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.....

Of Trails and Roads- "among the trees" versus travelling through country

The first time I drove down the Alaska Highway in 1997, large sections of the highway between Watson Lake and Fort Nelson were narrow two-lane highway, slipping through the trees in curving pathways, up rises and down. It was not a high speed route, but the highway ran along in the aspen and spruce woods, giving a real sense of the nature of the place. I felt like I was there, had been there. When I drive there now, the improved high-speed highway punches through the landscape, in a wide swath, topography muted by big road-cuts and fills, the trees cut back so that one glances at the forest on either side, rather than travelling among the trees.

The cleared highway right-of-way is mowed annually, features exotic grasses and legumes used routinely to vegetate highway roadsides, and has incidentally been recognized by the re-introduced bison as a nicely maintained bison pasture that attracts them and creates serious road hazards for motorists. A broad swathe of artificial low herbaceous vegetation now transects the boreal forest for the length of the Alaska Highway. This broad and straight expanse of pavement facilitates the transport of people and goods from one end-point to another. The pavement itself is expanded by the sloping cut banks and the fill slopes to create an entity of substantial area that extends many thousands of times its width to create wide corridors of disruption and disturbance from whose familiarly similar pavement we view many kinds of landscape and cityscape. That we pass through without actually being there. Yet somehow we still think of roads as lines, in the geometric sense, having length and trajectory, but not extent. We bracket them out of our imagining of the places we've seen.
 I began to think about the difference between roads and trails again this past week, walking in the faux natural urban greenspace (at this season, snowspace) by my home in Edmonton, Mill Creek Ravine. In the time I've lived here, the city has consistently expanded the width of its trails, widening pavement of the paved bike trail, now kept plowed all winter long, and heavily gravelling the official walking trails until they are in fact single lane gravel roads, used as such by Parks and Recreation, which drives maintenance trucks on them. The roadside vegetation is religiously mowed back more than a meter on each side of the gravel edge now, obliterating wildflowers like the lovely star-flowered solomon's seal, Canada violets and wild lily of the valley, (Maianthemum canadensis), and promoting disturbance tolerant weeds like dandelions and bladder campion. They also cut back the stems of the fruiting saskatoons with brush blades, to create a neat corridor through the aspen woods and gallery forest along Mill Creek. Dog walkers, joggers, strolling friends, and cyclists make use of this easy route. Few stop to pick fruit, or watch birds. Some sport ear buds, or talk on cell phones.
 I often take the unofficial side trails, created by human feet (and mountain bikes), about a shoulder's width to the trail bed, winding their way among the trees and bushes, pausing for views, anastamosing, looping both sides of the main trails of the official net, and creating shortcuts between major routes. I feel that I am, as Dene speakers would say, among the trees when I walk on these trails. With the degree of traffic, one does need to look for roots that might trip a walker...the flowers along the trail are intact. Wild sarsaparilla grace the trailside in summer, highbush cranberries heavy with fruit in fall. I rarely encounter dogwalkers in these places (but sometimes have to step aside for mountain bikers). My feet are at home, finding their path where others have walked. Gravel does not crunch underfoot.
 In winter, as now, there is rarely a sheet of ice along the path, as the traffic is less. I am really there. The pathways are marked by the tracks of those who have walked, inscribing the trail through the act of walking itself. These trails, of course, are tame, as they are created by urban recreationists in a large city. I do not have to glance around for bear scat, or tracks. I have no fear of becoming lost. For trails are routes. They choose where to travel in going from one place to another. Or rather, they instantiate the choices of many who have travelled from one place to another. Even these trails require maintenance; natural processes work to obscure and disrupt trails. We had high winds a week ago, and many trees and branches fell across the trails. People moved them aside, to re-establish effective walking.
 In more remote and unsettled places, trails can feel like lifelines. They need more maintenance there, where washouts, bank erosion, treefall, and brush growth can erase signs of the route, or make following it nearly impossible. In Northwest British Columbia where I used to live, and have worked with local First Nations for nearly 30 years, the network of traditional trails was crucial. For trails of regional significance, work to create them beyond the mere passage of feet was required. These often required a fair amount of construction, leveling trail beds where they ran along sidehills, pecking foot and handholds where rock walls needed to be ascended, even construction of timber bridges to span impassable rivers in this dynamic mountainous landscape. Routes were marked by blazes (at least once steel axes were acquired), or by bending over branches. Brush had to be cleared so it would not spring up and cause injury when it was walked on when bowed down with heavy snow. Lore detailing routes, details of ownership of territories and location of boundaries, and how to cross hazards like avalanche slopes without excessive danger were passed in families, along with accompanying place names. These trails required skill in walking, balance, the ability to cling to a steep slope or to cross a cottonwood log over a rushing creek, and to avoid being caught up in brush. They required route finding. Trails led to resource areas, and were named by the type of use (berry patch trail, mountain goat hunting trail, and so on).
 Some of the Indigenous trails because roads. Others became disused, as settlement patterns changed, ways of making a living were altered and resource use shifted. These fade from memory, as people cluster in the valley bottoms and the Elders who ranged these lands are gone.

This is an image of an old blazed Kaska trapline trail in the Yukon.

The word atane means 'trail'; you can indicate a moose trail, for example with keda 'tane.

Another Kaska trail between a gravel truck trail and a fishing site is clearer and more currently used.

Trails themselves offer a network of human spaces on the land. Walking on land with no trail is a highly skilled activity. One must choose a path, assess the footing, dodge bushes and branches, step over logs and downed trees, look ahead to decide which pathway will lead to the clearest route with least effort– and still get where one desires to go in the larger scale (e.g. go up the correct ridge, not slip over into the next valley, arrive at the lake and so on). One must also return without getting lost or arrive at the next camping place as anticipated. When we went walking with my Manhatten-bred niece many years ago, the fact that traversing country requires skill was brought home to me. Deb had literally never had to decide which side of a clump of bushes to walk on before.

 My colleague Rob Wishart wrote a piece about the Gwich'in skill of walking...this resonated with me, because years before I had been travelling along the Dempster highway with my Gwich'in elder teachers and had commented that the rolling alpine made me want to just go running across the land....William looked at me and commented that it isn't easy to walk across the land. I thought about it and realized there are sedge-tussock marshes, exhausting to negotiate, wet ditches, low tangled dwarf willow, and deep soft sphagnum. It may look like one could run across it like a farmer's pasture, but this land takes much more skill than that.

Forested landscapes have their own set of skills. And walking on winter landscapes, assessing snow quality, ice safety, and deciding if snowshoes are needed is a whole different set of skills.

The packed trail or blazed path offer comfort and security, welcoming. Others have been here. Places and destinations are known.  Cross-country traversing, trail walking, and driving on roads all reflect different levels of intimacy with the land, different sets of skills, different scales of concern and different perception of grain.  Finally, the bird's-eye view offered by air travel gives yet another distinctive set of perceptions of pattern and land while being literally removed from the landscape one contemplates.

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

Environmental Change and Variation in the Yukon

Photo:
Willows yellow from drying or disease along Frances River
I just got back from the southern Yukon where I went to do research on observations of environmental change by Kaska Elders. The weather was alternating between being very hot (up to 30C) and rainy, though there had been little rain early in the season, and a light snow pack the winter before. During a trip up the Liard and Frances River by boat with one elder my collaborator Linda and a Japanese anthropologist and I helped the elder put out a small forest fire that was burning in the moss at a camping site along the river. Berries seemed to be a couple of weeks ahead of normal in terms of ripening, but crops seemed poor, perhaps because of poor weather when the flowers were pollinated. People speculated that perhaps the bears were bolder because the berries were poor. I found a correlation like that in nuisance bear reports down on the Skeena River in the Terrace area in the 1980's. Just as I was getting ready for a trip down the Alaska Highway to the Toad River area to speak with some Elders there, a young Kaska friend told me there were two fire balls down the Cassiar highway. The next days the smoke was quite perceptable far to the east of the area the fire had ignited. I began to hear that the highway was closed south out of Watson Lake....not encouraging, as I needed to go that was to go down to the Skeena River to do some follow-up on last year's research on tumplines. Rumours began to circulate that the community of Lower Post would be evacuated...I returned with some anxiety to Watson Lake through the smoke plume, and when I arrived, massive smoke clouds filled the sky to the south, rising like a thunderhead at the west end, right down where the Stewart-Cassiar runs. At the barricade I was told they would likely convoy traffic through first thing the following day....there was some rain in the night, and indeed I was able to get through. At that point about 10 km of the highway passed through the smoking fire. Its estimated size then was about 3000hectares. Last I heard it was up to 15,000. The fire sparked my thinking about disturbance frequency, and whether the fire frequency may be changing....given that the boreal forest renews itself through episodic conflagration, it was hard to tell if this fire was unusual, or within the normal range of fire occurrence. Last year there was a large fire north of the Yukon border along the Cantung or Nahanni Range road....and when I was there in 2004 there were large fires at Contact Creek and at Swan Lake on the Alaska highway...this was one of the questions we asked the Elders about. When I got down to the Skeena River, the weather was so dry there were virtually no mosquitos....unheard of...and river levels were at a near record low. Sockeye salmon escapement is at about 1/3 normal for the second year running, and this reduction is not attributable to salmon farm sea lice as no fish farming is permitted off the north coast of BC. So--likely collapse of food chains in the mid Pacific due to global warming is the cause. Allen Gottesfeld, who works for the Gitxsan Watershed Authority pointed out this disturbing fact to me....commercial salmon fishing is now virtually extinct in Prince Rupert, formerly a city of canneries, and food fish for Tsimshian and Gitxsan are running low, prompting shifts to less preferred species (coho and spring/king salmon instead of the diminishing sockeye).