Big Animals in a Small Park
Yesterday, after we finished our morning walk, Molly the dog and I encountered two young moose. They were surprised to see us and made for the woods. I tend to think of moose as big and ungainly, but their movement, though quick, was graceful as they ran across an open area into the forest. Their disappearance was sudden and complete once they were in the woods. Gone.
Molly has seen moose before, and she is obviously impressed with them. Her response has been the same each time. She moves from standing to sitting and then watches, looking at the spot where the moose were last visible before disappearing.
I am impressed too. There is something thrilling about seeing a big animal in the Park. Part of the thrill, to be sure, is that such sightings are uncommon.. But the thrill reaches deeper than that, to something more basic in my own animal makeup. My guess would be that seeing big animals sharpens my sense that the Park still has some wildness left.
Being in the line of work that I am in at Acadia Partners, encounters such as this get me to asking questions. One persistent question is what we need to preserve in order to make sure that we are still being surprised by moose next year, five years from now, twenty years from now.
Freedom of movement is one clear answer. The Schoodic District of Acadia National Park is much too small to serve as the range for wild moose. The still undeveloped tract of private lands just north of the Park—lands that are actually larger than the Park itself—are an important element in our current ability to still experience “wildness†at Schoodic.
But there is more. Today, a pair of young moose can still make their way from the Park, across the privately owned land to the north, then over to Forbes Pond—which is almost wholly undeveloped—and head farther north all the way up to Schoodic Mountain, north of Sullivan, Maine. From there, a moose has relatively unimpeded access to a large area of woods and wetlands stretching all the way up to Route 9, out of Bangor. The one significant, deadly barrier to that movement is Route 1. As things stand today, if a moose can get the timing right crossing Route 1, he or she has access to a range of more than 100 square miles of moose habitat.
That is a lot of real estate helping to retain the sense of the wild on the 2400 acres that make up the Schoodic District.
Looking ahead twenty years or more, it seems likely that much of that land will be developed, very possibly as second homes or retirement homes. Before that happens, it is important to understand what we need to do—what do we need to protect—in order to preserve enough freedom of movement to ensure that someone walking on Schoodic some morning fifty years from now can still thrill to the sight of two young moose.
Obtaining that understanding starts with questions. Here are a few to get us started. How do moose move, today, across this range? Do they use the route from the Park across the lands to the north to Forbes Pond? (From the occasional dead moose on Route 195 by Forbes Pond, my guess would be yes – but we need to understand the movement in more detail.) Is Route 1 serving as a barrier that discourages movement, keeping moose mostly on one side or the other? If so, what kind of structures, such as an underpass for moose and other animals, might we put in place to open up the range? Where would we put such an underpass? What is the most critically important moose habitat on Schoodic? How about north of route 1?
As financial contributors to Acadia Partners already know, these are the kinds of questions that Acadia Partners exists to answer. This is the kind of research for which we raise money. And, of course, the same line of questioning applies to animals other than moose. There are, for example, important questions about movement and barriers to movement of sea run brook trout that the Schoodic Education and Research Center is just now beginning to consider, together with scientists from other organizations.
Acadia National Park is a small place. This is true for the whole Park, not just the Schoodic District. In general, Acadia depends greatly on movement between the protected zones of the Park and the much larger, still relatively undeveloped lands around the Park. Understanding how that movement works — and understanding what we need to have in place to ensure that the movement continues over the long run, — are among the key areas of scientific inquiry that we must find funding to pursue.
September 6th, 2006 at 11:10 am
[…] I have written before about the fact that Acadia is really a very small protected area. Its health depends on the larger, and largely unprotected ecosystem that extends beyond the Park boundaries, along the Downeast coast and inland all the way up to the County. The technologies and new ways of interacting that Friedman describes in The World is Flat create new opportunities to cooperate across agencies and across institutions to work on larger-scale conservation problems. In a flat world, it should be much easier to look at conservation from the standpoint of whole ecological regions–in our case, embracing much of New England and the Maritime Provinces in Canada. Acadia Partners and the Schoodic Education and Research Center are not staffed in a way that would allow us to become the center of such conservation efforts, but we can be active participants and contributors. More important, perhaps, we can take a leadership role in encouraging the development of such landscape-scale conservation work. […]