Things changing everywhere...

[reuben_j_cogburn]

This isn't about the Wuhan virus.......
It's about how things have changed on a biological scale in my neck of the woods and in Alaska in general...
Several years ago the spruce bark beetles came through, devastating the the mature white spruce tree's. 90+ percent of the mature tree's are dead.. (black spruce seem unaffected)... The beetles seem to not like young spruce... The sap maybe?
This has decreased the mast significantly.... A few years ago I could shoot all the trapping bait (pine squirrels), I needed and not leave the front step of the cabin..
I shot one last fall and have only seen one since then. The number of marten and ermine have crashed. I did not even bother to trap other than sets for river otter. My yard used to be filled with wood peckers.... now the tapping sound is as rare as the chatter of the squirrels.
About this time the arctic hair and snowshoe population started a down cycle.... Not unexpectedly I have noticed a decline in the number of coyote tracks... I have seen none up here on the flats. You can see tracks on the river where travel is easier, but I have only seen one coyote all winter.
This is the time I have for recreational hunting, as I am done hauling, but I can still travel.... But should I??
The only thing that will help the coyotes and wolves would be the moose die off which is going to be significant.... (I fear)..
I guess I'll just have to adjust along with everything else....
It kinda makes me sad.... but I am glad I am here to see it.... And I am glad I actually care about it.. as opposed to people who live in apartments away from the real world, but somehow seem to know more about the environment than country folk...

Ciao y'all....
see ya this summer........ :wink:

 

[Rick Courtright]

Hi,

Well, I think most of us here know Mother Nature can be a tough mistress, but it's interesting to see how all of this stuff works in cycles. Glad you get to see it: as you mentioned, millions of people will never even see it in a video, let along face to face.

Stay warm and safe up there!

Rick C

 

[arfmel]

Hopefully you are safe and can stay safe from this nightmarish virus up there.

 

[turd]

Hopefully you are safe and can stay safe from this nightmarish virus up there.

It'll go away when it warms up. :mrgreen:

 

[Bear Paw Jack]

Reuben, asked me to answer questions that come up. I'm very familiar with his area. Most of the year Reuben lives away from the general population in a bush cabin by himself. Very little risk of the virus effecting him.

 

[Don Lovel]

I hunted Elk in an area in Colorado devastated by beetle kill. It made me so sad every day to see how far reaching the devastation was and how mad I am that the USFS and Dept of Interior did a crap sorry job of managing it. They could have harvested a lot of the pine, Technology and big tree harvesting equipment would have done a great job, but environmental regulations kept anyone from doing anything. Now there are thousands of acres of standing fuel. The Sangre De Cristo fires last year burned quite a bit of dead timber.
Hunting sucked, game movement is screwed up as they are not using much of the dead timber

 

[Mobuck]

"USFS and Dept of Interior did a crap sorry job of managing it. They could have harvested a lot of the pine, Technology and big tree harvesting equipment would have done a great job, but environmental regulations kept anyone from doing anything."

Don, I saw quite bit of that when I was in Colorado in 2010. I wasn't allowed to even pick up dead stuff laying on the ground w/o a "permit" when there were thousands of dead trees going down in every wind storm. The environmental regulations prevented limited timber harvest to establish control lines that could have halted the beetle damage but now the bare burned areas are causing worse damage than the cutting that the regulations prevented.

There are many of us here on RF who live in the outdoors and utilize what Nature provides albeit in far different locations and ways. We see the effects of the oft-times misled workings of regulations imposed upon us by those misguided environmentalists who somehow feel they're the only ones who know anything.
Within 2 miles of where I now sit, there are 5 "wetlands" (duck swamps, mosquito breeding grounds) on land some of which Dad farmed in 1955 and some of which I farmed 20 years later. Supposedly, this is "re-established wetlands" but it hasn't been swamp land since 1933 when CCC straightened the creek limiting the flooding. At this point, the land will not ever be financially viable farmland again. The landowners receive a windfall at taxpayers' expense. To what gain? For a few duck and goose hunters it's great but for the most part it's just a cesspool of diseases brought in by migrating water birds.

 

[bobski]

either you live in dead elements,(building products) or you watch it die around you....(fresh cabin in the woods.)

no matter which you choose, we die all the time. enjoy what ya got while ya can.

 

[gunzo]

While not on as big a scale of course, the Ash borer beetle has killed every single Ash tree in my area & I assume the state. I knew I had quite a few Ash trees on my little farm, but had no idea as to how many.
A satellite view of my place when it was in summer green shows the dead. Those & some American Wild Cherry were my best trees & something hurt them as well.

On a side note, I've sen some blight resistant Chestnut trees that a naturist planted on a farm decades ago & they are now mature. This was a treat as I had never seen one in my area.
They began being killed in 1904 when a fungus was brought in from Japan. The ash borer came from N.E. Asia.

Seems we get a LOT of things from Asia. :shock:

 

[Bear Paw Jack]

I moved to Alaska in January 1981 and the whole time I was there, we talked about the beetles and risks of fire. To this day I have absolutely no use for environmentalists who would let them go in and harvest the wood before it started to rot. They needed to deal with the fire risk, but environmentalists would sue every time it came up. They have put many home at risk along with most of the wildlife. I have no problem if they are in the middle of things when the fires start.