Cycles

Shrubs and trees explode in color. Forest flowers open to the unrestrained sun even as leaves emerge from tight buds to eventually shade out the forest floor. Everything is so familiar to me despite the three seasons we’ve been through since then. The script is the same even when the players differ.

That’s true in broad strokes. Late snow cover, early warm days – you can ignore climate change and still the stresses on living things are always at least subtly different this year from last year. Our feelings on the climate are skewed by the present, but trends can involve decades and more. So-called hundred year floods influence real locations of nutrients and plants. Our understanding is limited by the time frames individuals operate on, and since we may not experience rare events multiple times in our lifetime (or our working adult life) we’re often surprised by happenings that are frequent on a geologic time scale.

Crucial events often happen quickly, rarely, and in random places. Predation is like that. So many adaptations are meant to avoid predation, yet actually observing one animal killing another can take a lot of work and luck. Especially with larger carnivores which need to eat less often than a phoebe catching bugs out of the air. The only evidence left may be tufts of bloody fur, clumps of plucked feathers, or unpalatable dragonfly wings as delicate as gossamer.

The world around us is shaped by unseen events and the long-term action of natural laws. History echoes in DNA, dramas played out over eons. Species dance together, for example flowers and their pollinators. Sometimes both groups mutually benefit from their interactions and sometimes one group tries to gain unfair advantages. Other dances are purely antagonistic, like when plants develop defenses to ward off herbivores. Even here competition can become cooperation, as when the toxin caffeine causes humans to spread coffee plants across the tropics.

The history explaining why a community lives in a specific area is also grand compilation of individual stories. Skunk cabbage seeds are swept along by streams, aspen seeds on the wind. Shakespeare enthusiasts import European starlings which now flourish in our fields and cities. Ants carry trillium seeds along through the forest. The world around us has always been in flux, just sometimes in more extreme ways than others.