Member-only story
A Moving Story of Birds Helping Trees
Pine forests saved by a nutcracker! Sweet!
Those who minimize climate change proclaim that there will be winners as well as losers. Sure, billions of humans will be harmed by rising sea levels and more frequent, severe and unpredictable hurricanes, monsoons, droughts, wildfires, and cold spells. But hay — a few farmers will do better. Changes in temperature, moisture and carbon dioxide are likely to expand Canadian acreage amenable for growing alfalfa, corn, soybeans and wheat.
While agribusiness may soon be planting crops hundreds of miles further north than was previously viable, most natural ecosystems aren’t so mobile. Although a few species, like humans and rats and pigeons are generalists, most plants and animals evolved in fairly narrow ecological niches, and don’t thrive in environments too disparate from those they adapted to over millennia.
Many of our iconic habitats are anchored by trees — groves of majestic redwoods, beech-maple forests blanketing the eastern US, dark northern tracts of conifers. Trees aren’t particularly mobile elements of the natural landscape.
Yet trees are on the move. Pine trees are showing up for the first time on Sierra mountaintops. And a little bird told me how they got there.
