Reading Pictures: Three Clues

Reading Pictures

Winter 2000

Three Clues
Photo by Pat Wadecki. Words by Stephen Packard.

A layer of soil, a layer of foliage, both filled with life. But in between is a layer about five feet high, of very little. One overpopulated animal species walks through that layer, eating everything that grows. Overpopulated deer, here along the Des Plaines River in Wheeling, have destroyed most of the ecosystem they could reach. Some people would say that this scene represents two overpopulated species. One ate the shrubs. The other ate hot dogs or paté at the picnic table.

Yet under the right circumstances, great numbers of people, nudged by laws and ethics, can live compatibly with biodiversity. Great numbers of deer cannot. Neither laws nor ethics impress them. Deer eat or die, they breed whenever they can; that's it. People not only can restrain themselves, we can also notice symptoms. We have needed and have developed a practice of medicine that can maintain ourselves in good health, most of us, most of the time. We need, and are developing, a medicine of ecosystems. It's called restoration.

For 20 summers now, the deer of the Des Plaines preserves gobbled up orchids and lilies and asters and shooting stars. Then, as each autumn turned into each winter, the deer fell back on the same food as beaver. From November through April, deer sustain themselves mostly on the bark of twigs.

The hungry mouths and teeth of deer can reach about five feet high. Thus, in areas where deer are severely overpopulated, a distinct line five feet from the ground develops as a visible symptom. As the shrubs go, and the young trees go, so go the flowers, and all the butterflies, and most birds, and most biodiversity.

The spreading oak on the left probably whiled away its youth (like the spreading hawthorn on the right) among cattle in a pasture. The larger trees back then, its parents, had earlier presided over buffalo and elk and wolf and Potawatomi. No browse line developed because wolves and human hunters helped to maintain a balance.

Buckthorn (a distinctive green in this photo, long after the native species have gone dormant) is a different kind of wolf. It gobbles up the light, filling the spaces the sun shone through.

But so do all the other treetops on those dense young trunks visible through the browse line. Aggressive native trees are seeking to replace the oaks. Fire was a part of the balance, with the wolves and hunters. It was the fire-maintained open woodland that allowed the oaks to flourish. For a while, imbalances seemed to toll the death knell for an ancient ecosystem.

Three clues: crowded little trunks, green buckthorn, browse line. They are merely symptoms marring a beautiful ecosystem. They don't necessarily mean death; they're just symptoms of illness. As we are learning to read the landscape, we also are learning to restore good health to the earth around us.

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