Bill Meredith
Since I started keeping systematic records,
the largest number of bird species I had ever
recorded in January was 47. So I did not begin
the month with high hopes. January is usually a
good time to stay inside and think about the
environment instead of being out in it, and this
year started out that way. Snow was on the
ground continually through the first half of the
month, accompanied by temperatures that were
below freezing most of the time. I bundled up
and took my usual weekend walks, but never saw
more than 25 species in any one day; yet the
numbers mounted, and on January 16, I was
surprised to record my 48th species. I had
broken my record with the month just half gone.
No. 48 was a ringbilled gull that sailed in
and perched on a light pole in the Food Lion
parking lot in Taneytown, where I was waiting
for my wife. Taneytown would not rank high on
the list of places where most people would
expect to find seagulls in January; in fact,
when I started keeping records in 1979, gulls
appeared in my notes only when I went to
Baltimore. But one of the significant
environmental changes of the past 20 years is
the proliferation of multi-acre paved parking
lots around malls and supermarkets; and those
parking lots always come with a supply of
garbage. When it comes to eating, seagulls are
the avian equivalents of billy-goats. They root
through open dumpsters with perverse glee; they
relish cookies and hot dog fragments that kids
didn’t have time to finish before their
harried moms yanked them into the car; and they
forage in the surrounding fields when early
plowing and manure-spreading is done. They have
discovered that it is at least as easy to make a
living here in January as it is in their
ancestral habitat along the Bay, and I have
recorded them around here in each of the past
four years.
A couple of the other birds on my list are
the result of ecological phenomena 1,000 miles
north of here—in a way, the stuff of legends.
In the tundra regions of Canada, one of the most
abundant small mammals is the lemming, which one
of my favorite writers, Ed Deevey, has called
"rat-sized hyperborean field mice."
They are eaten in great quantities by a number
of predators, particularly the Snowy Owl, a
beautiful bird with a wingspan of about 4 ½
feet. Most people have heard the fantastical
stories of lemmings committing mass suicide by
migrating down the mountains in Norway and
jumping into the sea… stories that are
exaggerated, though not entirely untrue. In
Canada, lemmings don’t migrate, but they do
reproduce with remarkable enthusiasm, so that
every three or four years there is a population
explosion. Lemmings are everywhere. Snowy owls
gorge on them, and produce large families of
their own; the owl population surges upward
also, and in the following year the lemming
population declines under its impact (it’s
really more complicated than this, but you get
the idea). The result is that every few years
there are more owls than the food supply can
sustain; and rather than stay home and starve,
they migrate south. This is apparently such a
year. A snowy owl turned up near Buckeystown a
few weeks ago; it was reported on the Internet,
and I was one of several hundred birders who
made the pilgrimage to see it. During the same
week, alerted by some Audubon Society friends, I
was lucky enough to see four short-eared owls,
another boreal species that had wandered south
to the Gettysburg area for the same reason.
The rest of my list was comprised of species
I have seen regularly over the past two decades,
though never before all in the same month.
Perhaps the severe weather had something to do
with that; birds need food and shelter, and they
tend to concentrate where these things are
available. The flood plain along Toms Creek is
such a place, and I visit it frequently. This
month it yielded a yellow-bellied sapsucker,
numerous myrtle warblers and an extended family
of bluebirds, in addition to the usual
chickadees, titmice, nuthatches and woodpeckers.
Walking through the flood plain after a
recent snow afforded the chance to watch mammals
as well as birds—not directly, of course,
because most mammals are nocturnal, but by the
tracks that show their presence. After one of
the most successful hunting seasons on record,
there were still plenty of deer. Dogs and cats
had been there; it’s a pity there is not a
hunting season for them, because they are
destructive to native wildlife. Squirrels are
abundant this year, and there were the usual
numbers of rabbit tracks. At least two kinds of
mice, raccoons, beaver, foxes, a frostbitten
possum, and what I am pretty sure was a weasel
left their records in the snow. People had been
there too; there will be fewer wildflowers next
spring in the places where the soil was torn up
by "4-wheelers."
I never walk through that area without
thinking of Robert MacArthur. He was an
ecologist who finished his doctoral work just as
I was beginning mine; his research on the
ecological niches of warblers provided the
theoretical basis for my studies of crayfish, so
he was one of my idols. At the height of his
career, just before his untimely death in the
early 1970’s, he wrote a book entitled Island
Biogeography, which became a landmark for
everyone concerned with the threat to
biodiversity. He showed that a given amount of
space (islands in the Caribbean, in his studies)
could support only a limited number of species
of plants and animals; that number depended on
the size of the island and its distance from
other islands. The smaller the islands and the
farther apart they are, the fewer species they
can sustain.
I was not nearly as smart as MacArthur, so it
took a long while for me to understand that this
concept applies to places other than islands in
the ocean. But eventually, even I realized that
places like the narrow strip of woodland along
Toms Creek are islands, in an ecological sense.
They are remnants of what was once a forest that
stretched hundreds of miles; they are now
isolated patches, separated by farmland,
highways, suburban developments and supermarket
parking lots. And as such, they are the only
places in which native wildlife can find the
food and shelter necessary to survive in harsh
times like this winter.
As "progress" comes to the
Emmitsburg area, we see more and more housing
developments springing up, commercial concerns
paving former farms and woodland, and megafarm
complexes ripping out fence rows and trees to
create larger fields for monoculture cropland.
Our local natural islands are shrinking and
becoming farther apart; the inevitable
consequence will be a loss of diversity in wild
plants and animals. The Toms Creek flood plain
is a particular treasure in this respect; it
houses a rich variety of native plants and
animals, and it should be preserved and
protected. The town could do this fairly simply
by buying the land, declaring it a natural area,
and banning motorized vehicles from it. It would
require a few dollars and some courage and
foresight on the part of local leaders; but it
would be worth it. Nature would take care of the
maintenance.
