Of Furry rockets

Today I witnessed one of the more comic and tragic moments of the year, thus far... a squirrel flung into the air like a furry rocket.

To give a bit of background, I've been at Peck Ranch in southern Missouri in the foothills of the Ozarks. The area is owned by the Missouri Department of Conservation and run as a wildlife preserve. We help out with different tasks since their staff is so small: invasive removal, felling Red Cedar, burning brush piles, etc.

Most recently we've been working on a few fire lines in preparation for this year's fast-approaching fire season. This involves bucking logs (cutting into manageable pieces), breaking up jackpots (putting fallen trees onto the ground and separating large fuel piles), and moving all fuel 75 feet from the control line. The other main task is to fell snags (standing dead trees) that are close enough to the control line.

Snags, being dead wood, have a greater tendency to catch fire than their green counterparts and can torch the fire into the treetops. This could lead to crowning, but more often it leads to shooting sparks beyond the control line and starting spot fires. During fires, one of the main tasks for mop-up is to get rid of any burning snags by putting them on the ground via chainsaw or dozer.

Another element of snags, besides a fire and falling hazard, is their positive role as habitat trees. The dead wood harbors a lot of woodland creatures and supports the environment as a source for food and shelter. That is, grubs and other insects eat the wood, woodpeckers bore into the wood to eat the grubs, and birds or squirrels will use those holes as a den.

This brings us to today's moment. My job for the day was to swamp (move logs and sticks), which is very repetitive and easy to get distracted from. In one of my moments of distraction, I looked up at a snag that one of my teammates was in the last moments of felling. The tree began to lean, the holding wood popped, and the tree began its descent. I'll never forget the scene next.

On the top fork of the tree was a knot hole, and as the trunk popped askew a furry woodland creature popped its head out as if to say, "Oh, Expletive!" As the tree barreled sideways, the squirrel shot out of the hole like a cannonball. To give a little scope, this was far up. Maybe 50+ feet. This was also in the middle of a glade, so there was nothing but ground to welcom it. It was the squirrel equivalent of base jumping but without a parachute. I couldn't help but blurt out an amazed chortle at the ridiculous sight. When the tree hit the ground, it did as all trees do-- with a mighty 'thud.' The sound drove home the gravity of the situation: that there might very well be a squirrel-shaped splatter somewhere on the ground nearby.

In curiosity or concern, I decided to investigate. I scanned the wreckage of the tree for where the poor wretch would have come down, but found no trace of it. Lucky for it, the surface-to-mass ratio for squirrels is pretty favorable for a fall like that. It turned a funny-situation-turned-grizzly back into a funny one.

Unfortunately a minor tragedy replaced that momentary comedy. I kept investigating where it's home used to be and found two infant squirrels not long for this world. So much for ending on a high note.

This whole scene made an impression on my most of the morning that I didn't know what to make out of. It seems like a trifle, the life of a few small mammals, but if anyone has ever heard the *thump, thump* of their first roadkill you know it is a jarring moment. Years ago when my brother was a pizza delivery driver, he came home shaken and recontemplating his whole job decision after making shreds out of a poor sparrow with his car.

What thoughts did come to me were perhaps the idea of the jumping squirrel as a metaphor for my life right now. I'm just getting to the point where I'm being forced to take a leap into the unknown without much of a safety net. Right now I know that grad school is a complete no-go for this year, and I've made the goal to move out to Colorado to do work at CSU as a research assistant as soon as my AmeriTerm is up. The key will be finding a research job, an apartment, and a social circle once I'm there.

The other idea the scene left me with was a concrete example of a lot of the things about conservation that have been bothering me for a while. There are some inherent contradictions that I haven't been able to iron out yet. My preconceptions of my work would be doing something nurturing and restorative to the land. Really, I'll I've been doing is killing. I've been ripping out, cutting, and poisoning invasive plants. I've been knocking down habitat trees to make fire management easier. I've been putting scars in the earth so that people can more easily walk into the woods and possibly do damage to it. It sometimes seems that what I do is either futile or counter-productive.

Really, the long-sighted view of things is that all this destruction is a net positive. Killing some plants allows a greater diversity of native species to grow. Those habitat trees could have torched in a fire and created greater damage. Trails do cause erosion, but getting people into the woods in order to educate them and make them appreciate nature is also important to the woods' survival.

I guess I'm glad that I'm still thinking about these things and feeling some guilt in 'playing God' with the environment. It means that I'm not blindly having pride in my work without understanding it or-- even worse-- feeling like some conqueror there to do mankind's will on the land.

The most important thing to take away is that nature probably doesn't need me to restore it. It can do that itself. What it needs me to do is to take responsibility for the mistakes that people have made in the past and be a steward to allow it to do what it should be doing.