I learned a lot about the P/J Woodland today in my class on Taos Ecology. (P/J stands for piñon/juniper.) We went on a field trip in Taos Canyon, up a trail called Divisadero to 7,400 feet. Our teacher, Sylvia, said that piñon is very vulnerable to climate shifts and retreats in times of drought to re-colonize later. If the temperature goes up even one degree, the heat shuts down the life processes and kills the tree.
Piñon is our most important source of firewood around here, though we also burn aspen, cedar and "red pine." Aspen burns hot and fast and cleans out your stovepipe. But a log of piñon will burn all night and the stove still be warm in the morning. The piñons around here and as far south as Santa Fe have been taking a beating for the past decade. Plagued by drought and infested with ips beetles, they have died by the thousands. Cutting the dead ones for firewood isn't an option because of the danger of spreading the beetle. The past couple of winters we've had several days of below zero temperatures, which is what it takes to kill the beetles. And deep snows to replenish the watershed and fill the irrigation acequias in spring, but no one is saying that the drought is over yet.
The aspens are affected too. Aspens reproduce by sending up suckers. A whole stand of aspens may be connected at the root. Ancient aspen clones, some of them thousands of years old, are threatened by a lethal combination of disease and insect infestation that destroys even the roots. The good news is, in Flagstaff, Arizona where stands of aspens are struggling to regenerate, the forest service has succeeded in protecting new suckers from browsing elk by fencing off the parent trees.
Today we students are trying to understand how everything in the environment affects everything else. We stop to look at a juniper tree infested with mistletoe, great olive-green clumps of it thriving on bare branches, sucking nourishment from the wood and leaving black fungal spores. Sylvia notes that it is not advantageous for a parasite to kill the host. Which also applies to our own species. She points out a mountain mahogany bush that has been grazed by mule deer. "Deer ice cream," she calls it. They have devoured most of the leaves, but the stems seem fine. The deer leave piles of "deer duds" that help fertilize the ground. Periodically, we are startled by the blast of a high powered rifle from the opposite hillside. Hunting season.
We identify five different kinds of grasses and talk about the partnership between specific fungus and specific algae that paint the sides of the rocks pale green. Fungus absorbs water and keeps the algae moist; algae is photosynthetic, creates food from sunlight, and provides nourishment for the fungus. They are intertwined and can't survive without each other. Together they help weather the rock and break it down into soil.
Near the ridge we do a fifty foot, radial vegetation sampling, identify and count the number of different kinds of trees and note what condition they are in. Where dead juniper and piñon have fallen, dozens of saplings are springing up, some in the protective shelter of clumps of grass and sage. They look bright and healthy and give us hope the way all young things do.
Driving home at dusk, I slow down in the driveway but don't see the deer until I come to the bridge. Two of them have already crossed--one of them a buck. The does are browsing on the other side of the bridge, in the field and above the stone wall. I stop in the middle of the road and wait. A car rolls up behind me. Slows down, dims the lights. Someone else enjoys watching them, too. I proceed with caution, turn on my brights and count eight deer--and yes, there he is--the other buck. One buck hasn't driven the other away and no one has shot them.
Yet.
It gives me hope.
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