February 22nd - Deer and Prairie Fires
Deer and Prairie Fires
Deer are big jerks. In Wisconsin, there is a serious overpopulation of deer. Deer harbor this one tiny little insect in their nose called a botfly. It doesn't hurt the deer, but the grubs, if laid in a moose nose, suffocate that big, glorious beast. That's why there's no moose in Wisconsin anymore. Deer are also the cause of the rise in Lyme’s disease because ticks just love a big hot-blooded animal like that. On top of all that, from an overall ecology standpoint, deer graze on all little sapling trees, thereby breaking the regenerative cycle of old growth forests. Besides the saplings, they have a taste for native flowers (especially forest and prairie lilies) that are now rare in our forests, getting replaced by garlic mustard and other invasives that the deer avoid. I read an academic paper recently about how the constant heavy grazing by deer as well as their compaction of the forest floor over the past 30 years as the population boomed (and continues to), has reduced the biodiversity by as much as 80%, especially in parks where hunting isn't allowed. Pretty much the DNR just does what hunters want, and hunters want more deer.
Deer are rats.
I was at a land management conference all day which is a funny thing. These people are terrified of invasive species destroying our ecology. They're right to be scared and all, but how many people do you know talk about plants by their scientific names, see garlic mustard when they close their eyes and haunt their dreams, and read academic papers about fire ecology? I've met quite a few now over the years through this rabbit hole I've gone down. Sometimes I forget that most people aren't thinking about leafy spurge, Japanese knotweed, garlic mustard, mullein, glossy buckthorn, Canada thistle, honeysuckle, burdock, autumn olive, wild parsnip, and multiflora rose in their yard. Sometimes I think that everybody has their fingers on this pulse. Sometimes I think that the people I surround myself with are representative of the world.
I'm gonna go start my prairie on fire tomorrow with a flame thrower.
Tall dry prairie grasses sing a different song to the wind than the crisp oak leaves refusing to let go. The leaves sound thirsty and hollow like an old man pulling at his ears as he thinks about his children when they were still children and absent-mindedly playing with the change in his pocket. The grasses issue a masochistic crackle like a gentle river of fire, hoping to kiss the lightning and start over again.