I started to write an epistle on my endeavors to modify my landscape to attract wildlife. I wrote many paragraphs of conventional-wisdom boiler-plate when I realized that I did not entirely believe it. That is one of the fine things about writing. It forces you to slow down and think.

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We are all products of the path we have followed through life. I am who I am because of the choices I saw and the decisions I made. Others would have seen other paths. Others would have chosen other paths.

I have a confession to make. I like fishing for smallmouth bass. I happen to live near the Grand River. The stretch between Grand Ledge and Portland is excellent fishing.

The things I like most about smallmouths are their eagerness and predictability. It is a mistake to call them stupid. Rather, they are finely tuned to survive in their environment. The Grand River is a very fertile river. No crystal-clear water here! My favorite stretchs alternate wide, shallow, rocky stretches of fast moving water with deeper, slow moving pools. The rocky stretches, being wide, receive much sunlight and grow much seaweed. Wade the shallow stretches and you will see schools of minnows. Walk the gravel bars and you cannot take a stepwithout crunching clam and snail shells and crayfish remnants. The best stretches have bottoms where rock is bigger than hen eggs. Bottoms with smaller stone are as sterile as gravel driveways. It is easy to see why. The carp fin over those bottoms like robotic vacuum cleaners, sucking up the gravel and suckigg all the life out of it.

The murky water, and the brisk current effect the smallmouths in two major ways.

First, the fish become highly visual and impulsive. The water is too noisy to hunt by sound and too turbulent to rely on scent. The range of vision is short, so it is better to strike at potential food before the current sweeps it out of the cone-of-attack. The bass can always spit-out if the "prey" is not edible (and does not have hooks). Fussy eaters don't eat.

The second consequence is that there is a distinct hierarchy of "loafing" spots. The prime spot has the alpha fish. The best loafing spots are characterized by a diminished current and a large cone-of-attack. The slower current allows the fish to remain suspended with minimum work. The large cone-of-attack means that maximum amount of food is swept by the fish. Food minus work is life. Typical loafing spots are behind and in front of boulders, just behind the drop-off underneath a rapids shoots into a pool, and log jams. The more unforgiving the river, the more reliably one can find fish in the prime loafing spots.

And what of the fish that are not big enough to hold a loafing spot? They are prey. Every poker game has at least one patsy. And if you do not know who the patsy is, well, you are the patsy. Eventually some of the patsies get big enough to occupy the lowest quality loafing spots and their growth-rate takes off. Fitness. adaptability and luck (i.e., not being home when the grim reaper calls) allow the individual fish to grow and thereby hold onto better and better loafing spots. Each spot offers better food-minus-work characteristics and increases the fish's growth rate...making less susceptible to predation by other fish.

This is called a positive feedback loop. More size means better loafing spots. Better loafing spots translate to faster growth. Faster growth means more size which means even better loafing spots.

God rolls the dice a million times when He works the gaming table of life. The differences between the winners and losers can be microscopic. The differences hinge on the two games of thermodynamics and predation.

And this is where my view of wildlife management is at odds with the pros. The professionals say that we are to envision the habitat as an old-fashioned, wooden water barrel. Mentally picture that some lunatic took a saw and cut the tops of the staves to different lengths. The barrel can only hold as much water as the height of the shortest stave. The only way to increase the capacity of the barrel is to increase the shortest stave, the limiting factor. The conventional wisdom goes on at great length enumerating the number of staves (16 in one book) and categorizing them by type: "food plants, cover, structural elements...."

It isn't that complicated.

1. Food minus work is life.
2. Thermodynamics and predation.

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Quality matters:

A few other incidents have been instrumental in forming my views on landscaping for wildlife. The most eloquent was a paper about the feeding habits of baboons in a book edited by Marvin Harris. First thing in the morning, the troop of 'boons would go down to the tall-grass marsh and start picking grasshoppers off the stems. 'hoppers are sluggish in the cool of the morning and are a concentrated source of protein and fat (calories). Three things happen with the rising morning heat, the 'hoppers get faster, the 'hoppers get farther apart and the thermals develop to where the buzzards can circle. At some point (known only to the baboons) the grasshoppers get too sparse and too fast and it becomes thermodynamically more economical to use the circling buzzards to locate carrion from the previous nights kills. Again, a gimmick and high protein, high calorie food. After polishing the bones of the kills, the baboons run to the fruit trees to mop up any fruit that is approaching ripeness after they polished off the bones from last nights kills.

The key point is the cascading effect from highest quality to lowest quality. The baboons switched to the next lowest quality food source when the prefered source was depleted. And they worked down this heirarchy every day.

Another formative event was to hunt in an orchard. I had hunted the area for several years before the neighbor convinced me I was walking too far afield. Sure I would see two or three deer, but I never had enough in front of me that I could get rock-solid shots at really good animals. Either the shot was good and the animal was not or the animal was awesome but out-of-range or deep in the pucker-brush. The first night I sat in the orchard I saw twenty-three deer. Holy cow! They came out of the swamp and ate the windfalls. In the years that followed, the best time to hunt was when there were a few windfalls every night and the deer had to hustle to get their share. The hunting was not is good in the "on" years when there were so many windfalls that the deer could be completely nocturnal and still get their fill. Excess food allows them to take their time. That is why gross bait piles often fail to attract deer during the huntable hours.

Finally, I got into rotational grazing. I bought and read books about animal science and forage crops, grazed and otherwise. There is an extremely strong link between forage quality and animal performance. A beef cow will lose condition on dried grass with 50% Total Digestible Nutrients but will conceive easily and both calf and momma will grow fat and sassy on 70% TDN hay. Note that reproduction is when the most nutrition demands are made on an animal. Not only will animals eat more when presented with higher quality food, they digest it faster so they eat more frequently. (TDN is dry weight of food in minus dry weight of poop out, turned into a percentage. It was the first, and simplest, way of quantifying food quality).

Number of offspring is best leading indicator of habitat quality:

Another thing that makes high quality food a must is that animals that are in a high state of nutrition will super-ovulate while animals that are stressed for food will either not ovulate or will abort some of the fetuses (fetii?). This is nature's way of exploiting prime habitat (or weather conditions) and minimizing risk.

The need to exploit prime habitat can result from an epidemic sweeping away the majority of your competition. It can result from a fire clearing brush/trees and putting more forage at mouth-level. It can be a return of the rains after a 100 year drought or the return of normal weather after an exceptionally severe winter.

The plasticity in birth numbers works in reverse too. In the event of crummy weather/food supply after conception, the mom can abort some or all of the fetuses (fetii?) After all, it is better to abort one fetus and wean one offspring that to give birth to two and have both die prior to weaning. This "plasticity" does not occur in breeds that originate in certain kinds of climates. These climates are characterized by sporatic rainfall. It is as if evolution taught them that one excellent month does not signify a climate shift. Many of the finest wooled sheep breeds (originating in Asia Minor and Northern Africa) do not have birthrate plasticity.

A little side note: domestic animals have almost no food constraints and should have evolved to extrodinary levels of fecundity. Since most species (cows and sheep) have not, it must be that man has been inadvertently selecting against fecundity. Take sheep for example. Ewes that have mostly singles, mostly twins or mostly triplets are not rare. If man exerted no selection pressure, and food and weather were not a constraint, then the ewes that had triplets would out number the strain of ewes that had singles by a thousand-to-one after six generations. So what happened? Likely, the shepherds selected for large size and rapid growth rate. The shepherds were not sophisticated enough to properly "handicap" the singles and twins. He unknowingly selects for singles by keeping a disproportionate share of his largest (in absolute terms) lambs for replacement ewes and rams. We have seen an increase in the number of fawns (i.e. more triplets and fewer singles), and I believe it is due to a genetic shift to exploit the increase in prime habitat.