REFUGIA: CREATE A SAFEHOUSE FOR THE WILD THINGS
In the old pasture, three piles of brush are heaped high. They’ll stay there all winter, all summer. Snow will bury them. Vines will run over them.
Now that the first snow is on the ground, the reason for the piles is obvious: animal tracks. Creatures live beneath the piles, find refuge among the tangle, and avoid the mean spirits of winter so they may reemerge in the spring.
A pile of brush is refugia. Refugia? What is that, what is refugia?
Put simply, refugia is a safehouse or safe haven for wild living things, animals and myriad other life forms that need a home, relief and safety from the oppressive crush of humanity.
Slowly but surely, my wife of 48 years and I are turning our small allotment of acreage into a modest refugia so that we may sustain and even increase the population of the wild things that live in or migrate through our backyard and backcountry. By building our refugia, we are enriching the environment for the wild ones and enriching ourselves in return.
“Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all.” At night the barred owls rebel rouse for a few minutes in the trees by the garden. They make a welcome racket. They are here because the field is teeming with small mammals, their favorite prey, under the moon. Because of the density of low growth, the grassy scrub expanse, and the brush piles, the mice, voles, shrews and such find cover and plenty of food to sustain them. They, in turn, sustain the owls. The world seems to be in balance here for the night. There will be more barred owls in the spring.
On the back line is an immense dead white pine, killed twenty years ago by a flash of lightning. We will never cut it down. Big piliated woodpeckers have reared young in cavities in it. Hawks and crows routinely alight in the top few naked branches to survey their domain. There are so few such huge dead snags remaining in New England forests that the larger birds seek them out and stay close simply because that massive 100-foot skeleton of a tree is standing there.
In the north yard by the driveway are several large flowering crabapple trees; there are others around the property that we planted years ago. These fruit trees are living magnets for wildlife. In late fall, white-tail deer forage beneath the trees for the drops and they stand on their hind legs to reach into the lower branches for fruit that has yet to fall. Squirrels don’t care too much for the sour apples but they put up with the taste to obtain a full dose of calories. Robins winter-over in the branches. In the spring, orioles feed on the blossoms. A dozen different birds seek insects that are attached to the riot of white flowers.
On the west and north margins, we have obsessively cut away completing vegetation from wild highbush blueberry plants for nearly four decades now. There is a wall of blueberry along the fence line. During fruiting season, that fruiting wall iis a haunt for birds large and small.
But the predominant reason why animals come here, thrive here, is because we have a hand-dug pond at the low point in the pasture, measuring some 32 feet by 16 feet. The deepest depth is just under six feet. This sheet of water is the crown jewel of our refugia. Water is the ultimate source of all life, of course, and most life in the neighborhood takes full advantage of the pond.
Deer come at night to drink, opossums too, raccoon, mink, fox. Two moose have visited over the years. A blue heron glides in on occasion to seek amphibians for breakfast. Yellow spotted salamanders lay eggs in the pond, frogs and toads, too. Dragonfly nymph cruise the depths; water striders the surface. Somehow wetland plants are beginning to get established. The first cattail shoot made its presence known this past summer.
Complementing the pond is a seasonal stream that found its way to the pond because we diverted a tiny fraction of the volume from a seep that charges a small wetland at the edge of the property. That little trickle became a superhighway for minute creatures. Crayfish found their way to the pond via the flow. And that wetland? I shoveled up a six-inch-high barrier in the hopes of expanding the bog just a little. That effort at approximating the engineering of beavers seemed to work.
In a generation, nine billion humans will inhabit this little blue orb called Earth. This juggernaut of humanity is overwhelming almost all environments on earth. Our wild companions are being pushed rapidly to the margins and those remaining enclaves are shrinking. You and I can’t very well save a planet, so it must be up to each of us to protect the margins, to improve the soil, plant fruiting and nut trees and shrubs, and provide running or still water, shade, rock walls to hide in, leaf mounds and brush stacks to escape to, compost piles to stay warm within.
Without refugia, wildlife will eventually be lost to us. The living world collapsed more than a few times in the deep past, only to be saved somehow from total annihilation. 252 million years ago, 95 percent of all living things on the planet died off within the span of just 100,000 years. The Great Dying, as the end-Permian mass extinction is known, occurred because what is now Siberia split apart and disgorged enough lava to cover an area the size of the continental United States with more than a mile of molten rock. The volcanic cocktail of gases turned the sky dull green and the oceans purple, overwhelmed with magenta-colored sulfur-loving bacteria. Oxygen levels plummeted; poisonous sulfur dioxide spiked. The greenhouse gases load in the atmosphere may have been ten times the 400 ppm today. So hot was the surface of the planet that the only possible refugia for life were at or near the poles.
In tiny refugia outposts on a nearly dead planet, a fraction of the plant and animal life that had populated the earth hung on. In the epoch the followed, the Triassic, it took nearly 10 million years for ecosystems to fully repopulate and the diversity of life reach former robust levels.
The richness of the life around us now is fast becoming impoverished. Somehow, on an individual level, we must each try to arrest the fall from grace. Creating refugia in our own backyards and neighborhoods is a start. Can’t create a pond? Hand dig a shallow vernal pool that holds water for just ten weeks in the spring. Collect rocks and build a rough stone wall. Heap up a compost pile. Plant wildflowers and thyme in the lawn, fruiting trees (any native trees) in the park, berry bushes and berry cane everywhere. The dead snag tree should be left standing. Let fallen leaves lie. If nothing else, stack up several brush piles and leave them be.
Refugia building: do it. Let life back into your life.
