Global Warming and the Future of Isle Royale – a blind flaneur

Search
About the Flaneur

I walk through my blindness the way I saunter down streets in Paris: unfettered and alive, enchanted and engaged by the raw material of the senses. I am a blind flaneur. Come along with me. Just don’t try to take my arm, unless I ask. What’s a flaneur? Read the first post, Return of the Flaneur to Galerie Vivienne. After that, try Foot Rage and the Blind Flaneur. If you don’t find me on the street, take a look in the Fair Use Lab. You can browse the archives or contact me.
Brendan the Navigator

"Brendan, this is what the world looks like all the time to me. Just a little fog. It’s a fine day for boating on the Great Lakes.” Without missing a stroke he turned to dart a skeptical glance at me. Brendan the Navigator. When we named him I didn’t tell his mother everything the legendary Irish name implied. But I imagined him taking on the role of navigator for me. Growing up with Coastal Survey charts and tales of Great Lakes shipwrecks, he came to know Superior as another home. He never doubted the wisdom of canoeing there with a father who was half blind. Read more.
ADA 20th Anniversary

On its 20th anniversary, pundits will debate what the Americans with Disabilities Act has accomplished. I still believe what I said in a TV interview after the ADA signing ceremony in 1990. “The ADA will not end disability discrimination overnight. But in a nation governed by the rule of law, getting it in writing is the place to start.” So what is the ADA's legacy? A Generation of Problem-Solvers.
Re-Imagining Accessibility

Re-imagining accessibility through the transformations of culture -- particularly the transformative promise of accessible technology for people with disabilities -- is the work of the Fair Use Lab. What does Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster have to do with accessibility? Read more: Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]
Fair Use Lab
Blind Photographers

In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in New York, the social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it. Paul Strand probably didn’t give her much credit for making culture, either. Read more: Curiosity & The Blind Photographer [MiT5 2007] See more on blind photographers.
Photo Flânerie
Not This Pig

If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).
Café Mouffe
Imaging Paris: Dada Muse

The legendary Kiki of Montparnasse posed for Man Ray’s Le violin de Ingres (1924). See more from Imaging Paris.
Archives
Yellow Springs 2.0

What is a village? A small place, yes, as wide as the world, layered with histories and stories, where you can walk wherever you want to go. My vision of that place is Yellow Springs 2.0.
Linking Out

Global Warming and the Future of Isle Royale

1 July 30, 2008 at 6:00am by Mark Willis

A bull moose wades in the water at Isle Royale National Park. [Photo by Jim Scurlock, a winner in Lake Superior Magazine's 1998 photo contest]

You don’t have to look for polar bears in Greenland to find the impact of global warming on wildlife. Climate change now threatens the dynamic balancing act between moose and wolves at Isle Royale, the largest island in Lake Superior and one of the least-visited U.S. national parks. According to the Washington Post:

Researchers monitor both populations by plane overflights early in the year. This spring, they counted 23 wolves and about 650 moose, down sharply from the highs of 50 wolves in 1980 and almost 2,500 moose in 1995. In 2006, moose numbers hit a record low of 385.

With the exception so far of this year, summers over the last decade have been unseasonably warm on Isle Royale. Moose thrive in frigid boreal climates, but when the mercury rises above 60 degrees Fahrenheit, their heart and respiration rates increase, and every step is an effort. They spend warm days resting or submerged in water rather than eating the 40 pounds of vegetation a day they need to fatten up for the winter, when the only food sources are twigs and fir trees.

A hot summer means weaker and older moose may die from heat stress. Come next winter and spring, many others will starve because they ate too little during summer. Or they will be so weak, they will be easy prey for the wolves.

“It all started in 1998,” said study director Rolf Peterson, a research professor at Michigan Technological University. “Moose were dropping dead of starvation right in front of park visitors.”

The heat also encourages ticks that make moose miserable. Later onset of winter means more time for the blood-sucking ticks to latch onto a moose, and earlier springs mean more success for tick eggs.

Over the winter, a tick-infested moose may need to replace 100 percent of its blood. They also rub, bite and scratch off their hair in an effort to rid themselves of the insects. This spring, said study co-director John Vucetich, the average moose had lost 75 percent of its hair, and one in four had lost 95 percent.

“There were bare-naked moose running around,” he said.

No one thinks the moose, which arrived on Isle Royale about 100 years ago by swimming from the mainland, will disappear. But with fewer moose, the wolves could be doomed. Desperate wolves have been seen chomping on old moose bones and even eating green apples from trees. Read more.

Ever since I heard about this story last week on Michigan Radio’s Environment Report, Isle Royale has been on my mind. I’ve been canoing and writing about the island for years (see the essay about Brendan the Navigator), and now it’s time to turn my blog attention in that direction.

Tagged Isle Royale · Lake Superior · ecology

1 Comments

#1. a blind flaneur » Dress a Moose for America 09.04.2008

[...] of those elephants and donkeys? Hold on, the moose is making a comeback. Not since the days of Teddy Roosevelt has this majestic, if ludicrously [...]

Leave a Comment