On grouse and ptarmigan-sounds , memories and meanings

A brief memory trip inspired by an internet sound search- thinking of the resounding of the blue grouse in the Coast Mountains in BC in May- peaks wreathed in clouds, air intoxicatingly clear, and the sound....reverberating among the peaks, the sound of the mountains in May.  My attempts to hear this sound from digital sound clips decontextualized on an iPad- utterly missed the mark.  I went hunting for old diaries to see if I had recorded my impressions....I found none from the right period in my life.  Fieldnotes were too voluminous and detail-oriented to record (or locate the record) of the aesthetic experience I remember.  Walking up the Seven Sisters in May, up the Coyote Creek trail...a trek through the Coastal Western Hemlock Zone halfway up the mountains, the trail twisting and turning, uphill and sometimes down, through the forest above the last logging cut.  Moss and hemlock and fool's huckleberry aka rusty Menziesia (Menziesia ferruginea)- a huckleberry relative which bears dry capsules instead of juicy dark berries-, some real black huckleberry, in flower at this time of year....as we near the little pond near the upper limits of the forest- the sound, throbbing, deep, resounding through the forest. The sound of the quickening spring.  Below, the accelerating rattle of the ruffed grouse, here the deep booming of the blue grouse. Litisxw. '
The little lake reflects the peaks and dark trees, just at the edge of the old burn from the 1930's then half a century before.  We pause for a bit of food then push on past the trees to the open terrain of the moraines and rocky glacier bed between what we called the Black Sister and the tallest peak, Weeshkinisht on the map  'Wii Sga'nist, the big mountainin Gitxsan.  The peaks surround.  Goats frequent the still bare alder thickets on the flanks of the Black Sister.  The remnant glacier is a small snowfield up near the headwall of the cirque. 

Down below, at the base of the mountain where we lived, the ruffed grouse dominated, generally the grey form.  Put–put-put-put-put-put –the chainsaw that never starts.  Theirs the realm of thimbleberry and birch and hazel, of heart-leaved Arnica, morrels, and dandelion greens, the deciduous and mixed woods of the valley bottom.  I used to enjoy their trail of tracks across the snowpack in winter too, and sometimes little curled droppings appearing almost like compressed sawdust or wood shavings.   Grouse, unsurprisingly perhaps, is a Gitxsan crest, and figures in the Adaawk from Temlax'amit that is on the pole of Ant'kulilbisxw in Kispaayaks. The crying woman on Mary's pole holds a bird, the grouse that could have saved her brother from starvation had she and her sister been able to procure it in time...  I have a Walter Harris print of the grouse hanging in my house, and a carved painted plaque. I like to eat grouse too, though as I'm not a hunter, I haven't cooked it many times.  My favourite is with wild mushrooms in a kind of stew or fricassee. I also have some beautiful banded grouse tail feathers in a little basket with other beautiful "found feathers" in my Edmonton living-room.
Spruce grouse, "chickens" figure in my memories of more northerly places.  The first time the wonder of spruce grouse, black hooded, sitting dark and immobile in the small snow wreathed black spruce of the boreal forest near Ethel Lake in the central Yukon. My daughter was almost 6, and lost her first tooth that day....A few years later, we were driving south in late August having taken the Alaska Ferry to Haines Alaska and driven down the Alaska highway to the junction with Highway 37.  We started down the Stewart-Cassiar south toward the Skeena.  Allen had a hankering to go fishing, and we pulled off at a place signed Wheeler Lake south about an hour from the Yukon border.  Before he could catch anything, he somehow broke the tip of his rod.  Frustrated, he noticed there were a number of young-of-the-year spruce grouse sitting fearlessly in the small black spruce and willows.  He and Rose set to work with sticks and stones, and soon we had two spruce grouse to share....cooked up on our coleman stove with freshly picked delicious lactarius mushrooms, and a side of low-bush cranberry sauce.  A delicious and memorable meal off the land that I still think of, decades later, whenever I drive by the sign that says "Wheeler Lake".  This was before I came  back to the Watson Lake area to work with Kaska Elders.....
Travelling with my Elder teacher Auntie Mida, one of the first Kaska sentences I learned to say was "Hligah dí’ ne gánesta" I saw one "chicken".  Kaska usually talk about any animals they have seen when traveling, and ask travelers what they have seen.  Probably in the days of more local travel this was useful, even necessary, information.  Driving out to pick some berries on the trapline of another Elder teacher, we saw three or four grouse, but had no 22.  I took out my camera to photograph the grouse, and Auntie Alice commented- "You want take picture, I want to eat them!"    She also explained that "chickens" like thick jack-pine, but willow ptarmigan, another grouse-like bird that turns snowy white in winter, prefers willow.
I once saw a beautiful cock willow ptarmigan on the upper Skeena/Klappan divide down on the borders of Spatsizi park, with his brown summer mottling, and brilliant red eyebrows.  I've also seen willows loaded with winter-white ptarmigan like partridges in a proverbial pear tree on the shore of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories.

Alice is right; willow ptarmigan do indeed like willows, and roost there in the winter.  In 1998 I spent some research time in Inuvik in the Mackenzie Delta region of the northwest Territories, a bit north of the Arctic Circle.  My friend Rob and I drove down the Dempster to the Mackenzie River Ferry at Arctic Red (Tsiigehtchic) and dozens of striped summer plumage ptarmigan darted out of the alders and willows along the highway flank.  Somehow we avoided hitting any..... While I was there in 1998 I also bought a beautiful print of a silk painting of ptarmigan (in their showy white winter plumage), looking very much like the ptarmigan I later saw myself on the shores of Slave Lake.
I came full circle on grouse and ptarmigan when I was visiting in Gitwangak  on the Skeena River last February.  I was working with a group of Elders and my friend Ruby discussing community health planning.  Dinim Get, my long time teacher, asked if I had a name.  He considered if he should give me the name Ay-aa'y, "ptarmigan", one of the names of his Lax Gibuu House.....

On Cranberries

Lowbush cranberry or lingonberry, Vaccinium vitis-idaea growing in moss under pine. Southern Yukon 2004.
A year ago I wrote more generally on the ethnobiology of Thanksgiving. Today I want to write about cranberries. Botanists have been somewhat indecisive about whether cranberries are, as it were, a red wetland-dwelling blueberry with a very tart flavour, or whether they should be segregated in a genus of their own, Oxycoccus (‘sour ball’) because of their trailing stems and vine life form, and their azalea like pink flowers which differ from the little heather urn-shaped flowers of blueberries, blaeberries, huckleberries, whortleberries, bilberries and their ilk. And of course their eponymous sour fruits, while blueberries are generally sweet when ripe. The cranberry of commerce is the large New England species designated Vaccinium macrocarpon if we take the position that “true” cranberries belong in the genus Vaccinium. This is the large tart berry associated with Thanksgiving sauces and jellies, and now ubiquitous in the form of jugs of sweetened cranberry juice and also common as dried sweetened cranberries. These cranberries find their native habitat in acidic wetlands, that is, in peat bogs. In the course of researching this blog I have learned that, although natural wetlands were formerly the sites of cranberry cultivation, now industrial cultivation involves stripping the fertile soil and leveling the future cranberry field, and surrounding it with dikes made of the topsoil, while placing acidic sand on the carefully leveled field. These diked fields are then managed in a manner reminiscent of rice paddies, being carefully flooded at specific times in the growth and harvest cycle of the fruit. I read that industrially produced cranberries are harvested by flooding the fields and sucking up the floating berries with huge mechanical harvesters. These fruits, often bruised, then are immediately processed into canned cranberry jelly or sauce or perhaps for juice. Apparently to get a quality that can be sold as unfrozen berries, you have to harvest the fruit dry, and humans run the machines that pick these higher quality berries, a mere 2 or 3% of the cranberry harvest. At some point in the past, there was a scare about pesticide contamination, so industrial growers are now very careful with the chemicals they apply.
Although a lot of commercial cranberries are no longer cultivated in wetlands, cultivation on the periphery of wetlands in soils naturally moist and acidic still occurs. This cultivation has the predictable effect of altering the hydrology of wetland areas, and can introduce chemical contamination from agricultural chemicals (e.g. nitrogen or pesticides) applied to the crop. As bogs are naturally highly oligotrophic (low in nutrients) this can cause decline in native bog species on the periphery of the cultivated area and invasion of weedy species, threatening unique bog ecosystems. Not to mention the decline of biodiversity in the cultivated plots themselves. Cranberry cultivation has been one of the threats to Burns Bog, a large peatland wetland area on the Fraser River Delta in British Columbia which exists in the midst of extensive urban and cultivated agricultural landscapes. This site is highly revered for its wildland bog habitat and recreation potential within the Lower Mainland, but has also been threatened with a number of schemes for its transformation or elimination, from housing developments to landfills, and its sensitive hydrology is threatened by various proposed dikes and drainage ditches. I recall learning about the environmental risks of the commercial cultivation when I still lived in BC, and there was concern about contamination with agricultural chemicals. This led me to try to buy organic cranberry products whenever possible.
What makes a cranberry? The classic cranberries of bogs (Vaccinium macrocarpon, V. palustris, V. oxycoccus) are viney evergreen members of the heath family living in peatlands, and which have persistent tart red fruits that develop from lovely spreading pink flowers. In northwestern North America we would call these “bog cranberries” and our local species has much smaller leaves and fruits than the classic cranberry of commerce, and is much lower in productivity. The taste is the same. And we also have what we would call “low bush cranberry”, which I have also seen rendered as “mountain cranberry”. This is Vaccinium vitis-idaea, the “blueberry” ‘grapevine of Mt. Ida’, also a low growing, but not viney, member of the genus Vaccinium with glossy evergreen leaves, usually growing in moss…but here the feather moss of spruce or pine stands, not usually of sphagnum bogs….which has small tart red fruits that taste like cranberries. These develop from classic heather family urn shaped flowers of white or very pale pink. In Scandinavia, where they are revered, they are lingonberries, and a national food of Sweden. When I have the opportunity, these are what I pick during late summer fieldwork to freeze for my Thanksgiving cranberry sauce. Alas, not only was it a poor berry year this past summer, I left the Yukon too early, before the cranberries were even minimally ripe. So it will be purchased V. macrocarpon for me this year.
Cranberries (aka lingonberries) are one of the most important fruits for northern Athapaskans. For Gwich’in in the Mackenzie Delta region of the Northwest Territories there are “yellowberries” nakal (Rubus chamaemorus, the cloudberry) a golden bog dwelling raspberry, blueberries (Vaccinium uliginosum, the bog blueberry) and cranberries. Cranberries last the longest, keep the best, and can be harvested in larger amounts. In the boreal forests of the southern Yukon, Kaska love cranberries too. They are called itl’et in Kaska, and people pick and freeze relatively large amounts. Cranberries can be eaten in the spring after they thaw. Anore Jones quotes a poignant tale of death and survival of a Yupiq woman in her “Plants that we eat” (1986 Maniilaq Association). A woman who was widowed and travelling alone with two small children managed to survive on sparse spring cranberries. One of her two children also made it. This was the grandmother of one of the elders Jones worked with in the 1980’s.
Cranberries are good for more than survival. A Kaska elder friend said she treated her husband’s urinary tract infection by feeding him cranberries. Contemporary herbal medicine also suggests cranberry juice, or cranberry capsules, for prevention of urinary tract infections or chronic cystitis. Cranberries, along with blueberries, apparently contain lots of anti-oxidants, considered to be cancer preventative through combination with free radicals. I buy cranberry capsules at my local organic food store which I take faithfully to prevent cystitis.
The Wikipedia article on “cranberry” mentions that some species of Viburnum are also called “cranberry”, which they consider erroneous. No, merely ethnobotanical…fruits of various species of Viburnum, locally V. edule and V. trilobata have red fruit that ripens in the fall and it is the gustatory quality of astringence, sour and a bit bitter, which makes them “cranberry”, not their botanical affiliation (they are in the Caprifoliaceae or honeysuckle family, and grow on tall woody bushes). Though they have large flat white seeds which make the fruit dissimilar to “real” cranberries to eat, they make a fine sauce or jelly. They lack the large amount of pectin of true cranberries, so the sauce is runny…but delicious. I wrote last fall on highbush cranberries (aka the Viburnums). I’ve been snacking on them as I walk in the ravine by my house. I’ll close now and wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving, and hope they are enjoying cranberries in one way or another to mark the holiday.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranberry
http://peterwood.ca/res/research/burnsbog/Burns%20Bog%20Protection%20Values%20and%20Management%20Options.htm
Jones, Anore. 1983. Nauriat Nigiñaqtuat, Plants That We Eat. Kotzebue, Alaska: Maniilaq Association.

other sources which discuss cranberries:
Parlee, Brenda, Fikret Berkes and Teet'it Gwich'in Renewable Resource Council. 2006. Indigenous Knowledge of Ecological Variability and Commons Management: A Case Study on Berry Harvesting from Northern Canada. Human Ecology 34(4):515-528.
Andre, Alestine and Alan Fehr. 2001. Gwich’in Ethnobotany, Plants used by the Gwich’in for Food, Medicine, Shelter and Tools. Inuvik: Gwich’in Social and Cultural Institute and Aurora Research Institute