6/19/2023 0 Comments Living earth woodlands texas![]() The thickening woods offered habitat for innumerable other animals, for raven and coyote, for owl and deer and raccoon. ![]() They brought with them the rich nutrients of the open ocean, and, as bear, eagle, and otter feasted upon their spawning or spawned-out bodies, this abundant ocean nourishment was distributed more widely, enriching the soils and enabling the sparse, pioneer woodlands to fill out into dense forests.ģ These forests, in turn, shaded the inland streams, their detritus providing shelter and food for the aquatic insects and small fish upon whom the salmon themselves fed. ![]() As those inland waters were subsumed beneath the immense, spreading ice sheets, the fish were driven out into the ocean and forced to adapt, yet, somehow, they never lost their ancestral tie to the fresh mountain streams.Ģ Whenever the ice sheets retreated, salmon would colonize the rivers and tributaries formed by the glacial runoff, slowly establishing new spawning beds in valleys scoured out and scraped by the ice. The migratory ways of the salmon were likely born in response to the swelling and subsiding ice ages that have dominated their range after these fish evolved to their present form in the cold freshwater of the northern latitudes some two million years ago. Photo by Leaflet (2009), Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, wiki/Grus_canadensis#/media/File:Sandhill_Crane_Bailey_County_Texas_2009.jpgġ Not so long ago, almost every stream, river, and rill emptying into the North Pacific - from southern Japan to northern Siberia, around the huge Alaskan land mass and the Pacific coast of Canada all the way to southern California - supported one or more salmon runs, perfectly adapted to the dynamic ecology of that watershed. 2 Sandhill Crane in Flight, near Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge, Baily Country, Texas. ![]()
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