Febuary 2013

Stream Keepers 2013Febuary.

Happy New Year

Since our short break at the holiday season we met the first Saturday of January to do some winter maintenance which involved the removal of a couple of standing dead alder trees which over hung the trail into our lake and another couple leaning over our fish counting box. All the trees were already losing sections when it snowed and to prevent an accident we decided to cut them down to be on the safe side. This brought up the question of the trees values as wildlife trees. The obvious signs that wood pecker had been using the trees to the point that they were almost totally covered in holes where they had been removing various grubs from deep within the decaying wood. By now they were totally ridden with mycelium colonizing the decaying wood extracting as much and what nutrients and minerals the mycelium had decided to harvest and not only for its self but for other trees and plants that the mycelium had colonized. The big bonus for me was the nice big fat Oyster Mushrooms growing all over the trunks of the Alder. Great lunch and dinner treat. As we steward the fish as best we can we also try to educate volunteers to the connectivity of all life in the forest and yes you guessed it the one big connection is mycelium, networks of hypha some that have been estimated to be over 2,000 years old and spreading for miles feeding and regulating the organic matter and growth cycles of all the forest plants. Hypha have the ability to extract nutrients and minerals from other plants and deliver them to host plants which use the mycelium as scavengers roaming throughout the forest often for miles gathering what they need.

A healthy forest means a healthy watershed not only for our fish but also mainly for our selves for without the enviroment guess what we do not survive. The environment is so complex that with all the available knowledge we have we still only can hope to scratch the surface so to speak of trying to understand the complex web that makes for functioning ecosystems.

All this unseen life going on in the watersheds influences the marine ecosystem as all that water running down stream carries all types of nutrients to the ocean where it contributes to the health or of the oceans ecosystems. Take a walk along the shore at low tide and see for your self how complex life really is.

 Where is your ditch? How many know where their ditch goes, try to think of how your rain finds its way from your house to the ocean. Then think of what you spray and use around your home and how it also makes its way into the streams and into the ocean.

Lantzville could have a pesticide bylaw but as I was told

“The province did not do it so why would we” This is very narrow thinking for does not the overall health of our citizens and especially our children deserve better for the future than a severely depleted and polluted environment to live in. We talk of outdoor burning but spray wily nilly every plant we call weeds with carcinogenic chemicals stinking up the air for our neighbors to breath and leaching into our waterways and yes eventually our very own drinking water. If you are backyard burning watch the wind and only burn when it blows away from your neighbors or wait until they leave home for the day and no there is no need to burn plastic and other garbage just because you can whether it is in a contained barrel or out in the open.

We are lucky to have such large areas of forest to walk in and take in the magnificence of nature.

Remember when out in the woods or on the beach take out what you take in and as they say leave only footprints.

Lantzville at one time had a saying “If you want good neighbors be ONE”.