At our popular Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture Series, it’s sort of become a tradition that just about every year we include a NATURAL history presentation.
*The connection’s stronger than you might think – changing wildlife, for instance, largely hinges on human transformation of the land and water – in so many ways, their lives revolve around ours.
*Within living memory the appearance of a deer was newspaper fodder, and children were taken out of school to go see it. Likewise the bear, the beaver, the turkey, and the coyote were all strangers to this land, not too long ago.
*With the possible exception of coyotes, all of those creatures lived here natively until European invaders clear-cut huge swaths of our land, killing off or driving out the forest species. Look at photos of Keuka or Seneca Lakes from around 1900, and you’ll see that their slopes are mostly denuded of trees.
*As farming techniques improved, less land and fewer people were needed for food production. The trees came back, and with them the wildlife, in many cases creeping up from Pennsylvania. Bears have become commonplace in the past twenty years, and the three New York populations… in the Catskills, in the Adirondacks, and a token few along the western Southern Tier… have pretty much merged.
*We hear a lot about invasive species… starlings, zebra mussels, purple loosestrife, emerald ash borers… but bears, beavers, deer, and turkeys are RE-invasive species, coming back to lands that once they knew.
*Coyotes, on the other hand, probably are in fact recent arrivals, although they fill the ecological niche once occupied by the now-extirpated wolf. Unlike the starling, say, which muscles aside native residents, the coyote is essentially filling a vacuum.
*Another native species is the otter. For otters to return we needed not only reforestation, but also cleanup… otters require pristine water. In their case we’ve been deliberately restocking, and the jury’s still out on our success. Unfortunately for our efforts the animals will often range a hundred miles to find a site they like, making it slow going to build up enough density for a breeding population.
*Eagle restocking, on the other hand, HAS been successful, pushing New York state from one breeding pair to dozens. Limiting certain pesticides has aided both them and the osprey.
*Global heating also plays a role. With grain being grown both earlier and later in the year, and farther north in Canada, the Canada goose population has exploded. The cardinal has moved north since World War II, aided by milder shorter winters AND introduction of the berry-bearing multiflora rose decorative shrub. New England fisheries have been devastated as the harvest species have withdrawn far to the north in search of cooler water.
*Allegany County Historian Craig Braack, who’s a perennial favorite history presenter at our Winter Lectures, is stepping outside his box this week to bring us a show of his nature photography. Craig spends as much time as he can manage behind a camera, joining such luminaries as Roger Tory Peterson, the Jamestown-born field guide pioneer, and General Sir Alan Brooke. Britain’s World War II Chief of the Imperial General Staff was a pioneer in wildlife photography, and stole time when he could even during the war, which no doubt helped him calm his soul.
*So Craig will be with us at Bath Fire Hall 4 PM on Friday, February 5, for our free presentation sharing his nature photos. We hope you can join us.