#dryfarmed | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

fatehbaz · 5 years ago

Text

Thinking about bugs and prairies today, as one does. Still impressive, to me, that ecological imperialism, Indigenous dispossession, unsustainable agriculture, and soil degradation was so intense that a single species of insect could go from a population of trillions during one summer, darkening the sky across the entirety of the Great Plains and potentially weighing 28 million tons, to completely extinct less than 20 years later. (The specific reason for the sudden extinction of the Rocky Mountain locust is, famously, still a mystery, though.) Like the passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, and American bison, the locust is a famous casualties of US imperial expansion of the 19th century. I know that the locust swarms of the 1870s are already well-known from their portrayal in media at the time and in popular fiction in later decades, but it’s the ecological relationships of the locust which still fascinate me. It’s unclear to what extent riparian deforestation and local bison extinction affected the locust.

Here, Rocky Mountain locusts are depicted as a manifestation of ecological resistance against homesteading and settler-colonial industrial agriculture.

The “The Train Hold-Up” is an 1870s photo graphic dramatizing how locusts were interfering with empire’s resource extraction and westward expansion, with a photo by F.D. Conard.

The cartoon grasshopper-man comes from 1875, and is held at Kansas State Historical Society.

The cartoon is a depiction of the locust swarms of 1874-1875; by artist Henry Worrall, via Kansas State Historical Society.

[Photo of Rocky Mountain locust. Via Wikimedia, public domain. And, a map of the suspected distribution range of the species, which forms a neat outline of the combined area of the Great Plains and the sagebrush steppe of the northern Great Basin and Columbia Plateau.]

Leading up to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, there were 3 other catastrophic droughts which devastated the Intermountain West and High Plains during the Euro-American land-grabbing campaigns of the 19th century, all due to Euro-American devegetation, agriculture, and Indigenous dispossession. Environmental historians tend to distinguish the 3 events as: “the Civil War drought” of the mid-1850s through the mid-1860s; the La Nina-influenced event of the 1870s; and the late-1880s and 1890s drought with blatantly clear connections to localized bison extinction, violence against Natives, colonial homesteading, and unsustainable dryfarming practices. (The Homestead Act passed in 1862, and all 3 of these drought periods correspond with the incredible intensification of US homesteading between 1860 and the 1890s.) And during the 1870s drought, the Rocky Mountain locust (Melanoplus spretus) might have achieved its largest historical population size. In 1877, the US government established the Entomological Commission, partially to address the vast swarms of locusts which would blacken the sky. The State of Missouri legally required citizens to commit at least one day each week to killing locusts. Extrapolations at the time proposed that, in 1875, 3.5 trillion locusts covered the American West. Then, suddenly, the Rocky Mountain locust went entirely extinct, with the last living locusts collected in 1902.

[Not a bad map of grasslands, steppe, and desert regions of the US. By Karen Launchbaugh, via Wikimedia.]

An 1888 engraving held at Minnesota Historical Society, which depicts a mid-1870s swarm of Rocky Mountain locusts.

------

On the presumed ecological relationships of the locusts:

From Hopkins’s academic review of Lockwood’s Locust (2004): The Rocky Mountain locust was once the most abundant insect on the Great Plains. In years of peak populations, Lockwood calculates, its numbers rivaled bison populations in both biomass and consumption of forage. Before the plains were settled, periodic swarms of migrating locusts were part of the natural rhythm of the grasslands, particularly during years of drought. That situation had changed by the mid-1870s, however, when farmers and ranchers occupied much of the Great Plains. A drought of several years' duration triggered a massive outbreak of locusts that swept over an immense area, destroying much of the agricultural production and bringing famine to many settlers. [...]

Several theories to explain the extinction -- and one positing that the locust was still alive, masquerading as an extreme migratory form of a common related grasshopper -- were put forward over the years. [...] One of the most interesting of these theories was that the ecology of the locust was somehow linked to the great herds of bison, and that the extermination of the latter from most of its range brought about the extinction of the former. These two major and competing grazers had coexisted on the plains for thousands of years, so the idea was advanced that the bison somehow altered the ecology of the grasslands to favor reproduction and survival of the locust. Another theory was that the planting of alfalfa throughout the locust's breeding area in the latter part of the 19th century could have played a role in the insect's extinction; alfalfa, which is palatable to grasshoppers, was shown in laboratory studies to be deleterious to the growth of the insect's immature stages. [End of excerpt.]

Bison near Yellowstone, and a look at some lower-elevation sagebrush habitat. [Photo by J!m P/eaco for National Park Service.]

Here’s a look at the contraction of American bison distribution until 1890. [By Cephas, via Wikimedia.]

---

Some entomologists think that smaller-scale Euro-American devegetation of riparian woodlands and soils - along streams and rivers - might’ve been the major cause of sudden extinction. (Riparian corridors in dryland ecosystems like Great Basin sagebrush steppe or shortgrass prairie can be especially susceptible to damage from the arrival of Euro-American settlers and water diversion for cattle rangeland.) Lockwood and other modern entomologists have also proposed that the locust, for reproduction, relied specifically on the riparian corridors and forests of the valleys of the Yellowstone region and southwestern Montana.

A basic summary of potential ecological influences on the extinction, from the abstract of “A Solution for the Sudden and Unexplained Extinction of the Rocky Mountain Grasshopper (Orthoptera: Acrididae).” Lockwood and Debrey: Within the region that this species occupied in the late 1800s, oviposition and early nymphal development occurred almost exclusively in riparian habitats. Intensive anthropogenic effects (i.e., tillage; irrigation; loss of the beaver; and introduction of cattle, plants, and birds) were associated with virtually the entire range of M. spretus in the late 1800s. We suggest that localized agricultural destruction of the insect's habitat and the introduction of exotic species caused the extinction of M. spretus. [End of excerpt.]

Thing I did:

Riley’s illustration of Rocky Mountain locust reproduction, from a report to the Missouri General Assembly, 1874. Via University of Missouri W.R. Enns Entomology Museum.

The specific element of ecological degradation which led to extinction might technically be a “mystery,” but settler-colonial agriculture and homesteading are the clear culprits.

287 notes · View notes

usfwspacific · 7 years ago

Text

Seasons of the Hunt: Part II of our Series on the Enigmatic Hungarian Partridge

By Dan Magneson, USFWS Fisheries Biologist

Editor’s note: As a part of National Hunting and Fishing Day (Sept. 23, 2017) and Public Lands Day (Sept. 30, 2017), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Pacific Region is highlighting hunting, fishing and public lands, as well as the importance of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Be sure to read part one of Dan’s story here.

Photo credit: gwbf.org

SPRING

The covey has disintegrated, with the young from the previous year having paired off and formed strong monogamous bonds with Huns from other coveys. If they are both still alive, the original parents will stay together and start yet another new family. If one has since died, however, the survivor will readily form a pair bond with a different mate.

If the Hun is like a feathered cheetah when it comes to speed, then they are like a feathered rabbit when it comes to reproducing themselves!

The nest site is usually chosen in sparser dried stems of taller grass intermixed among the stalks of broadleaf weed cover consisting of the previous year’s dead growth and thus creating a light canopy overhead; hay and alfalfa fields that received mowing the previous year are virtually never chosen as a nesting site. Huns have a decided propensity for nesting in strips of cover along fencelines and in wide ditches along roadsides, possibly a function of their spending so much of their time along the edges of the adjacent fields.

Depending somewhat on the latitude, the great majority of the nesting will take place from around Memorial Day to the first day of the official start of summer at the solstice; both the male and female are devoted parents and will actively defend the nest.

The female constructs a simple ground nest while the male stands guard. That task completed, she will typically lay from 16 – 18 buff-olive eggs (although there are occasionally white specimens) and sometimes as many as 22 eggs, by far the most of any gamebird in North America and in fact among the most of any bird on earth.

This, coupled with and enhanced by extremely good early brood rearing conditions, explains what enables the Hun to generate such steeply-sharp population spikes in certain years and explains why coveys may then be unexpectedly encountered in areas where you traditionally have never seen them.

Normally, the Hun is much less subject to mortality from predation during winter weather than are most other upland gamebirds – except predators can and often do exact a heavier toll during horrifically-bad winter weather of exceptionally long duration.

But they have an even greater Achilles Heel, whereupon their numbers really take it on the chin: above and beyond anything else, especially extended periods of cold and wet conditions early in a chick’s life can be deadly and very severely depress Hun numbers in the coming autumn; the importance of warm and dry conditions to the very young one-and-a-half inch tall chicks cannot be emphasized enough. So please, no rain dances now!

As the chicks continue to grow toward maturity, they become less and less associated with cover that has a canopy overhead.

Outside of this acutely-vulnerable period of their lives, I would expect that Hun populations would do better in dry and droughty years in the more easterly portions of their North American range, and conversely do better in moister than normal conditions in the generally more arid westerly parts of their range.

Photo: Hunting for huns in Montana. Photo credit: Hank Shaw

SUMMER

The female carefully conceals the eggs with vegetation whenever she briefly departs, and by now the last of the later clutches will hatch out in July, and insects are of paramount importance to the hungry chicks at this time of year; the high protein levels are necessary to fuel their rapid rate of growth and development.

AUTUMN

In the dryfarmed prairie regions, such as North Dakota, to be consistently successful in the early hunting season look for the birds along the grassy fringes between the wheat stubble and neighboring Siberian elm and Russian olive shelterbelts, or back-and-forth along the margins of other relatively-light cover types bordering the wheat stubble. The Hun coveys will be comprised mostly of inexperienced and naïve young-of-the-year birds, affording you closer shots and more opportunity to flush them again since they generally won’t go very far before landing. Their early season behavior always reminded me a great deal of hunting bobwhites along the osage-orange hedgerows back in my native southwest Iowa.

Photo credit: Donald Jones, Montana FWP

Composed at its core of immediate family members, falling in with this central covey along the way are otherwise-unpaired adult Huns.

Besides watching them in order that you can go pursue them again, there is another reason – if you have shot at them. Sometimes a bird you thought you had missed or barely “tickled” suddenly drops from flight deader than yesterday’s news, or you see a bird land short of where the rest of the covey put down. You owe it to your quarry to try to get these otherwise-wasted birds into your bag.

Huns will commonly feed early in the morning and again late in the afternoon; food is plentiful, so it doesn’t take them long to get their fill. Then they will loaf during midday in the vicinity of the edges of the fields. In wheat country, their diet may be almost entirely comprised of the kernels of this grain, along with sprouts of volunteer plants.

Like a big ol’ trophy bucket-mouthed bass near an old submerged stump, Huns seem to orient to certain features in an otherwise homogenous landscape. That elevated knoll or hillock or that lone bush or rock pile out in the wheat stubble are good spots to focus your efforts upon, as are abandoned farm machinery and implements in old ranch junkyards and the like. I remember once hunting an ocean of wheat stubble, and the only feature different was an old Christmas tree that had been dumped out there. And that was right where I found a big covey of Huns.

You may be able to flush the same covey twice or maybe three times, and very rarely four times. Huns really stick together, and the first flush is likely to be straight toward some landmark familiar to that covey. The second flush will likely see them veering in something of an arc. The countryside may look fairly featureless to you, but rest assured it is not to them. If you flush them a third time and at the limits of their home range, they might well turn and come right back over your head in order to return to familiar turf – which is quite often the same spot you originally found them, or near to it, and thus demonstrating that they really are rooted or anchored to a certain home range.

If you do succeed in fragmenting the covey into singles and doubles, these are the birds to pursue because they will likely hold much tighter and subsequently flush at much closer range than is likely with the remaining bulk of the covey

In the sagebrush country of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and the far northern portions of Nevada and Utah where irrigated agriculture is more the rule, again look for Huns in areas adjacent to stubble fields of wheat, rye, barley and other small grain crops. Much of the time this will be along the steeper foothills next to the flatter cultivated farm fields. Mostly grassy cover interspersed with dots of occasional sagebrush is ideal, and don’t forget to check the grassy heads of basins and especially the deeply sun-shielded and sometimes surprisingly-moist creases between hills, and especially on the very warm days of the early season. The Huns can find cooler shade among the broader-leafed shrubbery, and the damp conditions are conducive for attracting insects and also for growing succulent shoots and tender grass tips; Huns are always partial to a meal of fresh salad greens, no matter what the season.

I like best the places where the border along the sagebrush and wheat stubble fields really weaves and wanders a lot, where the wheat is surrounded on three sides by sagebrush and grass or conversely those lone and long fingers of sagebrush and grass protruding far, far out into the wheat stubble.

Keep an eye peeled for the places the Huns take dust baths, and the odd loose feather or two confirming that. And look for piles of droppings indicating where they have roosted; the individual droppings are pointed at one end and broad at the other, looking like a miniature green sugar cone with a scoop of white vanilla ice cream.

If you shoot a double-barreled gun, a fast 20-gauge with a #7 ½ load in a barrel choked improved cylinder and the other barrel choked modified with a #6 load should do a fine job in most instances.

Insects such as beetles, grasshoppers, crickets and ants will continue to be taken by Huns, but the carbohydrates and lipids found in grains have by now begun progressively making up more and more of the diet as the overnight freezing-frosty temperatures causes the insects to die off for the year.

But there are those coveys of Huns who live out their entire lives never once feeding on cultivated, domesticated cereal grains from farm fields.

In the Sawtooth National Forest south-southeast of Twin Falls, Idaho I used to hunt mule deer in a rather pristine, broad valley that was, as best I recall, either entirely ungrazed by cattle or else only very lightly grazed. I probably put up more coveys of Huns down there more often than anywhere else I’ve ever been, and they were miles and miles from the nearest agricultural areas. They were absolutely thriving out there in that desolate country. So don’t ignore those vast holdings of public lands that are managed by the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, the public lands adjacent to the big western reservoirs managed by the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and those portions of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service-managed National Wildlife Refuges which may be open to hunting.

There are often steep hills associated with these wilder areas, and the birds usually flush downhill and then hook off one direction or the other towards the end of their flight. I don’t think it is a deliberate and diabolical attempt on their part to better elude your finding them again; instead I think they are just trying to reduce their air speed in order to make a soft and easy landing. Don’t be too surprised if they subsequently start to slowly work their way up another hill. You can use the rough terrain to plot a quiet and more concealed approach and if you have a partner, one hunter can start working downhill from above them while the other starts working up the hill from a point just below where they originally landed. Watch especially any stragglers that flush late behind the main body of the covey; these birds often cut corners and take shortcuts to catch up, giving you a better idea of where they’ve landed if the flight of the main covey has been obscured by an obstacle.

But I’ll tell you, when it comes to pursuing opportunities to make multiple flushes in steeper country, don’t be surprised if the Huns wear you out before you’ve worn them out.

As autumn grows long in the tooth, the Huns will have wised up considerably, becoming in many cases ultra-wary and hyper-alert. It is about now they begin to start flushing so wildly, far out of shotgun range, and start showing you just how well they can twist and turn on a dime once in flight. Oddly enough, Huns do tend to generally hold well for a pointing dog – provided it doesn’t press them too closely. The ideal Hun dog is one with the endurance of the Energizer Bunny, and that casts to-and-fro across the field very widely, but is solid as a statue when it goes on point, allowing you plenty of time to get there. But don’t dilly-dally with these now-skittish Huns! Hunt the dog into the wind, and don’t be afraid to experiment if need be: circling far out to the side and around the covey, then coming in directly at the dog, sometimes perplexes the Huns just long enough for a decent shot at them. A hawk whistle may help freeze running birds in their tracks; to imitate a hawk, some hunters will go so far as to tie a dark helium balloon to their belts in hopes of likewise helping to pin the Huns down into place.

I’d stick with all #6 loads now, and consider moving up to a 12-gauge shotgun. You never know for sure what Huns might decide to do on a given day, whether to flush nice and close or way out there beyond gun range. But I think I’d lean more toward a modified or full choke, though, as it is more likely to be the latter case.

WINTER

I used to go to college in Bottineau, North Dakota, which is located in the far northern (and central) part of the state. A blizzard would be howling and wind-driven snow would be coming in thin, powdery waves across the ground, the mercury standing at far below zero.

Yet the Huns would be out scurrying around and feeding right in the midst of it, so impervious that they seemed imbued with immunity to bitter cold.

For such a small bird, the winter survival skills of the Hun border on the incredible; they are absolutely unfazed by the same ferocious blizzards that can lay waste to an entire population of pheasants.

Their habit of forming a warm roosting ring is part of it: with snow lingering on the ground, one author spoke of repeatedly finding different overnight roosts used by the same covey of nine Huns. They had always very consistently packed into an area smaller than what a single pheasant takes up.

But unlike either pheasants or bobwhite quail, if conditions get bad enough, then the Huns will use the blanket of snow itself as insulating cover, readily burrowing down into it to escape especially severe and otherwise deadly conditions.

The wind may whip up some big snowdrifts, but other areas are commonly kept largely snow-free by the very same winds, which gives the Huns a place to forage for food.

But if there is a fairly uniform and persisting cover of snow of four inches or more, the Huns will start to utilize woody cover, as Aldo Leopold noted in 1931: “Hungarians come nearer being able to get along without cover than pheasants or quail, but during snow they do require some heavy grass, weeds, or standing corn.”

In the northwestern quarter of the state of Iowa, it’ll be wild plum thickets for certain any time there is one in the Hun’s home range, just like with the bobwhite quail in the bottom two tiers of that state’s southernmost counties.

In the Dakotas, it will likely be stands of lilac and caragana.

Out here further to the west, it’s going to be shrubs such as snowberry, hawthorn, chokecherry and buffalo-berry.

Mimicking fox hunters is a viable option, whereupon you don white coveralls and wrap your gun in white tape. You might consider packing binoculars tucked down inside your coveralls to keep them from fogging up or flopping against your chest. Neither food nor length of daylight is as plentiful now, so looking even out into the very middle of fields such as wheat stubble becomes more worthwhile as the Huns are now generally spending a greater proportion of the daylight hours feeding. One thing that will help you after a new snow is that now there are fresh Hun tracks with which to betray their presence. Scanning far ahead will help you plot an ambush; if you don’t see the Huns actively moving about, then look for “dirt clods” sitting out there and protruding up from the snow.

Also don’t forget the effects of the wind chill factor. Look for Huns to escape the cold winds by locating themselves on the lee sides of hills, steep and sheer protective creek banks, and also man-made structures such as abandoned farmstead buildings as well as lone grain bins and machine sheds. If such areas also receive warming rays of sunshine and the thinner areas of snow melts off to boot, so much the better. The wind can work to your benefit by better masking your approach, but bear in mind that the now-nervous Huns will compensate by relying on their vision just that much more when conditions diminish the effectiveness of their sense of hearing.

As in all seasons, if there is a spring or seep where sprouts continue to grow from the unfrozen mud, they are worth checking out for Huns.

I definitely would go with a 12 gauge shotgun in the winter, and preferably one with a PolyChoke as you again never quite know at just what range at they will choose to flush on any given day. I usually like a more tightly-choked barrel with a #6 shell in the chamber, and I follow that up with #5 shells in the magazine for successive shots at probable longer ranges.

But if the snow is especially deep and worse yet covered by a thick glaze of ice for a prolonged period, the Huns will become desperately hungry, and then begin approaching gravel roadsides, livestock feedlots, silos, and farmsteads in general, searching for barer ground anywhere where they might locate some food. But no ethical hunter would ever exploit such a pitiful plight.

Late in the winter, after the season closes and the weather warms and the snow melts off, the males will begin squaring off with one another and engage in ritualized fighting, with the victor getting to stay where he is and the vanquished bird having to leave.

Female Huns are more aggressive during this period than the females of most other gamebird species, and will decisively lower the boom on any other females caught flirting with their chosen mate. And which male Huns are the favored mates? The ones seen as leaders within the covey and also those who seem to maintain a state of heightened alert.

The cycle of a new Hun generation is beginning anew.

SUMMING IT ALL UP

Coupled with the topography, the direction and the angle and the intensity of the sun along with prevailing weather and wind patterns combine to create a seasonally-changing mosaic of different plant species and ultimately plant communities of varying density. This in turn provides the Huns a home range in which they can capitalize upon the best opportunities for their continued survival and perpetuation of their own kind.

For you to be a consistently-successful hunter of these birds, you’ll need to develop the ability to discern these differences and how they interact; that in turn will get you pointed in the proper direction and better narrow things down to just where the Huns are likely to be found on any given day during the changing seasons.

And all of this is alluring to a hunter, or should be, creating a charismatic aura and enticing you to try to take apart and figure out just what makes these birds tick.

The upside to learning in this big outdoor classroom is the generally grand and glorious scenery, the stunningly-spectacular sunrises and sunsets in this otherwise-austere landscape, the wild and sometimes surreal cloud formations, the weird and grotesque rock formations, the sego lily and Indian paintbrush, that old corral with those giant and golden cottonwoods, and all the solitude to be found in the American Outback that is Hun Country.

It’s a classroom in which you will never become bored.

Best of Luck to you the reader during this hunting season and in all in your future Hun endeavors!

#iHuntBecause #HuntShootFish #hunting #conservation

4 notes · View notes