The northern section of this mountain chain is called the “Eastern Arc,” stretching from the Taita Hills in southern Kenya, through the Pare, Usambara, and Udzungwa Mountains of Tanzania.  Similar mountains reach across Malawi from north to south.  These East African mountains are a Galapagos of speciation and evolution, each range a biodiversity “hotspot” from the point of view of unique, endemic species – those found  nowhere else on Earth.  Scientists believe that the forests cloaking these scattered ranges have existed here for over 30 million years, and were once connected to the forests of the Congo Basin and West Africa. As climate changes washed across Africa, these ranges acted as islands in a sea of alternating drier and wetter climates.  In wetter periods, forests spread across the lowlands and connected species living in the mountain forest islands. When the climate dried the forests shrank back to their moist mountain refuges and populations of species that had once interbred became genetically isolated. Many of these mountains support a unique type of high-altitude grassland and heathland in their higher elevations.

Western face of Mulanje Mountain from the road between Blantyre and Mulanje

Mulanje Mountain is one of these mountain islands, rising in a bend of southeastern Malawi with Mozambique to the south and east. We were visiting the Mulanje area because one of the two USAID-funded projects we were evaluating works in communities bordering the Mulanje Mountain Forest Reserve. The Forest Reserve was proclaimed in 1927 by colonial authorities, and its protected area status has been maintained after independence. The project is called MOBILISE – Mountain Biodiversity Increases Livelihood Security, an it is being implemented by a Malawian NGO, the Mulanje Mountain Conservation Trust.

Storm clouds over Mulanje Mountain seen from Mulanje town

Like other East African mountains, Mulanje has its share of species found nowhere else.  Perhaps the most notable is the Mulanje Cypress, Widdringtonia whytei, which was declared the national tree of Malawi by the country’s first president, Hastings  Kamuzu Banda.  Often called the “Mulanje Cedar” by people in the area, this species is a member of the plant family Cupressaceae, the cypresses, to which redwoods, junipers, and cedars also belong.  The Mulanje Cypress is one of four species of “African cypresses,” all restricted to the eastern and southern Afromontane, and it is very closely related to Widdringtonia nodiflora, the Mountain Cypress, which is also found on Mount Mulanje.  Its closest relatives other than Widdringtonias are the Alcerce, Fitzroya cupressoides, of the Andes of Argentina and Chile, and Diselma archeri of Tasmania.  The biogeography of these trees shows clearly that they have been riding the mountains of the wandering fragments of Gondwana, the great southern mega-continent, since it broke apart about 200 million years ago.

Mulanje Cypress, Widdringtonia whytei (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

Despite is ancient pedigree and Gondwanan survivor status, the survival of the Mulanje Cypress is now threatened because of a combination of its unique and valuable wood, its relatively small population restricted to Mulanje Mountain, and its finicky reproductive ecology.  It is listed as “endangered” on the IUCN Red List.  It’s wood is straight-grained and resinous, easy to work, and resistant to water, insect damage, and rot.  It is, or was, in high demand for building fishing boats on Lake Chilwa, not far to the north, and even on Lake Malawi.  Mulanje Cypress loggers,  operating at first legally under permits from the Forest Department, and now mostly illegally, have cut the large old trees in the cypress groves on the mountain.  The first assessment of the status of Mulanje Cypress since 1994 was conducted by the Mulanje Mountain Conservation Trust a few years ago.  The study found that cypress stands currently cover an area of approximately 850 hectares, and that about 600 hectares had been lost only in the last 15 years, a decrease of around 40% in that short time.

Mulanje Mountain Conservation Trust sign, Mulanje town

At the lodge where we stayed on the flank of the mountain above Mulanje town, a craftsman was selling hand-carved boxes made of cypress wood.  He buys the wood from the Forest Department, he said, when they auction it periodically after confiscating it from the illegal cutters. The craftsmanship of the boxes was beautiful; the smell of the wood was heavenly.

Mulanje Cypress boxes at a handicraft stand at Kara O’Mula Lodge, Mulanje

Ecologically, the Mulanje Cypress maintains itself in a delicate relationship with fire.  Paradoxically, this fire sensitive tree needs periodic fires at long intervals to enable it to become established and compete against other evergreen forest trees. Its seedlings germinate and grow best in recently burned areas, and don’t tolerate shading – but they are killed by fires.  If fires are too frequent, not enough young trees survive to replace the old ones that are cut or die; if fires are too infrequent, baby Widdringtonia  whytei can’t make it.  The ideal fire frequency for the Mulanje Cypress seems to be once every few hundred years.  Conservation scientists working with the Mulanje Mountain Conservation Trust are trying to understand this delicate fire ecology so it can be mimicked and used in conservation of the cypress groves on the mountain. The rapidly increasing human population around the base of the mountain has increased the frequency of fires that spread to high elevations where the cypresses grow. Firebreaks on the mountain may help; controlled burning may help; outplanting of seedlings grown in nurseries may help.

Mulanje Cycad, Encephalartos gratus, in its natural habitat in the Likhubula Valley, Mount Mulanje (Photo courtesy of Hermann Staude)

Another endemic species, the Mulanje Cycad, Encephalartos gratus, is severely threatened by distruction of its natural habitat in the foothills of Mulanje Mountain. A recent study discovered that the also-endemic Mulanje Tiger Moth feeds only on this cycad. The moth and cycad are bound in a coevolutionary dance with extinction in their small remnant habitat here. The fate of both species depends on conserving the cycad. Mulanje Mountain Conservation Trust is growing cycads by the hundreds – they are easy to grow from seed – for outplanting by anyone who wants them.

Mulanje Cycad seedlings in the nursery at Mulanje Mountain Conservation Trust

The striking Mulanje Tiger Moth echoes the colors of the Monarch butterfly of my own home continent, their bright orange-and-black “tiger” coloration a warning to potential predators to think twice and stay away.  The Monarch backs up its warning colors with a body full of toxic glycosides that it gets from its larval host plants, milkweeds.  It turns out that the Mulanje Tiger Moth also stores away glycosides from the cycad to enforce its warning coloration. When I try to think about the meaning of this amazing case of convergent coevolution, my head just starts spinning.

Mulanje Tiger Moth, Callioratis grandis (Photo courtesy of Julian Bayliss)

Two tree species besides the Mulanje Cypress are apparently endemic to Mount Mulanje, as are a chameleon, two geckos, a rodent, and three butterfly species.  But the poor local communities living around Mulanje Mountain don’t have the luxury of worrying about the global value of the unique biodiversity of this place, which so captures the interest of well-off conservationists living on other continents.  The mountain is far more important to these local residents as the source of ecosystem products and services than as a global biodiversity “hotspot.”

Children, Sathawa Village, Mulanje District

In an era of climate change, the hydrological services provide by the biodiverse grasslands and forests on the mountain are especially valuable and important.  Mount Mulanje is a “watertower” rising above the woodlands and plains, feeding the rivers that nourish the farming villages below. On a day when we drove around the southern flank of the mountain in the rain, waterfalls were pouring off it everywhere.  In the thirsty, dusty dry season, the permanent streams flowing from the mountain are the lifeblood of these communities on its flanks.

View of Mulanje Mountain looking north from the Lujeri Tea Estate

But how do we connect the cypress, the cycad, the moth, and the other endemic species with these essential ecosystem products and services that local people recognize and value?  This is the big question. The unique, endemic biodiversity of Mulanje Mountain is the source of is waterfalls and rivers. All those leaves, those plants, those ecological communities, coevolved from their hundreds-of-millions-of-years evolutionary journey together, are the source of the wood, the fruits, the mushrooms, and the water that local people depend on.

The bright-faced children. The cypresses, the cycads, and the moths.  All of them are part of the same “village.”  Can these various villagers coevolve their way to a shared future?  This is the big question for me right now.

Double rainbow looking south to Mount Chiperone in Mozambique, a sister mountain-island, from Kara O’Mula Lodge above Mulanje town

For more photos of Malawi, visit the Gallery page.

For an earlier story about the Udzungwa Mountains, Tanzania, read Tanzania’s Udzungwa Mountains and Kilombero Wetlands.

For earlier stories about monarch butterflies, read Field of Dreams of Monarchs and A Pilgrimage to the Monarch Butterfly Overwintering Refuges in Michoacán, México.

Related links:

• Eastern Afromontane Biodiversity “Hotspot,” Conservation International
• Monitoring and Managing Biodiversity Loss in South-East Africa’s Montane Ecosystems
• USAID-Malawi MOBILISE Project
• Saving the Island in the Sky: the plight of the Mount Mulanje cedar Widdringtonia whytei in Malawi. Julian Bayliss, et al., 2007
• An ecological study of the relationship between two living fossils in Malawi: the Mulanje Tiger Moth (Callioratis grandis) and the Mulanje Cycad (Encephalartos gratus), Julian Bayliss, et al., 2009.

Western face of Mount Mulanje from the road between Blantyre and Mulanje town

April 2013. Mount Mulanje rises like an island above the rolling landscape southeast of Blantyre in southeastern Malawi. By examining images taken by the French SPOT 5 Earth-observation satellite, the Malawian team I was working with on an evaluation of USAID-funded biodiversity conservation projects had identified a pair of contrasting villages on the northern end of the massif, bordering the Mount Mulanje Forest Reserve. On a SPOT image taken from over 800 kilometers in space, but with a resolution of ten meters or less that could show individual trees, a sharp boundary could clearly be seen between the deep red, rough texture of trees in the forest reserve and the paler colors indicating cropland around the village of Nantali. To the south, around the corner of the mountain, the village of Naligula was located almost the same distance from the boundary of the forest reserve, but there a weaker red color and smoother texture indicated degraded woodland above the village in the reserve. Woodland degradation could also be seen on the SPOT image to the east of Nantali, above the village of Urolo. Our plan was to go to these villages to try to understand the causes of these differences in behavior toward woodlands that can be seen from space.

SPOT 5 image of the northern section of the Mount Mulanje Forest Reserve

We drove to Nalingula Village on the main gravel road heading north from the dusty district capital of Phalombe on a warm, sunny morning. Where we parked, a giant pile of bricks stood beside the road. The beautiful red local bricks used in house construction here are fired in wood-fueled kilns. It takes a lot of wood to fire a pile of bricks that big, and we had seen many other piles like it on the road from Phalombe. The condition of the woodland on the mountainside above the village told the story of intensive wood harvesting only too clearly, confirming the interpretation of the satellite image. There were almost no large trees for several kilometers up the slope into the forest reserve.

Looking east toward the Forest Reserve from Nalingula Village

In the village a small group was expecting us. They were members of a community-based organization called “Hope for Life.” There were more women than men in the group, and their leader was an enthusiastic woman. The conversation veered between English and Chichewa; the chairwoman spoke good English. The cause of the deforestation in the protected area above Nalingula, they said, was mainly charcoal making, but also firewood cutting, timber sawing, and cutting wood for brick-kilning. Some of these products sold to urban markets like Phalombe, Mulanje, and even Blantyre and Zomba. They knew the people who were making charcoal and cutting and selling wood illegally, and they had reported them to authorities in the past, they told us. But those people were never stopped, and the cutting went on. We wondered whether that was because some of those making money from the illegal activities were Forest Department staff or traditional authorities themselves.

Our hosts from Nalingula Village, members of the community-based organization “Hope for Life” at the boundary of the Mount Mulanje Forest Reserve

After they had explained the story behind the situation, we set out uphill at a brisk pace through the village fields toward the mountain. We wanted to “ground truth” the satellite image up close, with our own eyes. The subsistence farming system here was diverse and sophisticated, with intercropping of many traditional African crops: sorghum, millet, pigeon peas, chickpeas, groundnuts, cassava, maize, bananas, mangos, and papayas. As we went higher and the slope got steeper, the fields became pockets of dry soil between granite rocks and boulders, with stunted maize and pigeon peas that didn’t really look like their yield would be worth the effort of cultivation. Food pressure here must be intense to press farmers onto marginal land like this. The hardscrabble fields stretched right up to the boundary of the forest reserve, which was marked by a narrow path, above which was a wall of thatching grass taller than a person. Here our guides paused for a photo before leading us into the reserve.

Members of “Hope for Life” who accompanied us into the Forest Reserve resting at our turnaround point beside a small stream

At least the crop fields didn’t extend beyond the boundary line as we proceeded up into the reserve, and all around us now we could see native miombo woodland trees resprouting from stumps and roots. We rested and turned around at a small stream after walking into the reserve for half a kilometer. Above us all the trees had been cut for as far as we could see. But all around us they were making a comeback, resprouting, a revolution against the cutting and charcoal making.

Natural resprouting of cutover miombo woodland inside the Forest Reserve above Nalingula Village

After descending again from the cut over but regenerating woodland above Nalingula, we said goodbye to our hosts from the “Hope for Life” group, and as we drove north to their sister village of Nantali our heads were swirling with questions. We stopped in a thronged trading center on the main road and bought cold Cokes at a small shop before proceeding on to Nantali Village on a rough dirt track toward the mountain. Again we were greeted by a group who had been expecting us, alerted by cell phone by our hosts from the MOBILISE Project, the USAID-funded project whose activities we were evaluating here. MOBILISE, which stands for “Mountain Biodiversity Increases Livelihood Security,” is being implemented by the Mount Mulanje Conservation Trust (MMCT).

Village Headwoman, Nantali Village

As usual, we sat and talked in the shade of a big tree. The head of the village here was a woman, and her leadership, backed up by that of the headman of the local group of villages, and the even-more-powerful traditional leader, the chief or “traditional authority,” had protected the woodlands in the Forest Reserve above the village since 2008, they told us. At that time, a wave of charcoal-making was sweeping into the area from the Urolo area to the northeast, threatening to clear the trees above them. They resisted, and chased away the charcoal-burners. Those same charcoal-makers may be some of the ones who moved on to Nalingula, where we had just seen the results.

Among other questions, we asked these people where their water came from, reminded by a tap that was frequently in use not far from where we were holding our meeting under the tree. It comes from an intake on a stream inside the Forest Reserve above the neighboring village of Urolo, they said, and is gravity-fed here to the village. The trouble is, they told us, Urolo did not resist the charcoal-makers, and the forest within the protected area was cut. Nantali’s water supply dam and intake is now threatened by floods and siltation from the deforested area upstream.

Community water tap, Nantali Village

We again wanted to see the Forest Reserve boundary on the ground, so again we set out for a hike of a kilometer or so up through village fields and houses. The sharp line of big old miombo woodland trees was striking, and for a few hundred meters below the boundary, above the village fields, we were again in a zone of resprouting woodland trees.

Mature miombo in Forest Reserve above Nantali Village

Sharp line of the Forest Reserve boundary above Nantali, resprouting miombo in foreground

After lingering awhile in the old woodland, we descended to the village. We said our goodbyes, again pondering these contrasting situations. What had we seen, and what did it mean? In one case a village, led by a woman, in which the traditional authorities and values had protected natural woodland near the village. In another village, a rebellious community-based organization, led and dominated by women, struggling against traditional leadership that we suspected is involved in an illegal and corrupt economic relationship with forest guards and charcoal makers that had managed to cut all the natural woodland close to the village.

A few days later we had a chance to talk to people in Mphalamando Village, in the Nkhotakota District, in central Malawi. Their village is less than a kilometer from the boundary of the Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve, on the eastern side, not far from the shores of Lake Malawi. We heard a fascinating tale of how gender issues led to village-level forest conservation. In 2008, they said, they finally decided to set up a village forest area, and allow native woodland to regenerate on village land. The reason was that for years village woman had been caught gathering firewood and other woodland products inside the Wildlife Reserve by guards from the Department of National Parks and Wildlife, and they had been abused in one way or another. Finally, when they were beaten, and dropped on the road 30 kilometers away and made to walk home, the community decided that was the last straw. In order to protect their women from being subjected to that abuse, they decided to restore the woodland that was the source of those products. With the consent of the chief, the support of the Kulera Project, and help from the Department of Forestry, they have made a part of their village land a designated “Village Forest Area.” Thanks to the resilient miombo biodiversity, it is rapidly becoming a source of wood, mushrooms, wild fruits, traditional medicines, and other products once again. It is also providing ecosystem services, including allowing water to infiltrate the ground during the rainy season, feeding the water table that is tapped by village wells during the dry season.

Village meeting in Mphalamando Village

Natural regeneration of woodland in the Mphalamando Village Forest Area

A pattern, and a hypothesis, seemed to emerge from these village visits. It is women who gather firewood, cook food, fetch water. They also gather mushrooms, wild fruits, and often traditional medicines. Women’s traditional roles in supporting their families put them on the front lines of contact with the ecosystem products and services they depend on. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that women in these traditional villages are also on the frontlines of defending the natural forests from which they derive these essential livelihood resources. Maybe projects that seek to conserve biodiversity should recognize that women are likely to be allies and supporters, and make special efforts to work with and empower them.

For background on the evaluation of USAID-Malawi biodiversity conservation projects in which the village visits described here were made, see: “Restoring Miombo Woodlands for Village Development in Malawi”

For more photos of Malawi see: Malawi Biodiversity Projects Evaluation March-April 2013

Related links:

• USAID-Malawi MOBILISE Project
• Total Land Care

Matupi Village with foothills of Nyika National Park in the background

Matupi sits on a ridge above a small river flowing out of the national park, and we could hear its rapids rushing in the gentle valley below. On the other side of the river a few fields and houses scattered up the slope, and a distinct line in the vegetation marked the boundary of the national park, about a kilometer from where we stood. Above the line was woodland, thick and relatively intact; below it the trees were shorter, smaller, thinner. Apparently the boundary had been more or less respected here, and crop fields had not even pushed up to the edge of the park.

Foothills of Nyika National Park from Matupi; line between thinned woodland in forground and protected woodland indicates park boundary

We were visiting communities in the border zone of the park that have been supported by a USAID-funded project called “Kulera,” which in Chichewa, the main indigenous language of Malawi, means “to look after” or “to nurture.” The Kulera Project has been implemented by Total Land Care, a Malawi-based non-governmental organization supporting rural development, along with other partners, since 2010. Its goal is to protect biodiversity through providing biodiversity-friendly livelihood opportunities, and by supporting processes through which villages in the border zones of protected areas can “co-manage” and harvest certain natural resources just inside the protected areas.

The purpose of our visits was to evaluate, for USAID-Malawi, whether the Kulera Project had been successful in achieving its goal of conserving woodlands and their biodiversity on the borders of several protected areas in central and northern Malawi, including Nyika National Park. Our evaluation team was organized and contracted by ECODIT, a US consulting firm, and included team members from the Centre for Development Management (CDM), a small Malawian consulting firm based in Lilongwe.

We wanted to understand what worked and what didn’t, the successes as well as the failures. Our basic evaluation philosophy was that conserving biodiversity and promoting sustainable development is a “work in progress,” and a “moving target.” No one really knows how to influence the trajectory of complex social-ecological systems – such as these rural communities in Malawi. “Development” and “conservation” are all a big, high-stakes experiment, and by studying and evaluating them we may be able to learn something, and become more effective.

A huge expanse of woodlands sprawls across eleven countries of southern Africa, including all of Malawi. Adapted to a climate that is dry for around half the year, and wet and warm for the other half, these woodlands, called “miombo,” range from nearly closed-canopy forests in wetter areas to open wooded savannas with an understory of tall grass in drier areas. Broad-leaved deciduous trees of the legume subfamily Caesalpinioideae are the dominant vegetation in the miombo. In the dry season the leafless trees are grey skeletons with an understory of tawny grass. In the wet season they are lush and green. Miombo trees are adapted to browsing by elephants, and to fires started by lightning or humans, and they are tough and resilient. Many species sprout from roots or stumps if they are broken or burned.

Mature miombo woodland in Nyika National Park

In evaluating the success of the Kulera Project we needed information about the condition of miombo woodlands near villages where the project had been working. Had they been cleared for agriculture, or degraded by tree-cutting for fuelwood, charcoal-making, and construction materials? Had they been recovering due to protection and natural regeneration? We turned to high-resolution, false-color images from the French SPOT 5 satellite, and the remote sensing and GIS specialist working with our team scrutinized SPOT images showing the border zones of all the protected areas where the Kulera Project was working. It was her sleuthing that had led us to Matupi Village.

SPOT 5 image showing Matupi Village surrounded by cultivation, the national park to the east with intact miombo, and well-protected woodland on village land to the west of the village

On these SPOT images, healthy, intact miombo woodland shows up as a textured solid red, indicating lots of structure, leaves, green, and photosynthesis. Crop fields show up as a pale green. On the image around Matupi, the well-respected boundary of the national park was clear, although a few pockets of encroaching agriculture could be seen penetrating into the park. But more striking was that to the west of Matupi on the opposite side of the village from the park, on “customary” land owned and managed by the traditional authorities – the chiefs and village heads – was an area of woodland that from space looked as healthy and intact as the miombo in the park.

We sat in the shade of a big tree and quizzed the Village Headman of Matupi about the situation. A long time ago, a couple of decades at least, he said, the traditional leader of the area saw that people were not “respecting” the woodlands on village land, and they were becoming degraded. So in order to protect all of their values to the village, he began to “protect” them. Here, then, the Kulera Project started working in 2010 in a village that was already conserving its woodlands, and more or less respecting the boundaries of the national park. All the project had to do here was support the traditional leadership and assist an ongoing, grassroots process of conservation.

We visited another village to the northeast of Matupi, called Nkhamayamaji. There, in about 1998, a traditional leader persuaded people to stop cutting trees and allow natural regeneration to take place on the hill above the village, between it and the border of Nyika National Park about five kilometers away. When they weren’t cut and hacked so frequently, the resiliant miombo trees came sprouting back from roots and stumps, and now the hill above Nkhamayamaji is a young woodland with trees up to 20 feet tall and six inches or more in diameter.

Men of Nkhamayamaji Village with regenerating village woodland above them

Before, when the slope was mostly bare, said the village chairman, water would rush down the hill slope into the village, carrying sediment, cutting gullies in fields, washing out huts. Now that doesn’t happen, he said – the water soaks into the woodland on the hill, and fills up the wells down in the village later.

One reason the villagers were persuaded to protect the woodland above Nkhamayamaji, he said, was because of all the wild products they could get from it without having to go into the national park. He mentioned firewood, thatching grass, poles for building houses and tobacco-drying sheds, mushrooms, wild fruits, traditional medicines, and mice and termites for food.

Natural regeneration of woodland protected by Nkhamayamaji Village since 1998

Another miombo “product” is honey. The honeybee, Apis mellifera, is native to the miombo woodlands of southern Africa. It evolved to harvest the pollen and nectar of the multitude of miombo trees that flower. Humans, honeyguides, and honey badgers are some of the species that have coevolved with honeybees in the miombo woodlands. Because of help from the Kulera Project, and previous projects as well, most of the villages we visited had some beekeepers. They place their hives in the mature and regenerating woodlands, reaping a sweet harvest at the risk of some painful stings. Most hives we saw were a modern version of the old, traditional log or bark hives. Some people still gather honey in the traditional way, however, chopping down large trees with honeybee colonies in them, and setting fires to chase away the bees with smoke – a very destructive way to get a bit of honey.

Beehive in miombo

One aspect of the adaptation of miombo woodlands to the periodic disturbance of elephant browsing and fires is that many woody miombo species store a larger proportion of their biomass underground – where it is protected from those disturbances – than would a rainforest or a temperate forest, for example. Because there is a lot of biomass underground, the miombo is extremely rich in fungi – mushrooms – which thrive on that underground carbon-rich food source, often through symbiotic associations with miombo trees. Villagers in Malawi – usually women – gather mushrooms for domestic consumption and for sale. At the end of the rainy season it is common to see them selling bowls of bright orange miombo chanterelles along the roadsides in areas with intact woodland.

Miombo chanterelles for sale by the road

Nkhamayamaji, like Matupi, had started its miombo woodland conservation through traditional, grassroots efforts long before the Kulera Project began in 2010. What Kulera has done is to recognize these successful models of woodland regeneration, and to spread the word, in part by bringing representatives from nearby villages to see what is happening in places like Nkhamayamaji. They have supported the planting of fast growing trees such as Senna siamea in villages, to take some of the pressure off of the native woodlands for construction materials. And Kulera has introduced a new, efficient cookstove design that uses about half as much firewood as the traditional three-stone cooking fire, also reducing pressure on the miombo woodlands both inside of protected areas and on customary village lands.

For more photos of Malawi see: Malawi Biodiversity Projects Evaluation March-April 2013

Related Links:

• Centre for Development Management (CDM)
• ECODIT
• Total Land Care
• Conserving the Miombo Ecoregion. B. Byers. 2001
• Miombo Ecoregion Vision Report. J. Timberlake and E. Chidumayo. 2011
• Ecology and Management of Commercially Harvested Chanterelle Mushrooms

Isaías Cófre on “Muir’s Ridge”

The forest surrounding the Muir campsite today is a thriving, multi-aged stand of Araucaria araucana, in contrast to the open forest of old trees in his sketches. We assume that Muir was sketching what he saw as accurately as he could, and that the young trees that now make it impossible to see the exact views he sketched were not there a century ago. To confirm this, we needed to do some limited tree-coring of young Araucaria, count the growth rings to determine their ages, and confirm that they were not much more than tiny babies a hundred years ago. Our colleague Mauro González, a forest ecologist from the Universidad Austral de Chile in Valdivia, will be processing the core samples and determining ages of these trees. Mauro is an expert on the dynamics and fire history of Araucaria forests, and has a permit from CONAF, the Chilean government forest agency, to core Araucaria for research purposes.

Muir’s sketches made near camp on the morning of 21 November, 1911, showing in the main sketch a group of five big old umbrella-form Araucaria and an open forest understory

Photo taken from approximately 100 meters up the slope to the south of the campsite, showing the “Big Five” umbrella-form Araucaria that were visible in Muir’s sketch, and the dense understory of young Araucaria that exists now.

Isaías and Bruce looking for the view in Muir’s sketch (Photo by J. Byers)

Jonathan coring a young Araucaria in the “view-shed” of the Muir sketch

Core being inserted into a labelled plastic straw for protection

Another view of Araucaria sketched near Muir’s camp on 21 November, 1911

Possibly the same tree sketched by Muir, showing dense regrowth of young Araucaria in the foreground

Dense carpet of Araucaria seedlings at the campsite

The dramatic regrowth of the Arauraria forest in the century since Muir’s visit reflects a significant reduction in the frequency of fires. Fire is known to be the major determinant of forest dynamics in Araucaria forests. In the century before Muir’s visit, fires were probably much more common, set by Mapuches and colonists alike to improve hunting, facilitate travel, and stimulate grasses for livestock grazing. Frequent fires would have killed most young Araucaria, creating an open stand of mostly old, fire-resistent trees like that seen in Muir’s sketches.

Arrowheads found by Isaías near the campsite

While we were taking cores from some young trees, Isaías was exploring around the campsite. In an eroded area of bare soil about 100 meters to the southwest he found lots of pottery fragments and two stone arrowheads. The potsherds had features very similar to those in collections of Mapuche pottery in the Museo Regional de la Araucania in Temuco and other museums that date from the period between 1000-1500 AD. The broken handles of cups or vessels, and some pieces with thin, red painted lines, were distinctive. This area has obviously been used by native peoples from pre-Colombian times, probably as a site for gathering Araucaria seeds, “piñones,” which were an important food for those people.

Mapuche pottery at the Museo Histórico y Antropológico, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, with features similar to those of pottery fragments at the Muir site

We had a deep feeling of the layers of ecological and human history in our visits to this place that John Muir visited. The big Araucaria he sketched may be a thousand years old, and arrowheads and potsherds that may be a thousand years old litter the ground. People and trees have been linked in a relationship here, the trees feeding the people, the fires set by the people shaping the forest. Muir’s sketches recorded a snapshot of that dynamic relationship, and our visits gave a time-lapse view of ecological and human changes in this place.

More photos of our 2013 trip to Chile

Related links:

• John Muir Papers, University of the Pacific
• Fire and Araucaria forest dynamics

On the left is Sierra Nevada, and on the right is Volcán Llaima, which Muir labelled correctly.

Sierra Nevada and Llaima from the old Smith fundo at Ontario.

We then went to the other side of the gentle ridge, giving a view to the north and west.  From here, except for some big trees blocking parts of the view, we could see the views shown in three of Muir’s connected, panoramic sketches: Volcán Tolhuaca and Lonquimay to the east; the lower broken country of ridges, mesas, and peaks that Muir labelled the “Araucaria region” to the northeast; and Volcán Callaqui to the north.

Muir got the names of both of the peaks in this sketch wrong: on the left is Volcán Tolhuaca, and on the right is Lonquimay.

View of Volcán Tolhuaca and Lonquimay from Ontario

Sketch of the horizon to NE of the Smith ranch at Ontario, connecting to the left of the sketch of Tolhuaca and Lonquimay above in a panorama.

The photo below shows the view from fields a mile or so from Ontario today.  The rugged low peak in the center of the sketch, above which Muir wrote “Araucaria region” is Cerro las Cabras, to the south of Laguna Malleco in Tolhuaca National Park.

Ontario sits on the gentle ridge between the Río Quino to the south, and Río Traguën to the north.  Muir, Philip Smith, and their companions camped at the headwaters of the Río Quino in the Araucaria grove. Following the ridge up from Ontario would lead exactly to the meadow above Laguna Malleco from which Muir sketched the slope of the valley to the NE, and then climbed up the steep ridge to the south that they could see was “fringed with the long sought for Araucaria.”  Muir and his hosts must have ridden for half a day to that point, after an early start from Ontario.  Google Earth puts the distance at about 15 miles, a good long ride, but possible.

Making our way from Ontario through commercial timber plantations toward Laguna Malleco with the help of Google Maps and I-Phone, roughly on the route the Muir party rode. Volcán Tolhuaca and Lonquimay on horizon to the east.

View looking NE from rocky hill called “La Reina” at the S-curve on the road before it drops down to Laguna Malleco and the headquarters of Parque Nacional Tolhuaca.

In the photo above, Cerro Amarillo is the peak 1/4 of the way along the skyline from left; it can be seen above the ridge in Muir’s sketch below. Cerro las Cabras is the peak on the right skyline; it is clearly shown in Muir’s sketch from the Smith “fundo” at Ontario, above.  On that sketch, he wrote “Araucaria region” above Cerro las Cabras and the broken country near it.

Muir’s sketch of the ridge to the NE of what he labels as “Big mdow [meadow] above Lake.”

View of the Mesacura Ridge looking NE from La Reina, showing the features Muir sketched, including the peak called Cerro Amarillo, 2/3 of the way from the left on the skyline.

On the same page of his journal as the sketch of the Mesacura Ridge above, the text wrapping around the sketch, Muir wrote “Came in full sight of a ridge 1000 ft hi bordering the S. side of a glacier meadow top of which was fringed with the long sought for Araucaria.”

View of “Muir’s Ridge” looking south from the valley near Laguna Malleco showing “fringe” of Araucaria mentioned in journal (Photo by J. Byers)

The journal entry continues: “Long scramble up the steep grassy slope and brushy. 1 horse fell and rolled. Traced the ridge a mile or two admiring…

Views from Muir’s Ridge: top, looking north and down on Laguna Malleco; above, looking east to Cerro Amarillo.

“then descended long cane-covered S. slope to the bottom of another glacier meadow valley by the side of a brawling bouldery stream & encamped beneath an Araucaria grove. Ar. in scattered groups and fringing the horizon all around. A glorious and novel sight, beyond all I had hoped for. Yet I had so long dreamed of it, it seemed familiar.”

Isaías Cófre and Jonathan Byers descending the “long cane-covered S. slope” to the Muir campsite by the headwaters of the Río Quino.

A circular grove of old Araucaria about 10 meters from the stream, probable site of the Muir party’s camp on the night of 20 November, 2011. The ground was covered with a thick carpet of baby Araucaria seedlings.

More photos of our 2013 trip to Chile

Related links:

• John Muir Papers, University of the Pacific

Almost exactly a year ago my son and I followed clues in Muir’s sparse journal and sketches, obtained from the Muir historical archives, to reconstruct his route to the site on the slopes of a volcano in central Chile he visited a century ago. After a long search we found the area where he sketched and camped, on private land adjacent to Tolhuaca National Park.

Related Bruce Byers Article: Tracking John Muir to the Monkey Puzzle Forests of Chile (April 2012)

Although we finally located the Muir site last year, we only reached it once, and were only able to spend a couple of hours there. This year our goal was to learn more about the local people who helped him reach the place, confirm the details of his route, and begin to understand the ecological changes in the Araucaria forests since he saw them. Our sleuthing at the very end of our trip last year led us this year to the great-grandson of the man who organized Muir’s trip to the mountains. He was able to tell us exactly where his great-grandfather’s “fundo,” or ranch, had been, and so we finally knew exactly where Muir had sketched the volcanic peaks on the skyline in his journal, and started for the mountains at 6 AM on the foggy morning of November 20, 1911.

When he arrived in Santiago on November 11th, having taken the train from Buenos Aires for two days, Muir had no idea where to find Monkey Puzzle forests. As he usually did, he went to the Botanic Garden, now the Parque Quinta Normal, in which stood the Museo de la Historia Natural. Although the person he spoke with there had never seen Araucaria, and was no help in directing him where to go, he did give him a photograph of the trees, and on the back was written “Araucarias of Vulk. Tolhuaca,” abbreviating the German “vulkan,” volcano. German immigrants, including the director of the Natural History Museum, Federico Albert, dominated Chilean science in the days of Muir’s visit, although there is no evidence that Muir met Albert – also the founder of Chilean nature conservation – when he passed through Santiago.

In Santiago, Muir was told by an American contact, Mr. Rice, that “a Mr. Smith, a lumberman, owning several sawmills, and well acquainted with the forests to the southward, was the most likely man to direct me to the woods that I was in search of, and kindly telegraphed Mr. Smith to meet me at the train, at Victoria.” Victoria lies just to the west of Volcán Tolhuaca, and the note on the back of the photograph from the Botanic Garden must have been Muir’s reason for heading there.

So how were we going to find relatives of that Mr. Smith who might still living the area? Last year we started with the phone book for Victoria, and indeed found one Smith listed there – apparently a business, the listing was for “Smith y Riquelme Limitada,” at Avenida Confederación Suiza 1255. We went to that address, but it turned out to now be the office of the local senator from the area. They did know a “Mr. Smith,” however, a surgeon now living in Temuco; and they pointed down the street to the town plaza, where his sister, Marisol Smith, owned a pastry shop. We dropped by the Confiteria Central, ordering cake and cappuccino, and tried to call her many times, but never managed to talk to Marisol before our trip last year ended. This year, however, our Chilean colleague Aníbal Pauchard managed to talk to Marisol, and she recommended that we talk to her cousin, Harry Smith, who lived at a place called Niagara, east of Temuco. Harry was the one who could tell us the family history, she said.

And she was right. We met Aníbal on a Sunday afternoon, and drove out to Niagara. Harry greeted us warmly, speaking perfect English – his “mother tongue,” it turned out, since his mother was English – and invited us into his lovely old house, where he spread out old photos, letters, and journals, and told us all he could of the family history.

Harry Smith and his family photos (Photo by J. Byers)

Harry’s great-grandfather, Philip Smith, was the “Mr. Smith” who hosted Muir in Victoria and arranged his trip to the mountains. He first came to Chile in 1883 from Ontario, Canada, to install sawmills for the Waterous Engine Works. He liked the country, and stayed. He named his “fundo,” or what Muir called “the Smith ranch,” Ontario, and the name is still used on maps of the area.

Photo of Philip Smith (seated third from left) with his wife, Ann Walker, his nine children, and two of their spouses, made roughly in the era of Muir’s visit (Photo courtesy of Harry Smith)

Harry’s great-uncle Willy, Philip’s second son, was probably the son mentioned in Muir’s journal who drove him from Victoria to the fundo, “some fifteen miles from Victoria,” in a light buggy drawn by two horses. Harry’s great-uncle Willy lived at Ontario all his life, with his wife Elsie Reynolds, who finally left the fundo in 1947 after Willy died. Philip’s oldest son George, Harry’s grandfather, may have met Muir, but in 1911 he was just completing his own fundo at Niagara where Harry now lives.

Smith family photo of a two-horse buggy similar to the one that may have been used to take Muir from Victoria to Fundo Ontario (Photo courtesy of Harry Smith)

1886 advertisement for the steam-powered sawmills, manufactured by Waterous Engine Works of Brantford, Ontario, Canada, being installed in Chile by Philip Smith.

One wonders what Muir was thinking, hosted by a lumberman and sawmill salesman. In his journal he wrote: “Upon the whole I think I never passed through a finer forest of round-headed hardwood trees. But they are being rapidly destroyed. Only on a small scale can even New Zealand show equal tree desolation.” In a letter to Muir dated June 3rd, 1912, Philip Smith wrote: “We have had a beautiful Summer and our harvest on the farms has yealded satisfactorily, the lumber business also has kept firm, in fact the country has produced so much that our rail road has not been able to move the production as fast as we could wish.” Whatever he thought of the role of his gracious host, Philip Smith, in the devastation of the native forests of the area, Muir did not say in his journal.

Walking around the Fundo Niagara with Harry, we noticed many North American trees: sugar maple, honey locust, sycamore; a small botanic garden. Mr. Smith and his sons loved their trees, and brought their favorites from their home in Canada, even as they had come to Chile to cut down the native forests. But there was no maple syrup here, Harry told us – it never gets cold enough for long enough, and the sap never runs in the austral spring like it does in Canada. He had heard stories, passed down through four generations of the family, of making “sugar on snow”: you take hot maple sap boiled to the syrup stage, and throw it out on snow, where it turns to maple taffy. I told him I had done that in Vermont, and he was fascinated, imagining it.

Sugar maple, Fundo Niagara (Photo by J. Byers)

Now that we knew, from Harry that the “Smith ranch” was at Ontario, we found it on the map and drove there on a cloudless day, wending our way on bad back roads, following Google Maps on Jonathan’s I-phone.

Road to the Fundo Ontario (Photo by J. Byers)

Four men were sitting in the shade by a concrete foundation they were constructing. When we pulled up, they were at first wary. Where were we from? Why were we here? We told them our story, showed them Muir’s sketches, and said we were looking for the place near here where he drew them. One of the men took charge, and warmed up to us quickly when he found we were “extranjeros” from the U.S. and not Chilenos. He introduced himself as Marcelo Mila, a Mapuche, and “presidente” of the group of Mapuches who now live at Ontario. They have been here for ten or twelve years, he said. He offered so show us where you could see the views in the sketches, jumped in the back seat of our rented Toyota Urban Cruiser, and directed us off on a dusty road through fields of recently harvested wheat.

Marcelo Mila and Jonathan at Ontario

As nearly as we can connect the history between the Smith family and the Mila clan, it seems that when Willy Smith died, his wife Elsie eventually sold the land to a family named Binet in 1947. We guess that it was later purchased by CONADI, the Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena, the Chilean Government Indigenous Development Service, and then sold or given to the Mila family.

Marcelo first took us to a viewpoint looking southeast across an open field and down into the drainage of the Río Quino. This looked very close to the view of Sierra Nevada and Volcán Llaima in Muir’s sketch. We then went to the other side of the gentle ridge, giving a view to the north and east. From here, except for some big trees blocking parts of the view, we could see the views shown in three of Muir’s connected, panoramic sketches: Volcán Tolhuaca and Lonquimay to the east; the lower broken country of ridges, mesas, and peaks that Muir labelled the “Araucaria region” to the northeast; and Volcán Callaqui to the north.

On November 20th, 1911, Muir wrote “Foggy morn 6 o’clock packing for the lofty ridges where grows Araucaria imbricata… Our party consists of Mr. Smith, Mr. Williams, Mr. Hunter, myself, two Chilean packers, all well-mounted, well-clad, and provisioned.” Later, describing his search for the Monkey Puzzle forests to a friend in 1912, Muir said that the “Patagonian Indians” guided him there, and “treated him with great kindness.” Our guess is that the Chilean packers working for Philip Smith were Mapuches – Mapuches were skilled horsemen and cattlemen and it must have been common for colonists settling on their ancestral lands to employ them on their fundos. We found, a few days later, that at the site on the upper Río Quino where the Muir party camped under an Araucaria grove, the ground in some places was scattered with broken pottery and arrowheads, an archaeological site documenting long use by indigenous people.

Female cone, Araucaria araucana

At Ontario, we noticed a large field with a horseshoe of stick frames around it, and asked Marcelo about it. That is where we hold the Nguillatún ceremony every three years, he said. This is a sacred place; more than 1,500 Mapuches gather here for the ceremony, he told us. Marcelo said he was worried that the Chilean government was planning to carve a route for a planned giant powerline, the “Carretera Elétrica,” the “Electric Highway,” through this Mapuche land. The Electric Highway is supposed to carry power from new dams on the currently free-flowing rivers of southern Patagonia to the copper and lithium mines in the desert north, powering the flow of Chile’s mineral wealth to China and the rest of the world. It’s the latest version of Chile’s export-driven economy, something like the export of Chile’s native forest wealth in the late 1800s and early 1900s that enriched Philip Smith and his sons.

What are we to make of this, really?

Both of the men we met, Harry Smith and Marcelo Mila, are native sons of this beautiful place on Earth. Both were born here, neither chose where to be born, or to what mother and father. Both clearly love this place. It could well be that the great-grandfather of Marcelo Mila, a Mapuche now living at Ontario, was also one of the men who accompanied Muir to the Araucaria forests, along with Philip Smith, Harry’s great-grandfather. I enjoy imagining that scenario. It would “connect the dots” of the people who have lived on this land, who live here now, and who love it as their own no matter when their ancestors arrived.

Marcelo Mila (Photo by J. Byers)

More photos of our 2013 trip to Chile

Related links:

• John Muir Papers, University of the Pacific
• Waterous Engine Works sawmills
• Mapuche Nguillatún Ceremony
• Carretera Elétrica Chile
• Fundación Chol-Chol
• Suizandina Lodge, Malalcahuello, Chile

Sand washed across the beach road by Hurricane Sandy, Kill Devil Hills

But today was a glorious fall Saturday, with a deep blue sky and perfect Goldilocks temperatures: not too hot, not too cold. Most people don’t think of the Outer Banks as a biodiversity “hotspot,” but some rare and unusual creatures are found here, and our goal was to experience this unique biodiversity “up close and personal.”

Rare and endangered species of the Outer Banks, Nags Head

We parked at the trailhead of a network of trails at The Nature Conservancy’s Nags Head Woods Preserve, and set off. Nags Head Woods is situated in the middle of the northernmost, most developed, and most familiar, part of the Outer Banks. It backs against Albemarle Sound to the west, at a relatively wide part of the long and skinny barrier island. The woods cover old, now-stabilized dunes, and the topography of the old dunes creates dozens of depressions of varying sizes that collect water, forming ponds among the pine, oak, hickory, holly, and sweet gum. All the ponds were full after at least six inches of recent rain from Hurricane Sandy.

Sign at the trailhead, Nags Head Wood Preserve

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has worked with the local communities of Nags Head and Kill Devil Hills since 1977 to protect Nags Head Woods. About 1,400 acres of maritime forest and interdunal ponds are now part of preserve. More than 300 species of plants are found here, including several species that are rare in North Carolina, such as wooly beach heather (Hudsonia tomentosa), water violet (Hottonia inflata), mosquito fern (Azolla caroliniana), and a tiny orchid called the southern twayblade (Listera australis). Great names, don’t you think?

The trail led to a pond that was completely green, its surface totally covered with duckweed, a tiny floating aquatic plant in the genus Lemna, and I had a “flashback.” When I see the green of Lemna on a pond it always makes me think of what now seems like the long-forgotten era of concern about human population growth, resource use, limits to growth, and sustainable development – hot topics in the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, and now hardly mentioned or thought about, it seems.

Duckweed, Lemna species, completely covering a Nags Head Woods pond

In 1972, Donella and Dennis Meadows, in their book Limits to Growth, used the following story to illustrate the dangers of the exponential growth of population and use of natural resources that was occurring then – as it is still, now, today: “A French riddle for children illustrates another aspect of exponential growth–the apparent suddenness with which an exponentially growing quantity approaches a fixed limit. Suppose you own a pond on which a water lily in growing. The lily plant doubles in size each day. If the plant were allowed to grow unchecked, it would completely cover the pond in 30 days, choking off the other forms of life in the water. For a long time the lily plant seems small, so you decide not to worry about it until it covers half the pond. On what day will that be? On the twenty-ninth day. You have just one day to act to save your pond.” In 1978 Lester Brown, founder of Worldwatch Institute, used the “punch line” of this story for the title of his book, The Twenty Ninth Day.

Cover of The Twenty Ninth Day (1978) by Lester Brown, with photo of water lilies on a pond

In the late 1990s I was writing some curriculum materials about global human ecology and sustainable development for the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), a developer of cutting-edge high school textbooks in biology and ecology. My material was eventually included in “The Commons: An Environmental Dilemma,” released in 2001, and still available in a 2006 edition. I was searching for a dramatic way to illustrate exponential growth – an experiment or demonstration in which students in high school classrooms could observe the “Twenty Ninth Day” phenomenon. They couldn’t plant water lilies in a pond and observe them, but I thought they might be able to replicate similar exponential growth in their classrooms with duckweed. I collected some Lemna from a pond near my house, and a few jugs of nutrient-rich pond water, and tried to grow them in cups and bowls on the sunny countertop of my cramped, but sunny, kitchen. The “experiment” competed for space with cooking and dishwashing for more than a month.

I made careful observations and – a big surprise to me – the experiment worked. I translated the volumes of my bowls and cups to the metric measurements universally used by scientists. Here is how it was finally described in the text of “The Commons: An Environmental Dilemma”: “A scientist filled two beakers with pond water and labeled one “Beaker A” and the other “Beaker B.” Beaker A was four times larger than Beaker B. He placed 2 small floating duckweed plants in each beaker, and put the beakers in a sunny location, and allowed the plants to grow and reproduce for 39 days. Twice a week, he counted the number of plants in each beaker and recorded the information. At the end of the experiment, he had collected the data shown in the following table.”

My kitchen-counter duckweed experiment makes the big time in “The Commons: An Environmental Dilemma” (BSCS, 2001)

The activity guide for teachers suggested that they have their students plot the data from the two beakers on a graph, and discuss the results. When plotted, the data from Beaker A essentially show a classic “J-shaped” curve of exponential growth, with a doubling time of about seven days. Beaker B’s population growth curve shows the classic flattening out of the exponential “J-curve” into the “S-shaped” curve of logistic growth, beloved of population ecologists, as the “limits to growth” and “carrying capacity” in this much smaller beaker are reached. Honestly, I was amazed that duckweed was so cooperative, and the kitchen-counter experiment demonstration worked so well.

That memory was the source of my “flashback” when I saw the completely green, Lemna-covered pond at Nags Head Woods: it was a Thirtieth-Day Pond. Walking and passing ponds with varying coverage of Lemna, from zero to 100%, old questions came back. The Nags Head ponds got me pondering again the future of humans on Spaceship Earth. “Spaceship Earth” is another old image and phrase, this one reaching back even earlier, to a 1965 speech by Adlai Stevenson II, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, in which he said “We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent upon its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of man, half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.”

A blackwater pond with no duckweed at all, reflecting a glorious day at Nags Head Woods

Why, I wondered, are some ponds completely covered with green Lemna, while others have no Lemna at all? Those Lemna-less ponds have water stained almost black with tannins from decaying leaves and other organic material, and their still, black surfaces made them into perfect, beautiful mirrors of the surrounding woods and sky on this glorious fall day. Why are some ponds one-fourth covered in green, some one-half, and some three-quarters? Could it be their size? Depth? Amount of shade? None of these explanations seemed obvious. Maybe a passing duck landed on one, carrying a few Lemna on its feet to colonize it, but not its neighbor pond? Maybe a deer died in the mini-watershed of one pond, fertilizing it with nitrogen from its decaying body, and launching an exponential explosion of Lemna, while the neighbor pond struggled with lack of nutrients and stayed black, dominated by acidic leaf tannins? Was a black pond once a green pond? Or vice versa? Maybe… maybe… It’s easy to imagine a long list of “maybes” that might explain the diversity of Nags Head Woods ponds. Trying to figure out these patterns and explain them would be a challenge for multiple Ph.D. dissertations. At least here, TNC has preserved a natural laboratory for such research, should some student want to undertake it. Such places are rare, very rare, and therefore their scientific value is immense. On the resolution of these ecological questions may depend the survival of us all.

In a 2003 paper titled “Catastrophic Regime Shifts in Ecosystems: Linking Theory to Observation,” ecologists Martin Scheffer and Stephen Carpenter conclude that “Occasionally, surprisingly large shifts occur in ecosystems. Theory suggests that such shifts can be attributed to alternative stable states. Verifying this diagnosis is important because it implies a radically different view on management options, and on the potential effects of global change on such ecosystems. For instance, it implies that gradual changes in temperature or other factors might have little effect until a threshold is reached at which a large shift occurs that might be difficult to reverse.” Worrisome words for worry warts on Spaceship Earth. We humans seem to be pushing our planet toward thresholds of climate warming and extinction of species that might tip it, and us, off into the lifelessness of all of our neighbor planets – that is, of all the planets we know about.

Wildness on the Outer Banks

In a 2004 paper titled “Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social–Ecological Systems,” ecologists Brian Walker, C. S. Holling, Stephen Carpenter, and Ann Kinzig discuss the challenges of protecting Spaceship Earth in language that is the modern equivalent of the discussions of four decades ago: “Resilience (the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks) has four components—latitude, resistance, precariousness, and panarchy—most readily portrayed using the metaphor of a stability landscape.”

“Stability landscape” diagram from the Walker, et al., 2004 paper

The caption of this figure in their article reads: “Fig. 1a. Three-dimensional stability landscape with two basins of attraction showing, in one basin, the current position of the system and three aspects of resilience, L = latitude, R = resistance, Pr = precariousness.” This somewhat surreal figure made me think of a fine-scale topographic map of Nags Head Woods, with the depressions between the ancient dunes filled now with ponds. Green ponds, black ponds, in-between ponds…

Stability landscape? Where is the system now?

But we are back, after hiking full circle. Back to the car, by the green pond, the Thirtieth-Day Pond, completely covered by Lemna, next to the parking lot.

Duckweed-covered pond, Nags Head Woods Preserve

Looking at the preserve sign again, something new jumped out, the quotation from Henry David Thoreau, at the top right, from his essay “Walking,” published 150 years ago, in 1862: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Thoreau is best known for “Walden,” which described how a pond in Massachusetts was a metaphor for living a fulfilled human life.

This time I got it, Thoreau’s radical insight. Right here on the Outer Banks, a bit of nature left in its natural state, a few handfuls of ponds, are a laboratory, and a lesson, that may hold the key to whether our human species can invent a sustainable and resilient way of living on Spaceship Earth. Green pond? Black pond? How many days do we have left to act to save our pond? We will try our best; we’ll wait and see.

Love OBX, Surrender the Booty

Albemarle Sound from Nags Head Woods Preserve

For more photos, visit the Picasa gallery.

Related Links:

• TNC Nags Head Woods Preserve
• The Commons: An Environmental Dilemma, Biological Sciences Curriculum Study
• Resilience Alliance

Black-sailed dhow, Angoche

Cremildo Armando, the marine coordinator of the CARE-WWF Primeiras and Segundas Program, was our guide this afternoon, and we were going to Ilha dos Búzios, an island where Cyclone Jokwe, in March 2008, had destroyed a hundred houses in a small coastal village. We didn’t go ashore, but passed slowly up and down the mangroveless beach in front of the former village. This was Lesson #1 of the importance of maintaining the fringe of mangroves that surround and protect all of the shoreline here around Angoche, and the whole coast of Mozambique: “Ten-Thousand Mangroves Could Save A Village!”

Beach at Ilha dos Búzios, site of former village destroyed by Cyclone Jokwe, 2008

Nine species of mangroves grow on Mozambique’s 2,500 kilometer-long coast, which reaches from Tanzania to South Africa.  Mangroves grow on coastal mudflats and sandy shores on all of Earth’s tropical coasts, in intertidal swamp forests that link land and marine ecosystems. These unique salt-tolerant forests provide a range of ecological functions, from trapping sediment and building coastlines seaward to serving as nurseries for the young of a host of marine species.

After seeing dos Búzios, our skipper turned back up the estuary. We threaded between gently sailing dhows with black sails and men in tiny canoes fishing with handlines, and cruised along the shoreline of a sandy finger of land that points away from the old Portuguese center of the town of Angoche toward Potone Forest and inland. The high-density, low-income Angoche “suburb” of Inguri occupies this sandy peninsula, and by some estimates almost 30,000 people live here, no higher than a few meters above sea level. From the water we could see the bustle of boats landing passengers and cargo at various beaches along the shore. We could see some mangroves – but also areas where the mangroves were thin and degraded.

Then we turned south, passed through a channel between islands, and went deeper into the vast web of estuaries that back the northern islands of the Ilhas Primeiras e Segundas. After cruising along many kilometers of shoreline with nearly intact mangroves, we turned into a narrow, river-like channel, and for twenty minutes twisted our way through a watery pass only five or ten meters wide, enjoying the close-up view of the fine, healthy mangroves on both sides.

Cruising through mangrove-lined channel opposite Angoche

When we popped out of that mangrove channel, we were directly opposite Inguri, and turned right, heading back to Angoche.  Along the near shore we passed several small dhows, loading up mangrove poles to sell as building materials.  Mangroves are being harvested here in what, as far as we could learn, was a completely unregulated and unmanaged way.  What’s the tradeoff between these free construction materials and cyclone protection, or productive local fisheries?

Dhow with load of mangrove poles opposite Angoche

Around the world, as countries try to come to grips with the threat posed by the rising sea levels and the increase in intensity of cyclones, floods, and other extreme weather events predicted by models of global climate change, there is much discussion of improving coastal infrastructure as an adaptation measure. Mangroves are a soft, living infrastructure – not concrete seawalls and floodgates, but “green infrastructure” created by these amazing, biologically-diverse ecosystems. A recent study in the Red River Delta of Vietnam showed that mangroves reduced waves to less than 20% of their heights on coasts with no mangroves. The residents of Inguri – and other poor residents of Mozambique’s coastal villages – will be the first to suffer the effects of storm surges and flooding, and they can’t pay for “hard” infrastructure to protect their communities.  They can benefit from mangrove conservation.

Mangroves near Angoche

It is also possible to restore mangroves to areas where they once existed.  We saw mangrove restoration getting started in two places near Angoche. Although planting mangrove “droppers” – the already-sprouted dispersing seeds of these trees – is easy and effective for some species, the silvicultural science of how to restore each of the main species in its proper intertidal zone is not complete.  More pilot work on mangrove restoration is needed, and these efforts need to be linked with the social and economic development of the coastal communities of fisher-farmers here.

Mangrove restoration near Namizope Village, rows of leafless droppers planted a month earlier

Mangrove conservation and restoration is important for resilience to climate variability and change. The physical protection from cyclones, winds, waves, and storm surges provided by mangroves, and their ability to trap and hold sediment and thereby build land, are ecosystem services provided by these intertidal forests. And mangroves provide another ecosystem service: the trees, and the highly organic mud in which they grow, store and sequester carbon from the atmosphere, and thus help to slow the global warming caused by our species’ unrepentant fossil fuel use.

Measuring mangrove poles in the “Home Depot,” Inguri

The sun was getting low, the water westward a blinding silver mirror, as we returned to the port.  The tide was higher, and we could run in much closer to shore, so our wade through the mudflats to where we parked was much shorter this time. We drove into Inguri, and went to the market where mangrove poles, like those we had seen being cut and loaded onto dhows, are sold: the “Home Depot” of Inguri.  We went to the same beaches we had seen from the water, and now saw them from landward. We looked more closely at the few remaining mangroves. A passing boy stopped and posed, smiling happily.

Beach in Inguri, remnant mangroves visible upper right of photo

Note: The Ilhas Premeiras e Segundas was approved as a national marine reserve by the Council of Ministers of Mozambique on November 6, 2012. It is the largest marine reserve in Africa, with an area of 10,400 km2. For more information see: http://primeirasesegundas.net/2012/11/14/primeiras-segundas-archipelago-is-officially-named-a-protected-marine-reserve/

• Click here to see more photos from this trip!

The road to Saja Village

The people were enthusiastic, greeting us with handshakes and smiles. They were here for an orientation meeting, to learn about becoming a demonstration village for a “Farmer Field School” in the CARE-WWF Primeiras and Segundas Program.

Saja Village meeting with the CARE-WWF Farmer Field School team

The Farmer Field School will demonstrate new farming techniques and improved crop varieties that can help these subsistence farmers grow more food on the land they have already cleared, and maintain its soil fertility, so that they won’t have to continue the traditional, endless cycle of “slash and burn” agriculture.

So-called “slash and burn” farming may sound bad, and it has a bad reputation recently. But in fact, this traditional farming system is based in sound ecology, and was sustainable for many millennia, until overwhelmed recently by rapid human population growth. In traditional swidden, or “slash and burn,” agriculture, farmers cut a field into forest, and burn the branches and wood from the forest trees. The stored nutrients from the trees and branches provide the nutrients – the fertilizer – for the crops planted in the generally nutrient-poor soils where this type of farming developed. After a period of time, maybe five or ten years, the crops grown in these burned forest fields used up the nutrients, yields dropped, and farmers moved on, clearing new fields into forest, and letting forest recolonize and overtake the old fields. For millennia in the coastal and miombo forests of southeastern Africa this was a sustainable system, with both forest and human communities in balance.

Trees cut for a new cassava field in Potone Forest, drying before being burned.

Now, however, rapid population growth has increased the demand for food, and subsistence farmers clear more and more forest, at a rate far faster than the forest can grow back and re-store the nutrients needed for another cycle of farming. Something has to give to maintain a balance. Population growth has to return to zero, its normal state throughout most of human history. And agricultural and forest lands have to stabilize – conversion of forest to farms has to stop. That means that each farm has to produce as much food as ever, or even more, by maintaining or increasing the fertility and productivity of that piece of land.

Cassava field near Saja Village

Fortunately, there are many techniques for doing exactly that. These days the suite of such techniques is being called “conservation agriculture,” and includes: composting agricultural residues and returning them to the soil; minimum tillage; cover crops including nutrient-fixing legumes; tree crops of fruits and nuts, such as the ubiquitous local cashew; crop diversification and rotation; pest, disease, and drought resistant varieties of crops; integrated pest management; and no burning of fields, or nearby forest. Some of these practices have precedents in traditional African agriculture, but many are new, because they were not needed when swidden agriculture was in balance with nature, and worked.

Thus the need for Farmer Field Schools to teach villages like Saja these new techniques and introduce improved crop varieties. In these Farmer Field Schools, we see the face of effective biodiversity conservation in a poor country like Mozambique: feed people and conserve forest at the same time. And what better marriage of experience and missions could there be than an alliance between CARE and WWF to facilitate this new “look” at blending the old challenges of conservation and human development?

CARE-WWF Primeiras and Segundas Program Office, Angoche

The meeting took place under and around a big tree in the middle of the village. The CARE-WWF team that discussed the problems and solutions with Saja residents was experienced, and the level of enthusiasm was high. At the end of the meeting, an election was held to select the farmer whose farm would receive support to become a demonstration of these new techniques.

Farmer Field School orientation meeting in Saja Village

Saja is a neighbor village of Nametoria, the village we had visited earlier in the middle of the Potone Forest. Potone – pronounced with three syllables, and sometimes also spelled “Potoni” or “Patone” – is a relatively large and intact remnant of Mozambique’s unique and threatened coastal forest ecosystem. Coastal forests have been largely destroyed, fragmented, and degraded not only in Mozambique but in Kenya and Tanzania as well. For that reason, Potone was of special interest for biodiversity conservation to WWF, and the Primeiras and Segundas Program. Potone is considered a sacred area by local residents, and the diversity of its native plants attracts traditional healers who collect plants for their pharmacopeia. Saja is on the edge of Potone, and its agricultural expansion cuts into sacred forest, shrinking it from the outside in.

Fishing nets, Saja Village

Like most of these coastal villages, Saja sits at the ecotone between land and sea. Backed by coastal forest, where staple crops like cassava grow, it is only a short walk to the mangroves that fringe the estuaries that finger into the land here. Saja’s farmers are also fishers, and as we wandered through the village we saw piles of fishing nets side by side with piles of drying cassava. Cassava is starch, calories only; fish are protein. People need both, and especially children. We noticed too many toddlers here with the telltale distended bellies from a lack of protein in their diets, which will stunt both their physical and mental potential – and that of the country of Mozambique as a whole.

Cassava roots drying, Saja Village

The CARE-WWF Primeiras and Segundas Program recognizes the need to maintain the linkage between the land and sea here, to support these villages of fishing farmers – farming fishermen and women – in an integrated way. To support them in a way that recognizes and supports the ecological integration of their livelihoods.

Main Street, Saja Village

After shaking hands again with a substantial part of the village population, we drove back through the cassava fields, past new fields being cleared into the Potone Forest, and back to the main road to return to Angoche. There is hope here, yes. And hope needs a lot of help, it doesn’t just happen. There is a lot of work to be done here to help these villages once again come into balance with the environment that supports them. As we drove away from this meeting, taking our out-of-place Ford Everest out of this humble village, we felt humble, and honored, to have seen and understood something more about the hope and the struggle at work here in Saja.

Related blog posts:

• Potoni Sacred Forest

Related Links:

• CARE-WWF Alliance Primeiras and Segundas Program

Washington Post weather map, Friday, October 12th

Saturday morning was calm and sunny at the hawk watch platform at Cape May Point when we turned our binoculars skyward. Clouds of swallows circled the pond, and an occasional gull winged by. The bushes were popping with Yellow-rumped Warblers. But there were no hawks. Nada.

Cape May Point Lighthouse

We looked at the count, posted on a board by the official hawk counters from the Cape May Bird Observatory, which tracks hawk numbers passing here each fall from September to November. Yesterday, Friday, as the cold front was passing through, a huge flight of some species was observed: 1847 Sharp-shinned Hawks, 324 Cooper’s Hawks, 1003 American Kestrels, 442 Merlins.

Count board on Saturday, October 13th, showing Friday’s high numbers of hawks

Today, they were mostly all gone, already off along the Virginia shore and southward toward their respective winter destinations and destinies. By the end of the day the official CMBO counters tallied 383 Sharp-shinneds, 51 Cooper’s, 6 Kestrels, and 7 Merlins – very low compared to the high numbers of Friday.

Hopeful hawkwatchers on the platform, Saturday, October 13th

Count board on Sunday, October 14th, showing Saturday’s low numbers of hawks

It’s always exciting to see a river, a flood, of birds going over this platform – I’ve seen that in many years past. But this was OK too. With no hawks, we were just as connected to the real migration as with a skyfull. We could imagine them flowing by yesterday in those winds that were blowing us, too, down the Cape May Peninsula. We could imagine them today, safely across the Delaware Bay, resting and loitering and moving on southward, as we loitered and rested here, after a summer of rushing and working and feeding. Ah, fall in Cape May!

The Cape May Monarch Monitoring Project has been watching the monarch butterfly migration here since 1992. Migrating monarchs get funneled to Cape May by the geography of the northeast coast just like hawks do. Some people from the project were demonstrating monarch tagging to a small crowd in the picnic shelter beside the hawk watch platform on Saturday. After the demonstration I spoke with Dick Walton, the director of the project. Dick said that this year seemed to be a good one for monarchs. The daily census has so far recorded an hourly average of around 180 monarchs at Cape May Point, and looking back through their data over the past 20 years, that average has only been exceeded twice, in 1999 and 2006. It is more than double the 2011 average of 85 monarchs per hour, and beats the 2010 average of 130. So at least in northeastern North America, monarchs seem to have reproduced well this year, and a large overwintering population is on the move toward the refuges in the mountains of Michoacán, Mexico.

Monarch female nectaring on seaside goldenrod, Cape May Point, October 15th, 2012

I started my annual “monarch log” to record observations in my yard in Falls Church, Virginia, on Monday, 23 July, with this entry: “late afternoon, male patrolling above milkweeds. Not landing, touching or tasting them, but perching on high vegetation and watching.” My interpretation of this behavior was that the male was watching and waiting at a likely place for a visiting female to mate with.

The log continued: “Wednesday, 25 July – another male, same kind of behavior, on a HOT (near 100 degrees) afternoon.”

Then: “Thursday, 26 July – about 11 AM, hot and sunny, female landing, tasting leaves of milkweed, and I thought I saw some egg-laying – that is, abdomen tip touched to underside of leaves while she clung to the edge.”

And: “Tuesday, 31 July – no caterpillars or chewed leaves visible… so I don’t know if the 26 July female was laying eggs or not.”

The milkweed I planted two years ago, which hosted such an active monarch population then, had spread this year, and lots of healthy plants promised a feast for monarchs. But the monarch “field of dreams” was deserted and sad. In September, when there had been so many hungry monarch larvae on my milkweeds two years ago, there were none. What happened to the monarchs in Falls Church this year?

Seaside goldenrod, Cape May Point; monarch visible on lower flower directly below lighthouse. October 15th, 2012

In ecology, and in life in general, a lot is due to “chance.” Living systems combine processes and relationships that are well understood with events that are intrinsically non-deterministic, sporadic, and random. This makes it very difficult to understand the behavior of complex ecological systems, much less predict them.

Lots of hawks on Friday; almost none on Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Lots of monarchs in northeastern North America this year; no monarch caterpillars on the milkweeds in my garden. A glorious weekend at Cape May. Another year passing in this surprising corner of Earth. Let’s love and take care of what comes to us by chance, even what we don’t understand.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in my previous posts on monarchs:

• A Pilgrimage to the Monarch Butterfly Overwintering Refuges in Michoacán, México
• Migrating Hawks and Monarchs, Cape May, New Jersey
• Field of Dreams of Monarchs

Related Links:

• Cape May Bird Observatory
• Seasonal counts from CMBO
• Monarch Monitoring Project