Picture the scene: a raven sits croaking at the top of a white pine, the branches of which droop under the weight of the snowfall from the night before. The temperature had dropped to -10 Celsius after the sun had bid farewell and 10 inches of snow now lie sparkling in the weak morning light; more will fall as the day goes on. A Canadian Lynx glides across the surface of the newly laid snow, its splayed paws working as snowshoes do to leave no trace. The deciduous trees have been dormant for months, their leaves little but a memory to the creatures of the forest that remain in this winter wonderland. Like so much of the continent’s northern forests, conifers and evergreens dominate the landscape, the limited light and temperature of the short growing season means those that do not shed their leaves have a head start. When conditions eventually become suitable for growth, evergreens don’t have to waste precious time re-growing leaves or taking up the nutrients the deciduous trees had lost in the autumn.
Fast forward 3 months and the snowy landscape that wouldn’t have been out of place at the North Pole, is poles apart from what greets the recently roused Black Bear mother and her clumsy litter of 3 cubs. The Northwoods are alive to the sound of birdsong, and the season is only just beginning. The familiar song of the white throated sparrow pierces the evening air, the setting sun casting a golden glow over the understorey of the forest. I have mentioned northern Minnesota’s great biodiversity before; the overlap of deciduous and boreal forest creates many different habitats, many different niches and ultimately many opportunities for many an organism. Take one afternoon’s hike around the appallingly named Dry Lake for example: in one scene, I could see 3 species of woodpecker (Hairy, Downy and Pileated) and countless numbers of warblers. It got to the point where, for the first time in my life, I was forced to resort to scribbling field notes on a piece of scrap paper to remember what I was seeing so I could look up the species later. Some dodgy drawings and questionable handwriting later, I had seen everything from a Cedar Waxwing to an American Bittern. Throw in a far off American Beaver from earlier in the week plus a narrow miss with a Garter Snake, and you had one very happy naturalist.
Getting out to Bass and Dry Lake had been an adventure in itself. They both sit 6 miles outside of Ely, MN along the famous Echo Trail towards the Boundary Waters, meaning I had to settle in for a reasonably lengthy ride on my newly acquired bike. At the trailhead, I was greeted by the soft grunting of a wild Black Bear in the undergrowth, its vocalisations only adding to excitement over the possibility of encountering a bobcat or a wolf around the next twist in the trail. Part of what I love at the North American Bear Centre is that all this excitement, all of this anticipation is so beautifully captured by the Northwoods Ecology Hall, where visitors come and are encouraged to learn about the frankly obscene diversity of life around them. Dr Rogers realised a long time ago that you couldn’t save the bears without saving the species they lived alongside and that the only way to save them was to educate the public.
The connectionist view outlined above is one that is spreading quickly in ecology; the idea that nothing can stand alone and that removing even one species could have drastic knock on effects on the entire ecosystem. These trophic cascades are the closest biology gets to universal laws, ecology’s answer to Newton’s Laws of Motion. Perhaps the most famous of these cascades comes from Yellowstone National Park, where the reintroduction of wolves actually contributed to changing the shape of the river. There is no shortage of examples, with one particularly complex one involving Sea Otters on the Aleutian Islands, off the coast of Alaska. The counter argument to all of this is the ‘Functional Redundancy Hypothesis’, that roles and niches overlap so much that even if one species is removed, another could fulfil its neglected duties. Personally, I don’t know on which side I stand but I know it’s not black and white.
161 bird species breed in the Northwoods. That’s not just bird species that occur here, that’s 161 species that are comfortable enough and have found all the resources they need to carry out what is arguably the most important and vulnerable period in their yearly cycles. When we include migratory and irruptive species like the Snowy Owl as well, the bird list grows exponentially which is a testament to the productivity and availability of nutrients in the Northwoods.
In these 161, there are 9 species of woodpecker and whilst learning about how these similar birds coexist with each other, I stumbled across the infamous story of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. The Ivory-Billed is one of the largest woodpeckers in the world and was once common across the swamp forests of south east America; now, only 20 individuals remain and there hasn’t been a confirmed sighting since 2006. A $10,000 reward for indisputable evidence of its persistence went unclaimed but when two were supposedly spotted along the banks of the Cache River in Brinkley, Arkansas, tourists began to descend on the once economically struggling town of 3,000 like locusts.
Ecology is so often dismissed by society and indeed other sciences as ‘bunny hugging’, as a discipline that offers no real advantage to human beings. The most amazing thing about the Northwoods Ecology Hall, and indeed the Northwoods themselves, is that people care. People all have their own stories about nature and are desperate to share them; the best I’ve heard so far was a lady who had mistaken the blood curdling call of the Screech Owl with a gruesome murder in the woods. She had called the police and they, also confused, ran in fully armed to investigate only to be left staring at a rather confused and put out raptor.
This passion and stories like that of Brinkley, Arkansas speak to a deep-rooted love or at least interest in nature that I think everyone shares. It’s why whenever we lose another panda or another vaquita, or when Sir David Attenborough starts yet another series in some far-flung corner of the globe, we all sit up and take note.
Do Bears Sleep All Winter? 
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