03/09/2021 – Hike Thoughts

Took a hike today, the weather has been so pleasant.

When there was snow on the ground one day when I went out to Celery Bog – a city-owned property and natural area – I noticed some paths around the area called Pothole Wetlands to the west of the paved trail on the west edge of the Bog – a couple of low-lying ponds (usually with water in them) surrounded by trees. I was surprised because I’d never noticed trails in the area before, and I hiked them to see where they led. They went out and seemingly around the pothole areas.

I wanted to see if they were really trails or just incidental, so I went out to follow them today with no snow. They were still there, but now I am not sure they are trails. They’re too broad compared with other unpaved trails in the park. And they don’t seem to go where I thought – they seem to dead end in the pothole itself (which has water in it now). And they are mowed in circles around some of the trees.

My ideas now is that they’re firebreaks. They do some planned burns in the woods and the prairie restorations here, and they may have them in place for some future burns.

I reflected on planned burns fir natural area restorations. I’ve been reading “After The Ice: A Global Human History from 20,000-5000 BC”, which frequently talks about climate change and plant succession (we’re talking geological time natural climate change here, not what we are experiencing in the world now). There were  several significant changes over the covered time period, and archaeologists use pollen grain sampling and other measures to chart them and can get a good picture of the plants people gathered. In in places with sites that are separated by centuries and millennia, they change with the climate.

So what I wondered was, is attempting to restore natural areas to the plant growth as it was, say, a hundred years ago, an unnatural human intervention doomed to failure in this time of rapid global warming and climate change? Many of the plants they are intended to restore may not find the changed climate hospitable, and here we are adding more carbon to the atmosphere in our attempt to bring them back.

My conclusion is that I don’t know. Sometime I’ll ask someone who does, unless I get distracted by some other idea. Here’s a video I took because it sounded so springy.

Weather Report:  69/53, Dewpoint 38, Humidity 47%, Barometer 30.17; mostly sunny today, sunrise at 07:09, set at 18:47 and moonrise at 5:23, set at 17:54, waning crescent.

Covid 19 Report: US (CDC): 28,937,762 total cases, 524,695 deaths, 143.8 (!!) cases per 100K.  Indiana (ISDH): 668,308 total cases, 12,335 deaths; positivity (all) 3.1% (7 day) and positivity (unique) 8.6% (7 day).