish in mind when you make your daily decisions. Vote for people who support wild, sustainable populations of fish and will work to improve protections for salmon, which includes tackling climate change ASAP. Don’t eat farmed salmon, as farmed salmon are one of the greatest threats to the viability of Atlantic salmon in North America, especially in Maritime Canada. Finally, please share the amazing journeys of salmon with people you know. The more people who appreciate the remarkable lives of salmon the better.

Thanks for reading and for your support of wild salmon. Below are my comments on the Shawmut Hydroelectric Project. (FERC restricts comments to 6000 characters, which is quite limiting considering that the documents about relicensing dams often run for hundreds of pages. Nevertheless, I tried my best with the character limit.)

I’m writing to urge FERC to recommend the decommissioning of the Shawmut Hydroelectric Project No. 2322 (Shawmut Project) on the Kennebec river. The fish passage measures outlined in the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) are inadequate and will likely prevent the restoration of self-sustaining runs of sea-run fish, especially Atlantic salmon. FERC should recommend the Shawmut Project’s dams be removed on the Kennebec River. 

We lack the necessary skill and knowledge to engineer fish passage that allows all migratory fish species to overcome the challenges created by dams. On the Kennebec River, it is particularly difficult to provide adequate fish passage around dams because the river is home to at least ten diadromous species that migrate at different times of day, different times of the year, and under different hydrologic conditions. 

Of utmost concern is the Kennebec’s run of Atlantic salmon, a distinct population that is highly endangered. Their recovery is doubtful as long as dams exist on the Kennebec. The DEIS contains no substantive evidence that adding additional fish passage to the four dams on the lower Kennebec will favor Atlantic salmon and enhance their recovery to a point where the population is no longer endangered. 

I’m greatly concerned that Brookfield’s proposed fish passage measures will not provide salmon with the opportunity to migrate rapidly upstream or downstream. For example, page xx of the draft EIS states, 

“Brookfield also intends to achieve an adult salmon upstream passage effectiveness standard of 96% within 48 hours of a fish approaching each project, in order to achieve a cumulative upstream effectiveness standard of 84.9% through all four projects within 192 hours.” 

“Resident time” is double speak for substantial, harmful migration delays imposed on salmon. A 192-hour delay is an 8-day delay for a salmon to travel about 18 river miles between the lowermost and uppermost dam of the Shawmut Project. Since Atlantic salmon are reliant on stored body fat and protein to fuel upstream migration, this will cost adult salmon vital energy reserves as they attempt to find a way past the dams with negative consequences on their reproductive survival. 

Dams make river water warmer and slow its flow. Under future climate conditions, the Kennebec may become warmer during salmon migration periods. Warmer water holds less dissolved oxygen and increases the metabolism of salmon. Therefore, the effects of an 8-day delay will decrease salmon survival and reproduction upstream, regardless of the modeled 84.9% effectiveness. 

Pages 55-57 of the DEIS explore the risks of such a delay on salmon, yet somehow the significant, cumulative, and negative consequences of delays due to the dams are deemed acceptable by FERC. Pg 57 of the DEIS states, “Brookfield’s proposal to test the fishway effectiveness and implement additional adaptive management measures … is a reasonable approach.”

However, FERC’s conclusions on page 57 are not consistent with the science cited in the DEIS. For example, page 56 of the DEIS includes the remarkable statistic that under a four dam scenario on the Kennebec 37.4% of the run would die before spawning. As the Kennebec Atlantic salmon population is close to extinction–the recent 10-year average (from 2014-2023) of annual adults returns at the Lockwood fish lift is a mere 51 fish (DEIS page 44)–then a nearly 40% mortality due to dam-caused migration delays is completely unacceptable. 

Additionally, on page 52 of the DEIS notes that Brookfield “would modify or construct additional fishways only if needed after its proposed fishways are complete and have been tested for effectiveness.” This position also risks further harm to salmon. If new fish passage structures are ineffective, then the Kennebec’s salmon may already be faring worse than now. The most parsimonious and beneficial strategy for Atlantic salmon would be to require, beyond doubt, reasonable and effective fish passage as part of the relicensing process or decommission the dams. Based on the best scientific evidence, FERC’s position is neither reasonable or scientifically justifiable.

Additionally, the reasons why certain species of fish do not take to artificial fish passageways is sometimes unknown. Rivers are complex systems and artificial fish passageways only grossly approximate the conditions the fish would experience in the absence of dams. 

A free-flowing Kennebec River and naturally self sustaining runs of diadromous fish are worth more—economically, ecologically, and culturally—than anything the Shawmut Hydroelectric Project can provide.

Maine’s rivers likely never supported tens of millions of salmon, but they could and should support hundreds of thousands of salmon and tens of millions of sea-run fish collectively. Instead, status quo industrialization threatens to keep our watersheds impoverished. It is difficult to imagine the richness of a river full of salmon in Maine because that phenomenon hasn’t been experienced here in many generations. We suffer from a multi-generational amnesia that has us collectively accepting the near or complete absence of salmon and other sea-run in our rivers when their absence is not at all normal. The DEIS somehow tries, and fails, to justify that the current status quo is okay when it is not.

The electricity generated by the dams can be replaced easily by wind and solar installations. Energy conservation measures across the state could also be implemented to mitigate the loss of the hydropower. As long as these dams exist, the Kennebec’s Atlantic salmon are likely to remain endangered or, at best, exist only as a remnant population, while people and the ecosystem will never experience the full benefits of healthy runs of Atlantic salmon and other diadromous fish. Do not relicense the dams. It is the wrong decision and guarantees, with near certainty, that Atlantic salmon will remain endangered for the foreseeable future.

I was not prepared

/ Mike Fitz / Leave a comment

I stood in awe as the Moon eclipsed the Sun on April 8. I thought I was prepared for the experience. I was not. 

View of Earth from ISS. Atmosphere is mostly clear. A dark shadow blocks the landscape in the center of the photo.
The Moon’s shadow covers portions of Canada and the U.S. on April 8, 2024 as seen from the International Space Station. When this photo was taken, I stood agape in the eclipse’s path of totality. The view looks east. Maine and New Brunswick are centered under the Moon’s shadow. The Saint Lawrence Seaway is the wedge of water at left and slightly below the Moon’s shadow. The Atlantic Ocean occupies the top section of Earth. Photo courtesy of NASA.

Viewing totality of the eclipse was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. Please read more in my most recent post on explore.org.

Fisher and Other Trails

/ Mike Fitz / 2 Comments

Compared to summer, winter can seem like a dull companion, especially in my corner of the globe. The buzzing of insects ceased months ago. The forest floor rests under one to three feet of snow. Trees, shrubs, invertebrates, amphibians, and fungi lie dormant. Ice insulates wetlands that were vibrating with life not long ago. Migrating birds vanished months ago. Then, there’s the dangers posed by cold weather. Numbed toes and fingers aren’t pleasant, nor are the perpetual threats of frostbite and hypothermia. All-in-all, I could convince myself that winter is a season to be endured rather than embraced. This would be a mistake, though. 

While I miss the sheer volume of aliveness that accompanies summertime, winter has many endearing qualities. It helps me appreciate the abundance of summer. Off-trail travel is often easier when wetlands are frozen and snow smooths the terrain. And few experiences are as peaceful as the immense quiet that accompanies a snowstorm in an isolated grove of trees.

But this post isn’t about falling snow. Rather, it’s about a story written in the snow. Instead of looking at the wintertime forest as lonesome and empty, snow allows me to better understand how the landscape is a fully inhabited place. 

Last Monday, I highlighted the travels of a fisher during More to Explore, a bi-weekly highlight show on explore.org cohosted by Brian Byrd and me.

In the interest of brevity for the show, I skipped some details of the fisher’s trail. Tracking is an art that I’m still learning and I argue that I’m a slow study, but a few clues revealed I was looking at a fisher’s trail rather than a fox, coyote, marten, or lynx, all of whom inhabit the area.

  • Claw marks registered in most of the prints that I examined carefully, effectively ruling out felines since their claws are retractable and don’t register reliably in tracks.
  • The clearest tracks had five toes—an important clue that rules out the canines such as foxes and coyotes. Porcupines, bears, skunks, hares, and rodents can make five-toed tracks too, but they have other features that make them distinctive.*
  • The tracks’ size were too large for other members of the weasel family who live here such as short- and long-tailed weasels, mink, and marten. I could rule out river otters too since there was no evidence that the animal slid across the snow (something otters routinely do) or sought liquid water. The trackway crossed a beaver-created swamp but the tracks did not lead to water as an otter would have.
  • The animal’s gait was a mostly loping in a 3 x 4 pattern, which is a common way for fishers to travel. The 3 x 4 lope is a method of travel where a fisher places a front and rear foot from one side of the body in the same place, while the feet on the other side do not overlap. This gives the impression of only three tracks instead of four. Fishers walk, lope in a 2 x 2 pattern, and gallop too, but in my experience they’ll use a 3 x 4 pattern much more often in firm snow than American martens.
A set of fisher tracks in the snow. Four tracks are visible. The fisher moved from left to right. The yellow notebook at bottom center is ~17 cm wide.
A clear set of fisher prints. Her five toes are perhaps easiest to see in the second track from left. Also note that the fisher created four prints here so she slightly deviated from her typical 3 x 4 lope.

A fisher trackway in snow. The yellow notebook at bottom left is ~17 cm wide. The fisher moves mostly in a 3 x 4 lope. It was headed from left to right in the photo. The tracks are shallow, maybe only a centimeter deep.
A trackway from the fisher. She was moving with a 3 x 4 lope across firm snow. My notebook is about 17 cm wide for scale.

Several other mammals were active that day as well. Snowshoe hares, red fox, red squirrels, mice, and voles all left tracks or scat to reveal their presence. I was only lucky enough to be chastised by a couple of squirrels and didn’t see any other mammals for the majority of the day but walking slowly and quietly gives one the opportunity to be surprised. In a moment of quiet contemplation, the kind you experience while gazing through trees pondering your next move, a glimmer of movement appeared in the corner of my eye. I turned my head to find a weasel bounding through the snow. I didn’t dare reach for my camera knowing I’d spook it into hiding, although I remember clearly my confusion upon seeing it. 

A long-tailed weasel changes its fur color from summer brown to winter white and back again with the seasons. In winter, they are nearly pure white except for the tip of their tail, which is black—a feature that seems to misdirect attacking predators away from the head. This weasel, however, appeared to have a dark tail and head. 

My brain needed to register a few more bounds by the weasel to clear the confusion. it wasn’t oddly colored. The weasel was carrying a vole or mouse in his mouth. As he disappeared in a thicket, I was offered a special opportunity to examine its prints for clues about that may help me better understand how small weasels move in snow when they are burdened by the weight of their prey. 

Long-tailed weasels and the smaller short-tailed weasel (ermine) travel most often in snow by using a 2 x 2 lope. When you see them traveling in this way, it looks almost like a long hop, with the front feet hitting the ground first. The front feet quickly lift into the air while the hind feet land in the same place. The weasel I watched used this method and he seemed to carry his rodent cargo with ease—an impressive display of relative strength. His prey, though, left an important clue. Each of the weasel’s bounds were accompanied by a slash in the snow, which must have been created by part of the dead rodent (a foot? a tail?) dragging in the snow with each leap of the weasel.

A single set of long-tailed weasel tracks. They make a single depression in snow in the center of the photo. A light slash is visible beneath the weasel prints. The width of the yellow notebook at bottom is about 15 cm.
A long-tailed weasel’s prints are underscored by a slash in the snow created by the rodent prey it carried.

Two sets of long-tailed weasel tracks. Each set makes a single depression in snow. A light slash is visible beneath the weasel prints. The width of the yellow notebook at bottom is about 17 cm.
Two sets of prints from a long-tailed weasel. Note the repeating slash next to each track. The weasel traveled from right to left.

As I discussed in the video segment above, the life of a fisher would be far more mysterious without the record it leaves in snow. I would have no real clue how much fishers leave scent marks or climb trees without reading their trackways. Likewise, if I’d not been in the right place at the right time or been looking in a different direction I would have missed the weasel and its meal completely. Had I stumbled upon its trail with the strange, repeating mark next to each print I’m not sure I’d reason it was from the weasel’s prey. But now, I’ll be looking for other examples like it.

I hope you have the opportunity to utilize snow to learn more about your neighbors. When the snow pack melts in spring, I welcome the change although I must admit that forest seems a bit lonelier when I don’t know who has been visiting. 

*Mammal Tracks and Sign: A Guide to North American Species by Mark Elbroch is an invaluable resource if you want to learn more.

Thirteen Mountain Months

/ Mike Fitz / 10 Comments

Truly knowing a place might be a capacity only of the omniscient or for earthly beings, perhaps, something gained through multi-generational experience. Lacking omniscience, living in an area far from where I was raised, and having lived in my home only for a few years, I’m forced to make do as best I can. I’ll never know a place in its totality, but I’ve come to realize that I can get closer if I experience it in every season, which is how I found myself trekking to the top of Mount Chase, Maine during every month of the year. 

December 11, 2022 
The first trip in the journey and the most treacherous. Snow has yet to establish itself for the winter and ice covers many sections of trail. The summit is frosty. The hike down is much slower than the hike up.

A trail ascends through a thick forest. The trees are generally less than 6 inches in diameter and grow closely together. The trail is covered in ice like a steep stream that has frozen. About 30-40 feet of the trail is visible before it disappears at center.
Ice covers the Mount Chase Trail on Dec. 11, 2022.

View of forested landscape. Lightly frosted spruce and fir fill the foreground. A lake is visible at center in the lower elevation forest. A ridge of mountains forms the horizon at left center.
Looking west from the Mount Chase summit toward Upper Shin Pond, Sugarloaf Mountain, and Traveler Mountain.

January 8, 2023
With snow now covering the ice, the trip is far easier than last month and the snow is not yet thick enough that I have to ski to the trailhead. My trusty fat tire bike, Large Marge, gets me there. At the summit, visibility is exceptional and perhaps only limited on this day by the curvature of the Earth. On the way down, I hear a raspy-sounding chickadee. A boreal? Yes. I see it fluttering from branch to branch in the spruce-fir forest maybe 200 – 300 feet in elevation below the summit.

View from a mountain of a forested landscape. A ridge of large mountains form the horizon, although they appear small in the photo. Snow covered trees form the foreground just above windswept rock. Frozen ponds and forest sit in between the
The view to the west-southwest from the Mount Chase summit on Jan. 8, 2023. The mountains of Baxter State Park including Katahdin form the horizon.

A boreal chickadee perches in a frost covered dead spruce tree. The bird is at left center. It has a brown cap with is diagnostic of boreal chickadees.
A boreal chickadee perches in a dead spruce.

February 12
Peak winter. Minus 60˚ F wind chills during the week prior and low air temps approaching -30˚ F at home. I know arctic peoples cope with those temperatures routinely, but I’m too poorly prepared to survive those conditions. Thankfully, this day is warmer, so much so that snow fleas are active on the snow surface. I ski as far as I can up the trail. Eventually, I abandon my skis and walk the rest of the way when the trail steepness beyond my comfort level. The trail is also too narrow to ski down safely and I don’t own the the right style of skis or the skills to do that anyway. On the way up, though, I miss their floatation. The snow pack on the upper mountain must be at least 36 inches. I post-hole to my waist on two occasions.

View of mountain from a low elevation. The mountain is covered in trees that transition from deciduous to coniferous from low to high. The foreground is snow covered.
The destination: Mount Chase on Feb. 12, 2023.

View from a mountain of a forested landscape. Only a sliver of the lowlands are visible. Snow and trees fill the fore and middle ground. The trees are snow covered, especially on their left side.
The view looking south from the Mount Chase summit on Feb. 12, 2023.

March 11
The snow seems deeper than February, but maybe this will be the last deep snow trip of the year? Along an alternative route I like to take to the main trail, I find a set of lynx prints in the snow. Farther up the mountain I ditch my skis again at a point above the abandoned fire warden’s cabin where the slope gets too steep. A few snowmobiles have made the trip, though, and I continue with relative ease in their trackways.

A single lynx track. Photo is taken from directly above it. The notebook at bottom is about 7 inches long.
A single lynx track. The feline was traveling from right to left.
The 3x4 gait of a lynx in snow. Photo is taken from directly above tracks looking down. The tracks are several inches in width and length.
Although these lynx tracks aren’t well defined, the size and shape are distinctive. I find one set of these tracks per winter on average. Lynx are rare in Maine and have large territories.
Portrait view of forest. Spruce and fir trees fill the scene with spruce growing the tallest. A narrow trail is visible at bottom center.
The coniferous forest on the upper slopes of Mount Chase.

April 22
A difficult trip to the top and back (the hardest of them all, in hindsight). Mud season has fully enveloped the region. The dirt roads that approach the trailhead are slop. Large Marge gets me to the trailhead but not without extra effort from my legs. The trail remains almost wholly snow-covered above the abandoned fire warden’s cabin and the remaining snow is soft. Still, I’m thankful winter’s dormancy is broken. Near the trailhead, I hear wood frogs looking for love in a nearby a vernal pool. The calls of juncos, robins, and sapsuckers—birds that do not overwinter here—fill the deciduous forest nearby.

Two trails intersect at lower right. Both have water flowing on them. A sign at left points to the center of the photo. The sign is mounted on a post has a homemade look. It says "trail." An arrow points to the right toward the trail. Both "trail" and the arrow are outlined in permanent marker.
The official Mount Chase trailhead.

A derelict cabin in a forest. Wet, late season snow covered the bare area in front of the cabin. A mixed forest surround the cabin. The windows and door of the cabin is missing and the brick red lead paint is peeling from the outside.
The abandoned fire warden’s cabin on Mount Chase.
View from a mountain of a forested landscape. A ridge of large snow capped mountains form the horizon, although they appear small in the photo. Snow covered trees form the foreground just above windswept rock. Frozen ponds and forest fill the middle ground.
Looking west-southwest toward Katahdin and Baxter State Park from the Mount Chase summit on April 22, 2023.

May 17
I thought I’d be done with snow on the mountain by now. I was wrong. It falls on the way up and on the summit. Some small patches linger in the shadiest areas among the spruce and fir. Bud break might be advancing fast at lower elevations, but the plant phenology seems at least a week delayed on the mountain’s mid elevations and maybe two weeks behind in the summit area.

GIF of landscape view from a mountain top. Stunted spruce and fir fill the foreground. Forested lowlands fill the middle ground to the cloud obscured horizon. Snow flakes fall in the air.

Close up photo of flower in deciduous forest. The flower petals face the camera. The three petals are maroon.
Trillium erectum on the lower slopes of Mount Chase.

June 19 
A busy day on the trail with a whopping three cars at the trailhead! Large Marge, as usual, doesn’t have any other bicycles to keep her company. The forest has come to life. I note more than 20 plant species blooming. Biting insects are surprisingly few in contrast to home where the abundance of mosquitoes and black flies force me to don long sleeves, long pants, and a headnet almost anytime I intend to spend more than a few minutes outside. In the spruce-fir forest, I enjoy listening to the songs of blackpoll warbler. Sadly, they are categorized as a threatened species in the state.

A rocky trail disappears into a green forest. Trees with bright green leaves obscure the sky. The understory is also thick with green plants.
Late spring on the Mount Chase Trail.

This is the song of a blackpoll warbler recorded in the spruce-fir forest of Mount Chase. The song is a rapid series of high-pitched notes near the beginning of the track. The audio also captures part of the songs of Swainson’s thrush and winter wren.

July 21
The air feels and looks heavy due to high humidity and hazy, smoke-filled skies. This isn’t the first day of the summer with these conditions, and the past two summers had days like this too. Is the presence of smoke becoming the new normal for summertime Maine? I concentrate on observing the trees, which are in “peak green,” a phase in summer when the foliage has reached its max yet still retains some of the freshness of spring. Fledgling birds are the latest addition to the animal community. Golden-crowned kinglets and red-eyed vireos feed noisy babies. On the summit, hundreds of dragonflies zip between the stunted trees.

Portrait view of rocky trail through a green forest. The trail starts at lower right and disappears at center.Trees with bright green leaves obscure the sky. The understory is also thick with green plants.
Peak green on Mount Chase trail. July 21, 2023.

View of forested landscape from mountain summit. Bare rock covers the ground at bottom while spruce and fir trees slope off the mountain. The lowlands and horizon are obscured by haze in the air.
Looking west-southwest through smoky haze toward Katahdin and Baxter State Park from the Mount Chase summit on July 21, 2023.

Close up view of a dragonfly. The insect rests on rock speckled with small crusty lichens. It has a blue-spotted abdomen and holds its wings flat parallel with the rock.
A darner dragonfly of genus Aeshna rests on at the summit of Mount Chase. If you know what species it is, please identify it on iNaturalist.

August 20 
A quiet hike now that songbird nesting season is done. Only white-crowned sparrows sing in the summit area. The summer foliage has reached “tired green.” The work of photosynthesis as well as insect attacks have rendered the previously vibrant leaves a darker, less vibrant hue. I experienced a stressful week. Yet, I’m fortunate to have an escape for some brief solace.

View of forest that is a mix of young and old spruce and fir trees. Dead standing trees are among them. A large trunk is at left.
A section of old growth forest on upper Mount Chase.

View of forested landscape from mountain summit. Bare rock covers the ground at bottom while spruce and fir trees cover the near slopes. The skies are mostly cloudy. Forest fills the lowlands. A pond and mountains can be seen near the horizon at center left.
Looking west-southwest toward Katahdin and Baxter State Park from the Mount Chase summit on August 20, 2023.

September 24 
I discover (for myself) the remnants of a long abandoned cabin maybe 20 yards off the trail. It’s collapsed to its foundation. Still, I’m surprised by its presence. I walked by it many times previously without seeing it. The forest tends to make things disappear. Hazy conditions have returned to the area. A thick band of wildfire smoke clouds the north horizon and the mountains of Baxter State Park are mostly obscured. A few red-tailed hawks ride the thermals on the mountainside on their migration south. A raven family doesn’t tolerate their presence. They move to chase one of the soaring hawks. We’re approaching peak fall colors, although the colors are quite muted compared to normal.

A collapsed cabin rests in the forest. Vegetation has yet to grow over the structure but the wood at the base in the foreground is rotted and moss covered. The rest of the structure forms a pyramid shape.
The forest and weather will soon consume this collapsed cabin.

The Mount Chase Trail on Sept. 24, 2023.

View of forested landscape from mountain summit. Bare rock covers the ground at bottom while spruce and fir trees cover the slopes. A pond is visible at center left. Haze obscures the horizon. The low elevation forest is speckled with yellow foliage.
Looking west-northwest from the Mount Chase summit on Sept. 24, 2023.

October 18
The forest trends brown. A solid layer of newly fallen leaves cloaks the forest floor. I somehow sleepwalk most of the way to the summit, a habit I’ve been trying to break for years with greater mindfulness. I find myself stopping to focus on my breath and immediate surroundings. Something distracted me, probably precipitated by a media culture that profits from distraction and rage-inducing social networks. It is possible to walk through a forest and not see it at all.

Landscape view of rocky trail through a forest. The trail starts at bottom center and disappears at left of center. The canopy is mostly bare of leaves. The leaves that remain are mostly yellow. A larger tree bisects the image from top to bottom.
The Mount Chase Trail on October 18, 2023.

View of forested landscape from mountain summit. Bare rock covers the ground at bottom while spruce and fir trees cover the upper slopes. The lowland forest is mostly brown and bare of leaves. Tall mountains form the horizon although they look small due to the perspective. A pond is visible in the forest at center right.
Looking west-southwest toward Katahdin and Baxter State Park from the Mount Chase summit on October 18, 2023.

November 16
I begin at an alternative trailhead that I’ve used a few times this year. The route isn’t maintained. It’s nothing more than a decades-old skidder trail, but it is a quicker and more secluded course than the main trailhead. The year has been wetter than average, so water has consistently flowed over parts of the trail. Mid fall brought a prolonged stretch of dry weather though, and the trail is drier than it has been over the entire year. Winter will soon be here. The canopy is bare. Patchy snow sits in the shady areas of the mountain’s spruce-fir forest.

View of forest that is a mix of young and old spruce and fir trees. Dead standing trees are among them. A large trunk is at left. Tiny patches of snow sit on fallen tree trunks.
The old growth forest on upper Mount Chase on November 16, 2023.

View of forested landscape from mountain summit. Bare rock with some patchy snow covers the ground at bottom while spruce and fir trees cover the upper slopes. The lowland forest is bare of leaves. Tall mountains form the horizon although they look small due to the perspective. A pond is visible in the forest at center right.
Looking west-southwest toward Katahdin and Baxter State Park from the Mount Chase summit on November 16, 2023.

December 8, 2023
Winter is a time of dormancy for many life forms, although it brings vibrancy in other ways. None of the previous trips were as beautiful or as quiet. Several inches of snow coat the ground at low elevations and about 12 inches linger higher on the mountain. No human footprints are discernible on the trail. Snow and hoarfrost cover the conifers like cake icing. The landscape appears clean in a way that I don’t find in spring, summer, and fall.

A fat tire bicycle rests against a snow covered bank. Trees fill the background at top. The bike has a rear pannier and bar mitts.
Large Marge

view of snowy forest. The trees are mostly deciduous and bare of leaves. Snow covered the ground.
The Mount Chase Trail on December 8, 2023.
The final approach to the Mount Chase summit on December 8, 2023.

View of snowy conifer trees looking toward mountains on a far horizon. The trees are pyramidal in shape and their branches are covered in thick snow. The ground is fully snow covered. A blue sky fills the upper half of the photo.
Looking down the Mount Chase Trail near the summit on December 8, 2023.

View of forested landscape from mountain summit. Snow covers ground at bottom. A single set of human footprints cross them toward the perspective of the camera. Snow-covered spruce and fir trees cover the near slopes. Ice covered ponds and forest fill the lowlands. A line of mountains forms the horizon.
Looking west-southwest toward Katahdin and Baxter State Park from the Mount Chase summit on December 8, 2023.

Time spent in the forest is never wasted and every moment offers the potential to discover new perspectives. I’m no closer to profound insights after thirteen trips to the summit of Mount Chase, although I’ve walked away with a greater appreciation for the mountain’s rhythms. The experience is both the same and vastly different every time.