Paul Hetzler

Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

Names are important, as opinions are often formed based on our cultural conditioning. Even if you never watched an episode of the 1960s American sit-com Gilligan’s Island, you could probably guess that the character named Thurston Howell III wasn’t the down-home farmer from Kansas, and that Mary Ann Summers was not the millionaire on the show.

Fiction writers like to play on common beliefs to convey good or bad through their characters’ names. And sometimes, they use this ploy to turn stereotypes on their head when characters are the opposite of what their names imply, like the hard-boiled, monster-killing teen protagonist of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series.

For better or worse, what we think about the natural world can be shaped by names as well. One might assume vampire squids are dangerous, but they aren’t. Cone snails look harmless, but their sting can kill you. And one’s thoughts on blue-footed boobies depends on whether or not one is an adolescent boy.

My any other name

In many cases, plant names suit them quite well. Poison ivy and giant hogweed don’t sound the least bit enticing, which is good, because they’re dangerous to touch. And based on its names, you’d likely avoid dodder, a.k.a hellbine or devil’s shoelaces, even before you learned it is an orange-tentacled parasitic plant that sucks the life out of crops.

A few species don’t deserve the label “weed,” which brands them as undesirable. And yet, Jewelweed, which is related to cultivated impatiens flowers, has none of the bad habits of real weeds. Its orange (or yellow) orchid-like flowers attract hummingbirds and butterflies, and its sap has long been used to counteract poison ivy.

Milkweed, however, can act like a typical weed, but it is critical to the survival of monarch butterflies, and lots of people plant it in butterfly gardens or let it grow if it volunteers on their property. At certain stages of growth, milkweed is delicious when cooked properly.

Some plants more worthy of the title “weed” still have redeeming qualities. The bane of many land managers, Japanese knotweed is so invasive that it’s illegal in most places to plant or move. However, its young shoots make a fair substitute for rhubarb, and its roots show promise as a treatment for certain cancers. And while redroot pigweed, a type of wild amaranth, is a nuisance in some crops and vegetable gardens, its leaves are nutritious and tasty.

A favourite wildflower is so unfairly maligned by awful monikers that the record needs to be set straight about it. This 20- to 40-centimetre-tall beauty is not only attractive, it’s a potent medicinal plant. For some reason, it has garnered nicknames that include gagroot, vomitwort and pukeweed. What a marketing debacle! Many know it as Indian tobacco, which is not problem-free as a name, but at least it’s less negative. Fortunately, because this plant is in the genus Lobelia, you’ll generally find it listed as blue lobelia.

It’s a close relative of the bright-red cardinal flower, Lobelia cardinalis, which bursts into flaming bloom along stream and pond banks in late summer and early fall. Though not as showy as its crimson cousin, blue lobelia, Lobelia inflata, it is attractive in its own right. Its pale, blue-violet flowers first appear in mid-summer and continue until the first freeze. Pollinated flowers give way to inflated seed capsules that remain on the stem.

But heed warnings

This is the part of the program for a warning: consult your health-care provider before using lobelia, and to only use it under their supervision. Blue lobelia is a potent and effective medicine, but like many drugs, like insulin and digitalis, is dangerous in large amounts.

At the time of European contact, blue lobelia was widely used as a medicine by First Nations peoples over the extent of its range, which was all of eastern North America, from as far north as the Canadian tundra, down to northern Florida. As its less-flattering nicknames suggest, this plant will induce vomiting at high doses, a feature that has been used to save lives in case of accidental poisonings.

It is perhaps best known for its ability to help relieve the symptoms of asthma. One of blue lobelia’s key constituents, lobeline, accounts for the herb’s ability to relax bronchial tubes, open airways and stimulate breathing. It has been traditionally smoked in small amounts, although today it is also available as a tincture or in capsule form. Occasionally it is combined with other herbs and used as a chest or sinus rub.

Nicotine like

Structurally, lobeline does not resemble nicotine, although it affects the body in many of the same ways. This may relate to its long history in helping people kick the tobacco habit. Studies suggest that lobeline could help treat stimulant abuse. It seems that lobeline alters the way stimulants act on dopamine receptors, the brain’s “feel-good reward centre,” disrupting the way dopamine is stored and released. 

As impressive as its CV is, I appreciate blue lobelia most for its flowers. For it to be more widely accepted, though, I think someone should get this amazing plant a good public-relations team.

Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

Meeting romantic partners has always been fraught with issues like the fear of rejection, and maybe angst over an ill-timed acne outbreak. With over half of couples having met online, singles have more potential mates from which to choose, although having too many options can itself cause stress.

At first glance, wild animals have it easy when it comes to finding mates.

When female spongy-moths are in the mood, they just release a few molecules of sex pheromone, and guy-moths flock to them, eager to please. No dating profiles needed. And when a male white-tailed deer encounters a female during her heat cycle, she’ll hook up with him even if he doesn’t take her to a nice restaurant first. Sounds refreshingly simple compared with our modern dating scene.

The downside for spongy-moths is that within a few days, they all die. Most of their lives are spent as caterpillars, and their adult-phase romances are fleeting. For deer, the bucks get free-range sex for about two straight months, after which they’re celibate until the next fall.

While many species are all about hookups, what seems like emotional intimacy can be found in nature, too. Male and female great blue herons pair up exclusively all season, both helping to build the nest and feed the young, and the couple will coo and touch bills affectionately. However, these love-birds break up once their chicks are grown, finding new mates the following year.

Some species are not easy

Such troubles are petty when you consider the dangers of sexual cannibalism. Female black widow spiders and praying mantises often eat their male suitors right after, or even in the midst of, the mating process. The list of animals that lunch while they love includes a few snake species, notably the green anaconda, as well as scorpions.

Biologists don’t agree on what drives sexual cannibalism. Bizarrely, “mistaken identity” is on the list of possibilities. I suppose if Ms. Mantis swipes right on Mr. Hunk, and Mr. Mediocre shows up instead, that might set her off.

There’s also sexual parasitism, which is equally enticing. Anglerfish, with their needle-sharp teeth and weird fishing poles sprouting from their heads, are creepy by nature. Though many species ply shallow waters and have safe, if boring, sex, deep-sea anglerfish (found at depths of between roughly 800 to 8,000) have a mating ritual that’s beyond horrific.

Male anglerfish don’t survive

For ages, only female deep-sea anglerfish were found. The missing-male puzzle resolved when a female turned up with her mate (males are much smaller than females) melded to her like a giant zit. This fusion-mating process was actually filmed in 2018. Here’s the scene: after the usual small-talk, the male anglerfish bites into the female’s underside and holds on. The female gradually absorbs the male, integrating their blood vessels so that he gets free nourishment. Whether in a state of intimate bliss or abject terror, he slowly melts into her until nothing’s left but his sperm factory, which becomes a permanent sex organ of the female, allowing her to lay fertilized eggs at will.

But males don’t always get the short end of the stick. There are at least two kinds of spiders where males occasionally eat older females. Mating also doesn’t go well for female bed bugs, who actively avoid males. These nasty bugs mate through traumatic insemination, which is exactly what it sounds like. Male bed bugs inseminate females right into their body cavities after puncturing them, resulting in female injury and some deaths.

On the species level, sex is worth the numerous risks and costs because it leads to genetic recombination (in addition to offspring). Advantages include a more diverse and, thus, more adaptable genome. A new adaptation may help a species adjust to changing conditions, or allow it to exploit a novel food source.

Finding another way

All the same, quite a few species “decided” the fuss and muss of locating (and surviving) a mate was too much bother, and went to an asexual family plan, where mothers make female babies from unfertilized eggs. It’s a clever trick called parthenogenesis (PG), meaning “virgin creation.” The term has the same root as the Parthenon, the ancient Greek temple dedicated to the goddess Athena Parthenos, or “Athena the Virgin.”

For a species, one of the benefits of PG is that critters can multiply a lot faster than through sexual reproduction, and by so doing, can take advantage of new habitats or food sources more quickly than their competitors. While parthenogenesis happens in just 10 to 15 per cent of invertebrates, it occurs in almost half of all genera that are known crop pests, like aphids, mites, and scale insects. Curiously, the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive pest that kills hemlock trees, is parthenogenic here, but reproduces sexually in its home range of Japan. The list of vertebrates known to make babies through PG includes some lizards, turtles, snakes, sharks, and at least one bird.

The downside of PG is that without genetic recombination, the only variety in the genome is from mutations caused by damage to DNA from chemicals, UV rays or other factors. Parthenogenic species are less likely to successfully adapt to big changes brought by wildfires, floods or the sudden loss of a favoured food.

Given some of nature’s wild options for linking up with a mate, I’ll take the risk of duplicity and disappointment in online dating any time. Now, if I can just learn how to photoshop my yearbook picture onto Hugh Jackman’s body for my dating profile, I’m sure I’ll get loads of hits.

Paul Heztler
The Advocate

Europeans weren’t entirely inept at naming plants and animals. For example, they called a large brown bat species the “big brown bat.” Kudos for accuracy.

A few labels missed the target, though, like the native sunflower dubbed the “Jerusalem artichoke,” even though it’s related to neither the Middle East nor to artichokes.

Meanwhile, some names are partly right: the tufted titmouse has a tuft, but it’s a songbird, not a mouse.

And the great blue heron (Ardea herodias), the largest North American heron, is definitely great, but if you’re thinking royal or cobalt, you’ll be disappointed. Some are more brownish, and one subspecies in Florida is all-white. But hey, two out of three accurate names ain’t bad.

To be fair, most great blue herons in our part of the world are primarily a light grey-blue colour at rest. When they take to the air, the darker blue flight feathers are exposed, showing off their snazzy two-tone flight suits. Juveniles tend to dress entirely in drab blue, but adults sport a bright orange-yellow beak, a white crown and a dark head crest.

Obviously, they’re big, although females are about 10-per-cent smaller than males. The great blue heron ranges from 114 to 137 centimetres tall, with a wingspan between 168 and 200 cm. Weight can vary from 1.8 to 3.6 kilograms. 

Found across Canada, U.S.

Great blues are found throughout most of North America. Their breeding range can extend far into the north, close to the Arctic Circle, while their winter territory encompasses most of Central America. On the Pacific coast, from Alaska south to Mexico and across the southern half of the U.S., herons can be found year-round.

One of the reasons great blue herons are so widely distributed is that they are generalist feeders, making them highly adaptable. Their menus range from fish, frogs and turtles to insects, small mammals and water birds. Great blues hunt mostly in freshwater environments, but are at home in saltwater marshes and tidal pools. In fact, they sometimes frequent Caribbean islands as far south as the Lesser Antilles.

Equipped with harpoon bills and impressive reflexes, herons are well-suited to hunting.  But their bills are also used affectionately during courtship, to communicate (bill-snapping), and as you might expect, for protection.

Ages ago I became licensed by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation as a wildlife rehabilitator. In the study guide for the written exam, one item that became etched into my mind was a graphic of a heron stabbing someone in the eyeball.

Don’t get too close

Yeah. It turns out you have to cover an injured heron with a blanket before you pick it up. So whenever my daughter, whose name is Heron, picks up scissors or another sharp tool, I always afford her an added measure of respect.

Great blue herons start breeding in their second year, and if they live to their species potential, might continue for another 15 years. They are monogamous during each breeding season, but get to “remarry” every spring.

The preferred heron nest location is high in a mature tree in a wetland. In our region this often means a dead tree within a beaver pond. In remote areas, human disturbance is more likely to disrupt their reproductive success, though herons have been known to acclimate to highways and other human infrastructure. They nest in groups, occasionally with hundreds of nests in a single colony. Apparently, the correct term is a heronry, though I had always called it a rookery. In technical parlance, these nesting sites are “wicked cool.”

Messy housekeepers

The coarse, unkempt nests of sticks are striking to behold, ranging from 130 to 170 centimetres across with depths of 50 to 80 cm. Generally, the nests are used year after year, getting refurbished every spring. Egg clutches vary from two to six, with more in the far north to compensate for a lower chick-survival rate. In southern Canada, the number is listed as “between 3.9 and 4.1,” which most people would call “four.”

Since herons return to their nests by dusk, you can surmise the direction of a heronry by watching the direction it takes. If you are fortunate enough to find a heronry, bring binoculars and keep your distance. You may be treated to the return ritual when adults return to the nest. Both males and females incubate eggs and feed the young.

Adults may touch bills with their mate in a show of affection before lovingly barfing pre-digested fish and frog mush into the open beaks of their babies. I have seen the young waiting for dad or mom to come back with carry-in food, their beaks pointed upward and waving gently like some strange nest-grass blowing in the wind.

Hear them as they pass

For many years I lived on a piece of land in the St. Lawrence Valley studded with a beaver pond. It had two distinct, though small, heronries, and a few herons would wing by each evening near dark and let out their alarm call, a guttural “gronk” as they passed. But herons have a broader repertoire of voices. They coo and cluck to each other on the nest, and clack their bills.

Another cool fact is that within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (also known as Iroquois or Six Nations), the kinship system of three of the nations – Seneca, Cayuga and Onondaga – include the heron among their clans.

Herons also mark the seasons for me. I take note of the first heron sighting in the spring, and of the last time I see one in the late fall or early winter.

Even though great blue herons are big, weapon-wielding birds that surround themselves with water, they still fall prey to eagles, hawks and great horned owls. Since herons are a top or near-top predator, they are also vulnerable to environmental toxins that get magnified at each level of the food chain. Human disturbance and habitat loss are other challenges faced by herons.

In the past they were frequently shot for the same reason that road signs get shot – they are big targets that even a fool can hit – but this is a lesser threat now. In spite of everything, the Audubon Society lists their population as “probably stable.” I hope that’s an accurate report.

Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

Being a descendant of Irish and German immigrants, I think it’s right to give new arrivals a warm welcome. With one exception: six-legged migrants coming ashore in North America should be viewed with a skeptical eye.

Sure, a few insects from overseas are beneficial, but that doesn’t stop them from bugging us. Asian multicoloured lady beetles (Harmonia axyridis), first imported by the U.S. in 1916 to control aphids and other crop pests, now appear in droves each fall looking for rent-free winter digs. While they do eat bad bugs and don’t actively cause harm, large numbers can find their way indoors and become a nuisance.

Some invasive species clearly harm the ecosystem, as well as the economy. The emerald ash borer (EAB, Agrilus planipennis), native to China and the Russian far east, is a case in point. Discovered in 2002 near Windsor, Ont., this forest pest is now decimating ash trees in parts of Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

One fairly recent arrival is both a nuisance and an economic and environmental threat, a foul character indeed. Native to eastern Asia, the brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB, Halyomorpha halys) was first detected in Ontario in 2010. In 2014, BMSB turned up in an orchard in the Franklin region, in southwest Quebec, and then in the Montreal region in 2016, and is expected to spread across southern Quebec. In addition to Ontario and Quebec, BMSB is now in British Columbia, Alberta and P.E.I.

Hard to control

This pest uses a straw-like beak to suck the life out of plants, especially fruits and vegetables, bringing heartbreak to gardeners and economic losses to orchardists. Not only is BMSB hard to control with pesticides, it has no real predators. As a result, populations can build rapidly.

According to The Invasive Species Centre: “BMSB is a serious agricultural pest because its adults and nymphs feed on over 35 fruiting crops, causing damage to the fruit flesh and skin, making them unsuitable for food markets, but feeding from BMSB is not limited to agricultural crops. BMSB has over 170 confirmed non-crop hosts in North America and is a landscape-level pest that moves between non-crop and crop hosts during the growing season. Research on this pest is ongoing to determine the extent of its potential impacts as well the efficacy of monitoring, management and control options that are available.”

The term “marmorated” refers to the bands of light and dark colours around the insect’s abdomen.

Immature forms, or nymphs, change colour and shape as they moult, progressing through a series of life-stages called instars. Hatchlings (first instars) are roughly 2.4 millimetres long, with an orange abdomen and a black thorax. Second-instar BMSBs are mostly black, and instars three through five are mottled brown with one white band on each leg and antenna. Their eggs, typically found in clusters of 20-25 on the undersides of leaves, are roughly 1.6 mm long by 1.3 mm wide. Pale green at first, they later turn white, with red eye-spots developing just before they hatch.

The shield-shaped adult BMSB is 14-17 mm long, with smooth, rounded “shoulders.” It is best identified by its colour pattern, marbled brown and off-white on top with alternating bands of brown and off-white on its antennae and along the edges of the abdomen. One of the better ways to tell BMSB from similar native species is by the two light bands on each antenna. In the spring, BMSB adults emerge from mid-April to early June and feed for two weeks before mating. They damage crops in all life stages, injecting destructive enzymes as they suck plant juices.

Fruits to corn targeted

In the U.S., the “Punaise diabolique” has wreaked havoc in peach, apple and cherry orchards, especially in the mid-Atlantic region and along the west coast, with losses totalling in the tens of millions. The BMSB has also caused great harm to berry crops, as well as to corn, tomatoes and other veggies in 46 states.

But you can’t put a price on tranquility if your house is overrun with BMSB. As they become more established in an area, they seek shelter as cool fall weather sets in. In their native range (where predators keep their numbers down), they often hide under loose tree bark. But in North America, Australia and New Zealand, where nothing munch on them, populations go through the roof, and they swarm into attics and walls in such great numbers that people have swept up buckets of the stinkers.

And removing them is not fun. As their name suggests, they emit a pungent odour when disturbed or killed. They also leave enduring stains when crushed.

Unfortunately, BMSB will keep coming out of the literal woodwork over time, so the weapon of choice is a vacuum. Be advised this might make your hoover smell for a while. A shop vac that lives in a garage or shed is ideal, but taping an old nylon to the hose end creates a mini-bag where bugs get trapped and can be tossed into soapy water where they’ll drown in minutes.

Above all else, managing BMSB at home means excluding them. To that end, here are a few tips:

    • Weather-strip entry doors and inspect door sweeps.

    • Caulk windows inside and out.

    • Rake debris and vegetation from your home’s foundation. Inspect for and seal foundation cracks.

   • When insulating exposed plumbing pipes around foundation or crawl spaces, caulk small gaps and fill larger ones with steel wool.

    • If you have a fireplace, screen the top of the chimney to keep out pests.

We may soon get help from the samurai wasp, a tiny non-stinging wasp native to parts of Asia. It’s a parasitoid, laying its eggs on the BMSB eggs. As wasp eggs hatch, the larvae eat the BMSB eggs.

The wasp suddenly appeared in 2019 in British Columbia, where BMSB was already a major pest. By 2021, the samurai wasp was destroying about 80 per cent of BMSB eggs. Researchers in B.C. expect that samurai wasps will naturally spread to other regions where BMSB has become established, but it will take many years for wasp numbers to catch up with pest populations.  Unfortunately, the stinkers are here to stay, but there is at least one natural control agent to help keep the Punaise diabolique in check.

Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

One of our native residents has an adorable face, makes welcome mats out of their own poop, openly carries weapons and plows snow all winter. If you snowshoe or cross-country ski, there’s a good chance you’ll come across its furrows. Often, these trails will dead-end at a large tree, and if you look up, you might actually see the rascal itself, a ball of fur and quills sleeping among the branches.

One of 29 species worldwide, the North American porcupine is found throughout nearly all of Canada. Growing to 50 centimetres long and weighing as much as 15 kilograms, it’s the second-largest North American rodent behind the beaver. It’s the only cold-hardy porcupine in the world, and one of the few that regularly climb trees.

Their name derives from the Latin for “quill pig,” but my Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) friends call them anêntaks, literally, “bark eaters.” Reportedly, this is a less-than-endearing term they applied ages ago to their Algonquin neighbours, with whom they once shared hunting grounds in what is now northern New York State.

The Kanien’kehá:ka, like all six member nations in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, have a long history as agronomists. The Algonquins, who were mainly hunter-gatherers at the time, wisely knew that the inner bark of pine, maple, elm and other trees is nutritious. This is, in fact, how the Adirondack (anêntaks) Mountains got their name.

Active all winter

These rodents of unusual size are active all winter, which is a great time to track them. More or less bullet-shaped, they make effective plows, and after a new snowfall, you can see which troughs have been recently cleared. Though not strictly nocturnal, porkies do tend to be more active at night.

Like me and a few others, porcupines talk to themselves. For the most part, they “speak” softly. If you like to camp, you may have heard one of these animals “muttering” as it passed near your tent in the dark. Vocalizations range from grunts and mewls to low whines, and even what sounds like the caw of a bird.

A porcupine’s feet are pebbly textured and furless, and in deep snow you can also see marks where the tail drags side to side as it waddles. In cases where the claws don’t register, its footprint can look strangely like that of a small child. Because porcupine fur includes roughly 30,000 hollow quills that collectively act like a personal flotation device, they swim well, and dine on all sorts of aquatic vegetation in season.  

Quills not launched

Their quills, which are really modified hairs, also account for the porky’s ho-hum attitude toward humans, dogs and, unfortunately, cars. Quills, of course, aren’t missiles, and can’t be launched at predators. But they do come off at the literal drop of a hat, provided you drop said hat on a porcupine. A quill’s barbed end sticks amazingly well to skin and other things, and if not removed right away, can work its way through soft tissues like muscles and organs.

Quills are used the world over by indigenous peoples for embroidering. Usually cream-coloured at the base, transitioning to brown or black at the tips, quills have an innate beauty, but are often dyed before being worked into leather or textiles. In North America, native peoples reportedly threw a blanket or skin over a porcupine to harvest some of its quills. I’ve never messed with a live specimen, but have harvested quills from road-killed porkies by touching a leather glove to them. The quills take some effort to remove from leather, and I store them in small glass jars for later use in beadwork.

Not invincible

Generally, quills lie flat until a predator comes on the scene, at which time a porky will raise them and keep its back to the threat. Lashing its 20- to 25-cm-long tail side to side, the porcupine tries to make a protective radius around itself. Fishers, fierce predators and one of the largest members of the weasel family, are quick enough to outflank a porcupine and kill it by attacking the head.

One winter, I tracked a pair of fishers across a frozen pond to some rock ledges where I knew porkies denned. There, I found fisher and porcupine tracks in the blood-stained snow, a scene that spoke of a porky’s demise. Great horned owls, coyotes and wolves are said to hunt porcupines as well.

Having a cute face only gets you so far in life, and porcupines are despised by many folks because bark-eating harms and even kills trees. Since porkies are attracted to salt, they’ll chew on tool handles and other items used by people. 

In addition to eating bark of all kinds, they have a particular weakness for apples. It’s impressive how far out on a branch a porcupine will go to get one, seeming to defy gravity. Unfortunately, this resulted in some of my apple trees getting pruned a bit more than I would have liked over the years.

Porkies usually den in rock crevices, caves and sometimes in hollow trees, the entrance often carpeted in a deep layer of crap that gets pushed out into an alluvial formation. Some biologists think this is to deter predators, but it does not smell bad.

Long life

Breeding is in October and December. In May and June, females may birth up to four young, but typically just one. Not only do porcupines have a low birth rate, it takes more than two years for them to fully mature. In the wild, a porcupine may live 17 or 18 years, with the oldest on record being an ancient 28 years.

Ray Fadden, a former neighbour of mine, used to teach school at Akwesasne, where a pupil once handed him an orphan porcupine. He said it was easily house-trained and made a great pet, and showed me pictures of “Needles,” a full-size porky, in his lap. Apparently, he tried to release it into the wild, but after few days it found its way back home, where it bypassed my neighbour’s outstretched arms and made a beeline for the litter box to hurriedly deposit several days’ worth of pent-up feces. It seemed that Needles knew how to eat in the wild, but not how to relieve itself.

Kids and adults love to watch porcupines, as they’re one of the few wild animals that will stand for such ogling. Just hang onto your dog if you have one!

Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

Sometimes, the more information we get about the ripple effects our food choices have on the environment, not to mention our health, the more complex the issue seems to be. We know that buying local produce uses less energy than food shipped across the country or imported from abroad. And, we’re told that eating a largely plant-based diet is better for us and has a far smaller carbon footprint as compared with traditional western fare.

But when it comes to what diet is best for each individual, it’s not always a black-and-white situation. I’m sure there are a lot more than 50 shades of grey in this argument.

For example, a well-managed beef operation can actually help support and maintain native grassland ecosystems in prairie regions, and pastured poultry is generally an ecologically sound option. And then there’s the fact that highly processed meat substitutes are energy-intensive to make, and can be full of salt, sugar and other additives.

It turns out that in the Middle Ages, some wealthy Europeans had a strange obsession with vegetable-based meat. Well, before New World crops got established in Europe, the main food issue was malnutrition and starvation among the masses. Today, about 60 per cent of food grown in Europe was developed by First Nations agronomists. As corn, potatoes, sunflowers, beans, tomatoes, amaranth, chestnuts, squash and other New World crops spread across Eurasia, it helped push starvation a few centimetres away from everyone’s doorstep.

In part due to this reprieve from famine, a coterie of well-to-do Europeans gathered scholars around them to discuss whether a sheep that grows on a vine is a vegetable or an animal, or if birds that develop inside pods growing on trees were OK to consume on meat-free Christian fast days. For hundreds of years, a succession of learned men debated this kind of thing, rather than more apt questions such as “Are we just silly, or are we totally nuts?”

The idea that one could plant a garden of vine-lambs or an orchard of tree-pod birds, maybe even grow cabbage-patch kids, didn’t seem to bother guys who fancied themselves the smartest folks in the world. They hired explorers to hunt far and wide for veggie-meat, starting with sheep.

The origins of the vegetable-lamb tale are a bit woolly, but may date back as far as 2,500 years ago. The widely travelled Greek historian Herodotus is said to have mentioned it in 442 BC. But he was 17 at the time, so who knows which exotic plants he saw, and which he ingested or smoked. Evidently, a Jewish fable also makes reference to a livestock-on-a-stick “vegetimal.”

From the 14th century through the late 1700s, Europeans made forays into poorly mapped regions of central and northern Asia to locate this vegetable sheep.

Upon return, scholars would generally gush about the new species they almost found. It was dubbed the Scythian or Tartary lamb after the regions the travellers believed they had visited. It was also called the Barometz, with various spellings, thought to be from a word for lamb in one of the languages they encountered.

In the 1357 memoir The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the author (a pseudonym) writes that he regaled King Edward III of England with a description of a gourd-like fruit that one sliced open to reveal a flesh-and-blood lamb that could be eaten as any normal lamb. I have to wonder if it was seedless, or if you had to chew carefully and spit out sheep-seeds like a watermelon.

Later explorers depicted the lamb growing on a stalk or vine that connected to its navel, a sort of earthy umbilicus. The lamb could graze around the plant, but if the umbilicus-stalk broke, it would die. I assume these men also located a now-extinct carnivore of exceeding stupidity that could not figure out how to hunt sheep that were tied to the ground.

Alas, the Tartary lamb was never located, but certain Christian monks reported that they found, and ate, a type of bird they observed growing on trees. In their defence, these guys fasted a lot and ate little, so it could be that their asceticism led to hallucinations.

In the 11th and 12th centuries, a number of clerics in remote, barren monasteries in the northern British Isles swore they saw trees whose pods dropped into the ocean and turned into “bernacae” (barnacle) geese. They figured that logically, these geese could be eaten on mandatory fast days when real, non-plant meat was forbidden. Pope Innocent III eventually ruled that although some geese apparently did grow on trees, they were still off-limits on Fridays and other meatless days. But because Popes do not tend to visit rocky clifftop enclaves to check on their flocks, “meatless” goose dinners continued in some areas into the 20th century.

The real-life barnacle goose, Branta leucopsis, breeds in the Scottish Hebrides as well as on Ireland’s northwest coast, in Greenland, and other North Atlantic locations. They are more secretive than other geese and waterfowl in their breeding habits, favouring high cliffs for their nest sites. As a result, fledged juveniles seem to come out of nowhere and appear on the water.

“Green lambs” are real things, too. Native to the Malay Peninsula in southeast Asia, Cibotium barometz, or the golden woolly fern, has a chunky and unusually tomentose (woolly) surface rhizome that can be roasted, and its starchy insides eaten. There are no bones. Or seeds. Related ferns with similar features grow elsewhere, including New Zealand, and have also reportedly been used for food.

Were they not fiction, vegetable lambs and geese would go a long way toward reducing world hunger, greenhouse gas emissions, and maybe domestic squabbles. I respect and support my vegan spouse, and she does not try to “recruit” me away from omnivorism. I eat more legumes than before I was married, but continue to enjoy moderate amounts of local meat.

Hey, even Mary had a little lamb now and then, or so we are told.

Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

Spiders can be dangerous in weird ways. In 2014, Mazda had to recall more than 40,000 vehicles because yellow-sac spiders liked to plug fuel-vent lines with silk and nest inside them, causing gas tanks to pressurize, leak and cause fires. In that same year, a guy in Seattle burned his house down trying to kill spiders with a blowtorch in the basement. And at a Michigan gas station in 2015, a man tried to kill one with a lighter and torched a whole pump island.

But fire isn’t typically why we fear spiders.

Some experts think our aversion to spiders may be an evolutionary response, woven into the very strands of our DNA. Even though fewer than 1 per cent of the world’s 50,000 species of spiders pose a risk to us, early humans who kept their distance from things like spiders, scorpions and snakes probably lived longer.

These days, fake spiders star in horror films and come out of the woodwork at Halloween time because a lot of folks – perhaps 75 per cent of the population – still find them creepy.  Arachnophobia, an intense fear of spiders, affects 3 to 6 per cent of us worldwide, and is the most common phobia among humans.

I want to point out that spiders are essential to the web of life, eating millions of tons of insects each year. They reduce fly populations in barns tremendously, and a 2023 University of Guelph study found that spiders are key predators of agricultural pests like aphids. Even though they’re beneficial on the whole, it’s good to know how to identify and avoid the few poisonous spiders that live in our climate.

Canada is home to roughly 1,400 kinds of spiders, of which at least 70 are invasive. At the moment, we only have one species that is truly dangerous, and another two that are mildly toxic. The northern black widow is the main species of concern. In spite of its name, there’s a limit to its cold-hardiness. This native spider occurs in the southern portions of five provinces, including Quebec, where it has been found as far north as Montreal. However, based on a survey done in 2018, researchers from McGill University believe it is slowly moving northward due to climate change.

Here’s one to watch out for

A red-and-black colour scheme on a car is sporty. On a spider, it’s scary. Lucky for us, to identify the northern black widow we don’t have to flip it over to look for the characteristic red hourglass shape on her belly. Females, whose bodies are only nine to 11 millimetres long, can measure 25 to 38 mm when you include the legs. Males are half this size. Females have red geometric shapes (often like a “broken hourglass”) on their dorsal sides, and a red hourglass on their bellies. Males are harder to identify, as they can have stripes or spots in either red or white.

An interesting sidebar about black widows, so called because they’re known to eat the males after mating, is that such behaviour is not the norm. This “sexual cannibalism” was first seen in the lab where males couldn’t get away. It seems that in the wild, males have a “best defense is a running head start” policy, and most survive.

Fortunately, black widows live outside. But they sometimes come in on firewood or other items on which the shy, nocturnal bug-hunters hang out during the day. Northern black widows can also wander in through gaps in foundations or broken weather-seals around doors if there are cool, damp places next to the house to hide in. Move brush and leaves away from foundations, and keep door gaskets in good shape. 

Their bites initially cause redness and swelling, followed by severe muscle and stomach cramps, nausea and sweating within an hour. If you’ve been bitten by a black widow, call a poison control centre or dial 911 immediately. Apply ice to the bite while you wait for help. Do not use a tourniquet.

And one more to beware

Although black widows have the most toxic venom, the brown recluse spider has caused more deaths. Bites from the brown recluse, while rare, may require medical intervention because they can result in extensive tissue death (necrosis), with possible infection and scarring. In about one per cent of cases, their bites are fatal when the venom becomes systemic.

Brown recluse spiders are shiny, hairless, tan to brown, and up to a half-inch long. An important feature to look for is a dark brown, violin-shaped mark on its back, with the neck of the violin pointing backwards. True recluses, these guys like sheltered places, which is a problem when they hide in clothing or bath towels. Primarily an outdoor species, brown recluse spiders will adapt to living inside. The thing is that they sometimes stow away in luggage or gear of returning snowbirds – brown recluses are common in the southern U.S.

Most brown recluse bites result in tissue death around the bite, forming a wound that can take months to heal. The main concern is infection at the site. Bites that lead to fever, nausea or dizziness may suggest a systemic response, and you should seek medical care right away.

We do have two species of house-dwelling, slightly toxic spiders that can bite, the yellow-sac spiders. They can reportedly survive almost up to the Arctic Circle, so it’s a sure thing they’re in your region. Ghostly pale, almost translucent, yellow sac spiders actually range in colour from yellow to greenish, or occasionally pink or tan. They’re tiny; just eight to 10 mm long, which makes them easy to overlook.

Yellow sac spiders cache their silken sac-homes in nooks and crannies behind pictures, in the corners of rooms and, apparently, in auto fuel vent lines as well. Though not dangerous, this species has a mildly toxic venom that causes a rash, and sometimes a limited necrotic area.

About 30 years ago, one bit the side of my neck (it was in my shirt collar), and a nickel-size wound developed. The lesion turned grey, and took nearly a month to heal. I have to count my blessings, though. There was no fire.

Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

Back when I was a baby arborist, I worked for an old-timer who told me: “The best time to prune trees is when the tools are sharp.”

He would also say: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” even though he was beset with shoulder injuries, knee problems and back pain.

While he taught me a lot of things, I later learned that both of these old saws are dangerous lies.

There are, in fact, certain times of the year when pruning should be avoided. Late spring, between bud-break and full leaf-out is a key period of pruning abstinence.

The other no-pruning interval is from the time leaves start to change colour in the fall until trees are entirely bare. There are good reasons to put away pruning tools at this time of year.

The claw-back clause

As days get shorter, deciduous trees and shrubs start to make a waxy layer between the petiole base of each leaf and the twig to which they’re attached. The wax is called suberin.

Suberin will eventually plug the vessels that moved water and nutrients into, and sugars out of, leaves all summer. This blockage protects twigs from losing water over the winter. It also leads to the breakdown of green chlorophyll molecules, thus revealing the yellow and orange pigments already present in leaves.

Before the vascular tubes are entirely blocked, though, trees “claw back” about half the nutrients from each leaf: nitrogen, potassium, iron, magnesium, manganese, and other essential elements. This recovery is quite important to the nutrient budget of woody plants.

Trees also move sugar out of the leaves. This sugar is the product of a season’s worth of photosynthesis. Much of the sugar clawed back from autumn leaves before they drop is transported down to the roots, lower trunk, as well as branches, where it is stored as starch. In spring, starch is turned back to sugar and distributed to developing buds and leaves. Pruning branches in autumn, therefore, deprives trees of both nutrients and energy needed for the following year.

The illness angle

All woody plants have internal defence systems that make anti-microbial compounds to fight infections at the site of injuries, like pruning cuts. The renowned biologist and plant pathologist Dr. Alex Shigo, often called “the father of modern arboriculture,” studied trees’ defensive process. He called it Compartmentalization of Decay in Trees, or CODIT. This “tree-mune response” becomes active in the early spring just before bud-break and is in full swing throughout the summer, after which it starts to shut down. By the time leaves are turning, the CODIT response is much attenuated.

Therefore, wounds made in the fall are at greater risk of being infected by fungal pathogens that cause persistent, or perennial, cankers. Nectria and Eutypella are the two primary types of canker fungi, but there are more. And while spores from Nectria and other diseases are always present in the environment, they are most prevalent in the fall. In addition, the long rainy spells typical of autumn further raise the odds of pruning-wound infections, given that canker spores are spread by rain splash.

The best time to prune

Early spring prior to bud-break is the ideal time to prune. Not only is CODIT up and running, there is little chance that pruning sites will dry out too much, which can lead to bark cracks near the wound, as can happen with early winter pruning.

The truly essential reason to stow the lopper and saw while leaves are expanding is that when trees are “busy” pushing out leaves, CODIT goes on a coffee break until full leaf-out. It’s not that it turns off completely, but due to a hormonal shift in trees that happen as leaves are forming, their defenses are weakened temporarily.

The exceptions

‘I’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’ (well, except for words like “height,” “seize,” etc.). Exceptions can complicate things.

Obviously, some pruning may need to be done right away to address safety concerns, regardless of the season. In such cases, my one-time mentor is right: the best time to prune is when the tools are sharp. But if the goal is to boost aesthetics, or get more light on the garden, or fewer leaves in the pool, or to lessen disease pressure in fruit trees, fall pruning should be off the table.

And then there’s oak wilt, which can decimate oaks like Dutch elm disease did to elm trees. To help prevent the spread of this fearsome disease, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency recommends we not prune oaks between April 15 and July 15, when the risk of spreading oak wilt is extreme.

Depending on the year and where you live, mid-April might still be ahead of bud-break, an optimal pruning time. Some authorities suggest that to be on the safe side, we wait until Oct. 1 to prune oaks, a time that overlaps the period of colour change. Since oak wilt is far worse than perennial cankers or lost nutrients, oak-wilt prevention should always take priority over ideal pruning windows.

Conifers count, too

Although pines and spruces only lose a small portion of their needles in the fall, the same principles hold true for them. Cutting evergreen branches in autumn will rob trees of a share of the nutrients and sugars they need.

Another reason it’s best to cut conifer branches in late winter is that during July and August, a moth called the pitch-mass borer sniffs out fresh wounds to lay her eggs in. Her babies become an issue the next spring as they tunnel under the bark to feed on sap. The grubs enlarge the wound diameter, and trigger excess pitch accumulation. If you’ve ever noticed unsightly, oozing pitch on the trunks of pines and spruces, it’s a result of summer pruning that invited pitch-mass borers to set up housekeeping. The pitch-blobs they leave behind can persist for years, diminishing a tree’s aesthetic appeal.  

The moral imperative:

The last reason to stash the saw until trees are fully dormant is the danger of running into a self-righteous arborist who views fall pruning as a moral failure. They might give you the hairy eyeball, or worse yet, engage in “pruning shaming.” I’m not saying that I’ve ever done that kind of thing.

Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

To ask if trees are bad for the environment seems absurd. One may as well ask if water is unhealthy for us.

And yet, drinking too much water in a short period can cause “water intoxication,” leading to brain swelling, coma and, on occasion, death. Although water can be harmful in exceptional cases, we should keep drinking it, clearly.

On the other hand, the question of whether trees hurt the planet is a knotty one. When former U.S. President Ronald Reagan said in 1981 that “trees cause more air pollution than automobiles do,” he was widely mocked. However, he had a point. On hot sunny days, trees give off volatile chemicals that indirectly cause serious air-quality issues.

When skies are blue and the sun is high, isoprene and other compounds trees emit can react with nitrogen oxides from auto and truck exhaust to form ground-level ozone. It’s a major lung irritant, and contributes to smog as well. In the stratosphere, ozone protects us from getting fried by ultraviolet radiation; down low, it can fry our lungs.  

Trees worsen ground-level ozone only if car exhaust and sunshine are plentiful. Though it’s not good news, it doesn’t inspire me to run out and paint all trees with the same critical brush. For one thing, I’ve got other stuff to do, plus I’m sure the bristles would wear out pretty quick.

But wait – it turns out that many trees liberate methane from the soil, where it normally remains locked up. The mechanism by which trees do this isn’t clear, but it’s a measurable effect. Methane is a greenhouse gas at least 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide in its ability to warm the Earth.

And the news gets worse for trees: some species, notably cottonwoods, actually make methane, thanks to microbes that colonize their live tissues. We’ve long known that dead trees – and vegetation of all sorts – create this planet-warming gas. Scientists must now consider living forests as methane sources in their climate-change models.

Maybe we’ve been thinking too highly of trees.

New finding: bark absorbs methane

This is where it feels like Mother Nature is pulling our leg. First, we learn that trees might be environmental criminals, and then she rubs our noses in a finding that came to light in 2024: The corky outer layers of tree bark absorb around 50 million tons of methane per year. No other process on Earth removes more of this gas from the atmosphere. Although trees can release soil-based methane, and sometimes create a bit of their own, they are still net methane sinks.

So, score a point for the trees. But they’re not out of the woods yet.

In terms of proving that trees aren’t shady characters, we’ll have to beat the bushes for more evidence in their favour.  

Fortunately, we don’t have to look far. According to the U.S. Forest Service, trees reduce overall sulfur dioxide pollution by 14 per cent. They also take a lot of nitrogen oxides out of the air. To give these things real-life context, breathing sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides can aggravate asthma, and even cause irreversible lung damage.

Trees absorb particulate matter

According to one study, trees vacuum out more than 50 per cent of airborne particulate matter. Particulates matter because every year, about 6.4 million deaths worldwide are caused by this kind of pollution. Breathing airborne particles raises our chances of asthma attacks. The smaller the particles, the worst they are, because they lodge deep in our lungs, often entering the bloodstream. This is especially bad for developing fetuses, and puts adults at a greater risk of heart disease and stroke.  

There’s a charge for trees to clean the air: a weak electromagnetic charge on leaf surfaces draws in airborne particles and holds them until rain washes them off. This is much like how a commercial air filter called an electrostatic precipitator cleans pollution in heavy industry.

And pines perform well

In addition, a group of sweet-smelling compounds given off by conifer trees are more than a piney air freshener. Known as terpenes, these molecules drift up to about 3,000 feet, where they make clouds over forested areas that are twice as dense as clouds above other terrain. It’s like corn starch for clouds. Denser clouds reflect about five-per-cent more sunlight, which doesn’t sound like much, but apparently it makes a real difference in helping to moderate the climate. I’d say that’s a cool trick.

Perhaps the best-known “ecosystem service” trees provide is that they take carbon dioxide from the air and store it as wood, which is roughly 50-per-cent carbon. Worldwide, more than 17 million tons of carbon dioxide are taken out of circulation annually and sequestered by trees. Data from south of the border show that their forests sequester about 14 per cent of yearly U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. (Given that per-capita fossil fuel consumption in the U.S. is the highest in the world, they need all the help they can get storing carbon.)

Current studies verify that more diverse forest communities stash a lot more carbon than plantation forests do. Just one more reason to do what we can to preserve species diversity.

We’ve long known that trees do wonders for our mental and physical well-being, and it’s obvious we can put to rest any claim that they sully our planet. I encourage everyone to drink water daily, and to get out and enjoy the shade of a tree whenever possible.

PAUL HETZLER
The Advocate

Whether or not its precise definition is at the tip of our tongues, we all get the drift of what biogas means: there’s biology involved, and the result is gas.

If you’re ever on the same flight as the national sauerkraut-eating team on their way home after taking gold at the Paris Olympics, the biogas will be unmistakeable. And inescapable. More common (and less fictional) examples of biogas include cows’ belches and the bubbles that swarm to the water’s surface if you wade into a marsh.

Composed chiefly of methane (CH₄) at concentrations that range from 50 to 60 per cent, biogas can be used in place of natural gas for home-heating and to fuel internal-combustion engines to generate electricity.

28 times more potent than CO2

Formed by microbes under anaerobic conditions (oxygen-free), methane is a greenhouse gas more than 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. Methane is valuable when harnessed and put to good use, but makes the world hotter when it’s released into the air. This is one of the reasons it’s crucial to “harvest” biogas that is naturally released by landfills and manure pits.

Methane itself is colourless and odourless, but biogas is not pure methane. In that context, one generally finds methanein the company of dodgy pals like hydrogen sulfide (H₂S), which is responsible for the rotten-egg smell of farts and swamp gas. Not only is hydrogen sulfide a stinker, at high levels it’s toxic and flammable as well.

Another contaminant is ammonia, which forms corrosive nitrogen oxides. In addition to being greenhouse gases, nitrogen oxides cause or worsen the symptoms of emphysema, asthma and bronchitis when we breathe them in. Landfill biogas is frequently tainted by siloxanes found in lubricants and detergents. Siloxanes are also hazardous to breathe. Before biogas can be used as fuel in commercial engines to generate power, these impurities must be filtered out.

Generates heat and electricity,

Even if biogas did not yield perks like heat and electricity, we’d still have to extract it from landfills to keep the darned things from blowing up. Methane accumulates in landfills as organic matter decomposes in oxygen-deprived conditions underground. This led to a spate of biogas explosions, some quite destructive, in landfills across the U.S. and Europe in the 1960s through the 1980s.

Although such events are less frequent now, landfill fires and explosions continue. Recent cases in southeast Calgary in 2022; and Orillia, Ont., and near Vernon, B.C., earlier this year; are reminders that even though biogas can generate electricity for us, not everyone has gotten the memo on the need to manage it.

Biogas is often made in something called a methane reactor, or digester, which “digests” animal manure, sewage or household garbage anaerobically. The resulting methane, which would otherwise have been released to the atmosphere, is collected and used for heat, electrical generation or other applications.

In addition, digester-sourced biogas, which is higher in methane and lower in impurities than landfill gas, can be injected into the natural-gas grid or compressed into liquid and shipped to world markets.

Quebec ships biogas

The first large-scale biogas project in the country began when the Trans Québec & Maritimes Pipeline started shipping biogas in 2003 from a landfill near Ste. Geneviève de Berthier in the Lanaudière region.  According to StatsCan, the number of biogas ventures in Canada rose twofold between 2010 and 2020, and is expected to double again by 2025.

In its essence, a methane digester is an air-tight vessel that is filled with animal manure, food scraps, spoiled hay or other cheap, abundant organic waste. Since plenty of bacteria are already in the organic matter, you don’t need to supplement them. The only element that’s missing is time. It can take anywhere from five to 90 days for methane to “ripen,” depending on the type of vessel, what you put in it and, of course, climate (digesters work faster in Vancouver than in Nunavut). In large-scale digesters, new material is continually moved through the vessel, whereas backyard setups need to be periodically cleaned out and recharged. The residue left over when the process is done is typically used for fertilizer.

Methane digesters generate revenue

These days, livestock farmers are being encouraged to install methane digesters as an additional source of income or to offset heating costs. Digesters reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and manure processed in a digester retains more nitrogen than manure stored in open-air lagoons. It’s not brain surgery, but there is a learning curve, as well as labour inputs. The Canadian Biogas Association (https://biogasassociation.ca/resources/funding_and_incentives) lists funding sources available to farmers who want to start making biogas. Further information can be found at https://farmingbiogas.ca/  

Digester technology works on a very small scale as well. Backyard units that run on household waste are common in developing areas of the world, and are gaining traction in western Europe. The Chinese have been involved with methane digestion since about 1960, and in the 1970s, roughly 6 million home digesters were given to Chinese farmers. Home digesters are popular in India, Pakistan, Nepal and parts of Africa. In Germany, Europe’s foremost biogas producer, the government gives incentives and subsidies to farmers and others to help them adopt digester technology.

Rural residents can buy home biogas kits online, as long as local regulations don’t prohibit their use. If you’re handy, instructions for making your own backyard methane digester are available.  

Biogas technology is growing as a discipline at many universities. If you’ve eaten too much sauerkraut, you’ll just have to let digestion run its course. Away from others, please.

Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

To help explain how evolutionary change occurs over time, Charles Darwin used the phrase “survival of the fittest,” meaning that organisms with traits best-suited to their surroundings are more likely to reproduce and pass on those attributes to their offspring. For most animals, it’s a slow process that takes countless generations, but we see it in real time with microbes.

When an antibiotic is used for a bacterial infection, on occasion there may be a very few that live due to a gene variation that lets them break down the drug. The survivors then multiply to form a new strain of resistant bacteria, eventually giving rise to “superbugs,” like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. While this is not exactly natural selection, the same principal holds true: the fittest microbes (in this case, those than can withstand a toxin) survive.

But in popular culture, the concept of “survival of the fittest” is often conflated with physical fitness. Extreme sport competitions have adopted the phrase as their motto, and it was even the title of a 2018 reality TV show. In nature, however, the fittest is rarely the strongest.

Though survival is about finding enough food and water, it’s also about not becoming an entrée on someone else’s menu. For most animals fitness is dodging fangs and claws to live another day.

For a lot of species, fitness is blending in with the background. While I’m impressed by photos of seamless camouflage, a full-length film on it would be like watching paint dry.

On the other hand, I’d buy tickets to watch an animal immobilize attackers with glue-like projectile vomit, spew jets of hot acid at predators, or use its internal organs as projectiles.

Faking death works

Even faking death to avoid actual death is a theatrical affair.

If I were faced with something that wanted me for supper, like a zombie or a bear, my inclination would be to run. Dropping to the ground inert wouldn’t be top of mind. Yet, for a few critters, it seems to work. A well-known example is the Virginia opossum, also known as the American opossum, whose dramatic death re-enactments gave rise to the phrase “playing possum,” meaning to play dead, or to be a faker in general.

Found throughout southern Quebec and Ontario, as well as parts of British Colombia, this native marsupial has been expanding its range northward for decades. If you haven’t seen opossums in your area yet, you very well might in the future. Contrary to popular belief, it does not “play” dead. When threatened, an involuntary response called tonic immobility kicks in. Its muscles go rigid and its heart rate and respiration drop sharply.

Deeply unconscious in this state, it might be a tempting morsel to a carnivore, except that it also salivates profusely, urinates, defecates and releases a foul-smelling fluid from its anal glands. Apparently, no self-respecting predator wants to deal with that mess.

Other animals that exhibit this behaviour include reptiles, like the eastern hognose snake, which is native to Quebec, and at least one type of snake bleeds from its mouth as part of its act. Feigned death is known in a number of rodent and bird species, as well as insects. Tonic immobility can even occur in humans during acute traumatic events.

Some resort to goo

Chemical defense is an ancient survival tool used by microbes, fungi, plants and, of course, animals. The perfect example of this may be the striped skunk, abundant in southern Canada and found as far north as Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. Its weapon of choice is N-butyl mercaptan, related to the nasty stuff put in natural gas so that we can detect a gas leak. It’s very effective, and skunk encounters are memorable and unpleasant.

It’s a good thing the bombardier beetle is not the size of a skunk, or we’d all be in trouble. Distributed throughout North America, this 2.5-cm-long beetle shoots a boiling-hot corrosive cocktail to nail predators as far as 20 centimetres away. Without exaggeration, its concoction is literally 100 degrees F. They have two special abdominal chambers, one for hydrogen peroxide, and the other for hydroquinone. When needed, these are combined, along with a catalyst, and a violent reaction ensues, jetting a defensive liquid at about 40 kilometres an hour.

The northern fulmar, a gull-like sea bird native to the eastern Canadian Arctic, launches a different sort of cocktail. When confronted by a bird of prey like an Arctic skua, it vomits a stream of putrid, oily goo that it keeps on hand in a stomach compartment for just such occasions. This orange substance often clogs the would-be assassin’s flight feathers so it can’t effectively fly for a time. More importantly, the oil strips the natural waterproofing from the predator’s feathers, which means it can’t float and could easily drown. 

When your profession is “prey,” you do whatever it takes to be fit enough to survive.

Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

In addition to being a reliable source of honey, not to mention personal satisfaction, backyard beekeeping can be a rich learning experience for the whole family. And yet, at the same time, honeybees are causing grave and, in some cases, irreversible harm to the environment.

It’s imperative that beekeepers learn about the threats to native pollinators posed by honeybees, and actively work to mitigate the damage as much as possible.

Just to be clear, honeybees are a non-native species whose population is burgeoning. They certainly don’t need our help to survive. Statistics Canada reports there were 783,575 honeybee colonies in Canada in 2021, up sharply from 561,297 in 2011 – a 40-per-cent jump in 10 years.

It’s true honeybees are vital to industrial-scale agriculture, like on California’s almond farms, which are the largest in the world, and in Florida’s citrus groves. Although they are relatively poor pollinators, they’re the only ones that can be transported in great numbers.

Outside of vast tree-crop plantations that are inhospitable to native bees, honeybees don’t measurably boost pollination rates, according to a multi-year study by Cornell University. Led by Dr. Scott McArt, a bee specialist at Cornell’s Dyce Laboratory for Bee Research, the team concluded honeybees had an insignificant effect on pollination in all but the largest apple orchards in the study. The 110 species of wild bees the researchers cataloged on apple blossoms did the real work.

Honeybees displace other bees

The problem with honeybees is that they displace, and sometimes extirpate, native bees.

A long-running study by Concordia University noted that honeybee hives on the island of Montreal skyrocketed from less than 250 in 2013 to nearly 3,000 by 2020. During that time, the overall number of wild native bees across 15 sites dropped by an average of 1,200 per sample. Far more concerning was the loss of diversity. In 2013, 163 species of wild bees were documented. In 2020, that number was 120. Forty-three species of native bees disappeared from the record in seven years due to honeybees. That’s huge.

For years, professional beekeepers in the U.K. have been asking the public to moderate the recent “outbreak” of hives, which is putting native bees at risk. The London Beekeepers’ Association is concerned that “the prevailing ‘save the bees’ narrative is often based on poor, misleading or absent information about bees and their needs. It can imply that keeping honeybees will help bees.”

Push to limit honeybee populations

In fact, there is now a global push, led by current and former beekeepers, to limit honeybee populations in order to save wild bees, which do practically all the pollinating in the world.

One could dismiss such pleas from professional beekeepers as self-serving, but Andrew Whitehouse of the insect-conservation group Buglife agrees that the public’s unfettered embrace of honeybees is having dire consequences.

“We know the main reason native pollinators are in decline is a lack of wildflowers in our countryside and urban areas,” Whitehouse said. “To increase competition for limited resources puts a huge pressure on the wild pollinators.”

Too many honeybees also bring diseases to native pollinators.

As Dr. Jane Memmott of Bristol University in England has stated, honeybee hives are sometimes “little ecosystems of plagues and contagion.”

Invasion of the bees

Even the loudest critics of backyard beekeeping don’t want to see it banned. But anyone who likes the thought of a hive on their rooftop or back lot needs to remember the wildflowers in any locale are already spoken for by native pollinators. A meadow in bloom is not virgin territory that honeybees are free to exploit without impact. When a non-native species arrives in large numbers, there will always be repercussions.

It is a moral imperative that beekeepers – big and small – compensate for the nectar and pollen their honeybees consume in a season. Wild bees were there first, and relied on the existing forage to survive. If you keep bees, provide about one acre of flowering plants per hive. This is essential to keep native pollinators healthy.

Flowers that bloom at different times, grow to various heights, and have a multitude of floral structures and colours will serve the greatest diversity of native pollinators. Very often, this can be achieved by simply letting things go wild. Maybe cut back (so to speak) on mowing. Choose some areas to mow once a year in late fall, and others to cut every second or third year.

Bumblebees, which are four times more effective at pollinating than honeybees, often nest in rock piles and old foundations, things that tend to get “tidied up” as rural areas get more populated. Mason bees make use of all types of unkemptness for their nests. Since both kinds of bees are super-pollinators, a small decrease in their population is worrisome. A change in mindset regarding aesthetics will go a long way toward saving bees of all stripes.

And finally, if you don’t have land on which to grow wildflowers, please curb your enthusiasm. Seriously. Divesting is best, but cutting back is good, too. Perhaps one hive can suit your needs, rather than two or three.

Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

As a longtime gardener who likes to make healthy and eye-pleasing meals, I enjoy the colourful veggies that have come on the market in the past decade or so. Even apartment-dwellers with space on a balcony or patio for a few containers can now grow red lettuce, orange cauliflower, pink potatoes, golden beets, black tomatoes and purple carrots. These and other rainbow-hued produce are also available at farmers’ markets and in large grocery stores.

But as Doctor Suess noted in his children’s book Green Eggs and Ham, pigmented foods need the right context or people are likely to balk.

While bright colours are charming in a stir-fry or omelette, purple milk and orange meatloaf don’t have the same appeal.

Aside from blueberries, blue foods are a tough sell for me. Only chicken cordon bleu with a glass of Blue Nun sound enticing, and neither of those is actually blue. In particular, I find the phrase “blue fungus” to be an appetite suppressant. And yet, an edible blue mushroom called Lactarius indigo may provide us with a powerful means of battling the climate crisis, as well as helping to alleviate food and water insecurity.

Also known as the indigo milk-cap or blue milk-mushroom, L. indigo is native to forested regions of eastern North America, East Asia, Central America and parts of Western Europe. This mushroom’s most unusual feature is that when cut or broken, it oozes a milky blue latex. Once exposed to the air, its gooey blue “blood” slowly turns green. All of which screams “yum,” of course.

The indigo milk-cap is one of many species of mycorrhizal fungi that form symbiotic relationships with tree roots. Though mycorrhizae take small amounts of sugars from roots, they greatly boost their efficiency, allowing trees to absorb water and nutrients more readily. In this win-win scenario, L. indigo lives off trees while making them healthier and faster-growing overall.

Eaten fresh, indigo milk-caps are said to have the crispness of an apple. Their flavour varies from site to site, but is usually described as mild, and when cooked tastes similar to a portobello. Indigo milk-caps and other mushrooms can also be processed to mimic seafood, meat and cheese products, as well as used to make soy sauce, or even fermented into wine and beer.

In a study published in February 2022, researchers from the University of Stirling in England, and El Colegio de la Frontera Sur San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico, showed that the amount of protein found in blue milk mushrooms on a hectare of forest exceeds that of beef cattle raised on a hectare of pasture. Not only that, the mushrooms can be harvested year after year with no inputs.

However, the real beauty of these mushrooms is that forests that are either inoculated with L. indigo spores, or already have existing populations of the fungus, remain intact. For a variety of reasons, it takes roughly a century for a tree seedling to become an effective carbon store. These “shroom-forests” will continue to grow and sequester carbon, thus helping to mitigate climate change, and all the while can still be used for recreation or hunting. Land managers can keep harvesting a percentage of mature trees on the same prudent schedule as before, without compromising forest health or affecting the L. indigo mushroom crop.

Worldwide, forests are being clear-cut at the alarming rate of about 24.7 million acres a year. In South America, around 85 per cent of deforestation is for the creation of pasture for beef cattle, and to grow other kinds of animal feeds. Worldwide, beef cattle burp enough methane each year to equal more than 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide, on top of the many other types of greenhouse-gas emissions caused by deforestation.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “When sustainably managed, forests contribute significantly to reducing soil erosion….” The FAO also says forests help conserve water, protect fisheries, safeguard biodiversity and provide us with cultural and spiritual benefits.

The FAO reports that close to 80 per cent of humanity faces water insecurity. With about three-quarters of the world’s fresh water originating from forested watersheds, it’s more important than ever to leave forests in place. Harvesting blue milk-mushrooms on a portion of the woodlands now slated for conversion to beef pasture and planting new forests with trees inoculated with L. indigo are great ideas, but will require buy-in from landowners, and most likely some kind of government incentives as well.

Public acceptance of foods based on L. indigo will also be crucial. In 1960, Dr. Seuss got his characters to accept green eggs and ham by pestering them with an intrusive stalker. These days, such antics would get Sam-I-Am taken away in handcuffs. But with soaring food prices giving everyone the “food blues,” perhaps a good PR campaign can sell the world blue veggie-burgers and imitation cheese.

As severe weather events become increasingly common, as well as more costly and destructive, consumer demand is likely to shift away from carbon-intensive food sources to some degree. Growing blue milk-mushrooms in your woodlot isn’t for every landowner. But it’s important to be aware of the many agro-forestry options that could give smaller diversified farms a leg-up as consumer tastes change going forward.

Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

If a certain fungus is not available this year, Santa’s sleigh will be grounded on Christmas Eve, and gloom will reign at the North Pole.

Sometimes called the fly agaric because it supposedly was once used to kill flies, A. muscaria is common throughout North America and Eurasia from temperate latitudes to the far north. If you spend much time in the woods, there’s a good chance you’ve seen this fungus. It’s actually a tree-root symbiont, taking a small amount of sap from tree roots, but greatly boosting their efficiency in return.

Fungi are always present in a forest, although we can’t see them. By weight as well as volume, the vast majority of any fungus is hidden underground, or in things like old snags, stumps and logs. The “body” of a fungus is the dense, often mat-like mycelium that you may find under the bark of a dead tree or if you chop into rotted wood. Its “arms” are threadlike hyphae that extend out from the mycelium in search of neat stuff to do, like talking to trees (we think) and eating small animals (well, nematodes).

Mushrooms are what happen when fungi get in the mood to make babies. They don’t scroll through “Timber” for a hook-up, though, or otherwise have fun reproducing. If a fungus has consumed lots of organic matter for energy and enough moisture is present, it pushes out some erect structures like ’shrooms or conks (a.k.a. brackets, shelf-fungi), depending on species. These are called fruiting or spore-bearing bodies. Tiny spores, zillions of them, rain from the undersides of fruiting bodies and are carried on the wind to germinate elsewhere.

The fruiting body of A. muscaria is big: Its domed cap is known to get 30 centimetres or more in diameter, though 8-20 cm across is more typical, and it stands 6-20 cm tall. Sporting a bright reddish (orange on occasion) cap studded with prominent white spots, the fly agaric is one of the most recognizable free-standing mushrooms in the world; it’s the big polka-dotted red mushroom of colouring books, garden statuary, and Alice in Wonderland.

A. muscaria has psychoactive properties, and for millennia has been ritually ingested by Siberian shaman. It is also eaten by wild reindeer for – well, flying, I guess. Comet, Cupid, and loads of other blitzed reindeer (or caribou as we know them) have been seen lurching about after they’ve selectively browsed these mushrooms.

Santa’s reindeer-powered sleigh entered pop culture in the late 19th century, which is no surprise given that reindeer have had a close relationship with humans for millennia. At least a dozen thriving cultures still rely on this species today, including the Inupiat, Inuit and Gwich’in of North America and the Sámi of Nordic countries and northwest Russia.

Saint Nick’s team is shown having antlers, even though males shed theirs in autumn. However, unlike other members of the deer family, female reindeer also have antlers, which they keep until after spring calving. Clearly, Santa’s coterie of coursers are females. It figures – that’s who does most of the work in our species, too.

Naming these animals wasn’t Santa’s invention. The Sámi, traditional herders of feral reindeer, name the ones they train to pull sleighs. But airborne gift delivery may have been Santa’s brainchild. He knew that reindeer leg tendons click loudly as they walk or run. It’s hard to sneak up on kids with nine reindeer making a racket like hail on a tin roof. Good thing someone told him about Amanita muscaria.

The name Amanita may ring a bell: A close relative of the fly agaric, Amanita phalloides or death-cap, made the news this fall when three people in Australia were killed by a vengeful in-law. Turns out she slipped a few caps into their stew. Native to Eurasia, the death-cap was introduced to the Pacific coast and is now on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland. Just a cap fragment can devastate one’s liver and kidneys, making organ transplant the only “antidote.”

But our cheerful A. muscaria, in addition to being hallucinogenic, can induce nausea. This unpleasant side-effect is mitigated by drying with gentle heat – high heat takes all the fun out of the fly agaric by destroying its mind-altering properties. In Siberia and other regions, A. muscaria was often placed in stockings and hung near a fireplace to dry. This way, the moderate heat rendered them (mushrooms, not stockings) OK to use. Maybe it’s just me, but the image of stockings full of red-and-white stuff, hung by the chimney (with care, presumably) sounds familiar.

If you’re skeptical about a fungus-Christmas link, search for “mushroom Christmas” online and you’ll get a bazillion, give or take a few, images of A. muscaria tree ornaments, cards, candle holders, wrapping paper, and you-name-it.

In Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s hilarious 1971 sketch “Santa and His Old Lady,” Cheech explains how the flying sleigh is fuelled by “magic dust” that Santa gives the reindeer, and then takes himself. Maybe it’s a reference to fly agaric – who knows?

Although it grows throughout most of Quebec, please don’t experiment with A. muscaria. For one thing, autumn-picked mushrooms are said to be up to 10 times stronger than those gathered in spring and summer. Also, potency varies by site.

From tree ornaments to stockings full of goodies, the fly agaric has inspired many of the secular trappings of Christmas. If Cheech and Chong are right, it could account for Santa’s unnatural jolliness, too. And we know it’s the reason Santa’s team are able to soar around the world delivering presents. But then, maybe the reindeer only think they’re flying.

Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

Children who grow up on farms are privileged, though they may not always see the truth of that until later on. It seems much of the “digital generation” become adults, chronologically, at least, without knowing how to use a hammer, let alone fix a flat or do an oil change.

Farm kids learn many skills that serve them well, both on and off the farm. These can range from tractor safety, welding and engine repair to greenhouse management, direct marketing, and produce traceability. In every case, farm kids learn to work hard and problem-solve in the real world. In the process, they gain self-confidence. This is priceless.

But there are more fundamental, if lesser known, benefits of rural life. Kids who grow up surrounded by nature have a big mental, physical and cognitive lead over urban kids. There is solid proof that daily exposure to things like trees, animals, rocks, birds and open sky makes children feel happier and more confident. They’re more active, less anxious and learn better.

Scientists haven’t yet mapped all the neurological and biochemical pathways behind these effects. But controlled experiments from around the world agree the positive changes that happen when kids live close to nature are real.

According to a 2018 Danish study, youngsters who get outside on a regular basis have a lowered risk of depression, schizophrenia, eating disorders and substance use later in life.

Outdoors helps attention

In 2011, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that being outdoors lessens childhood ADHD symptoms. In fact, a growing number of psychologists now think time spent in nature could restore attention on a long-term basis.

Here’s an eye-opener: When children simply play with dirt, their anxiety and stress levels drop more than play that does not involve getting muddy. And they feel happier. This makes me wonder if breathing dirt while doing field work on an open-cab tractor does the same.

Connecting with nature also improves what’s known as eudaimonic well-being, a deep sense one belongs in the world. In other words, farming helps give life meaning. It’s probably one reason so many farmers can keep going in the face of daily challenges.

In addition, dirt (or soil) is vital for strong childhood immune systems. A study done in Finland looked at 10 urban day-care centres with concrete play yards. At five centres, researchers built “forests” for kids to use, trucking in good topsoil and native trees, shrubs and flowers. After four weeks, blood tests showed that the immune systems of kids who played in the dirt were notably healthier than their initial baseline at the start of the study, and the control group.

Effects on immune systems

The research team concluded a nature-poor childhood, the norm in our culture where 80 per cent are urban-dwellers, results in “uneducated immune systems.” This may render kids prone to immune-mediated ailments like severe allergies and celiac disease.

Immune systems aren’t the only things “educated” by nature. School performance is enhanced as well.

Pupils who spend time outdoors absorb material faster and retain more of what they learn. And the longer kids spend in fields, forests or streams, the bigger their academic gains are.

A 2019 study from the University of Chicago showed connecting with nature “improves working memory, cognitive flexibility and attentional control.”

In another experiment, students who looked out at green space for 40 seconds before a test did better than those who didn’t. Several other studies have shown listening to natural sounds raises marks on tough exams.

Nature inspires kindness

It’s been documented that nature makes kids nicer: primary-school students are kinder to peers and adults after forays into nature than after visiting urban landmarks.

Researchers at the University of Rochester report exposure to the natural world makes people tend to nurture relationships, value community more and be more generous.

Fortuitously, kids have an innate attraction to nature. If adults want to encourage kids to explore and examine the real world, stuff like magnifiers, notebooks, trowels and containers can enrich their experience. Let kids bring nature indoors by making space (within reason) at home for moss, rocks, bark and other found items.

Nothing beats direct experience for getting kids’ attention. Young folks will remember yellow birch if they make wintergreen tea from its twigs. Spicebush smells like cloves, while black cherry reeks of bitter almond. Teen girls have particular respect for the white pine when they learn of its historic link with North American women’s rights. Kids and youth can learn to make a superb pink lemonade from the berries of staghorn sumac. And it’s OK to bring in a little tech into the picture now and then; free phone apps to identify plants, insects and birds abound.

The summer I was 13, I began full-time work on a neighbour’s farm, a 2,700-acre mix of dry beans, corn, wheat, contract-grown sweet corn and dairy-replacement heifers. From that point, I was hooked, staying on for 10 more years. I wasn’t aware of the benefits of being out in nature back then, but these likely factored into the picture. The job came at a time it was best I was out of the house, and it’s fair to say the self-confidence and time in nature I got on the farm saved my teenage life. The hard-earned pay was welcome, but not the main benefit.

Even if children move away and don’t take over the family farm, they’ve profited from starting out there. Most of us have kids in our lives – nieces, nephews, grandkids – in urban areas. Let’s take them out to dig holes and get muddy as much as possible. It brings out their best nature. 

Paul Hetzler
The Advocate

There is good news about treating cognitive decline – and it’s tasty. 

In North America, nearly one in 10 adults over the age of 65 has some form of dementia, including Alzheimer’s, while another 20 or so per cent have mild cognitive impairment. With treatment costs rising and our senior cohort expanding faster than the population at large, dementia is a topic that won’t  get old any time soon.

Though Alzheimer’s disease was first described in 1906, it seems to have been mostly forgotten until the mid-1970s, when real research began. Historically, those with dementia were locked in asylums and subjected to brutal “cures,” like lobotomies and electric shocks, practices that continued through the 1950s. Later, anti-psychotics, like haloperidol, came into vogue for calming aggressive patients ­– until it was found these drugs made dementia worse.

Donepezil and other cholinesterase inhibitors, which tweak brain chemistry to aid memory, came on the scene in the late 1990s. And now, there’s a drug called lecanimab, which was just approved this year, that slows or even prevents the formation of brain plaques thought to cause Alzheimer’s and certain other dementias. 

More than drugs to treat dementia

But treatment goes beyond medication. Proven techniques for mild dementia include what’s known as cognitive stimulation therapy. In a group setting, patients discuss world events, collaborate on novel tasks and play word and math games. For those with advanced brain disease, reminiscence therapy is a one-on-one talk about times past, using beloved objects or favourite songs to help spark memories.

We know smell and recall are closely linked. But until a few years ago, aromatherapy for dementia patients was relegated to non-medical use by family and friends of loved ones, since there was little science to support its value. Fortunately, that has all changed.

The reason smells can evoke deep emotions and rich memories is because other sensory inputs go through the thalamus, a “sorting hat” that routes data for processing elsewhere in our brains. But aromas zip from our olfactory bulb directly to our hippocampus, without passing “GO” or collecting $200. The hippocampus is involved in memory formation, and has been shown to be more strongly connected to smell than to any other sense. Aroma is likely how Santa, who’s hundreds of years old, still keeps track of all those kids and presents. He’s got fragrant evergreen boughs, a tang of reindeer dung and smoky chimneys to jog his memory.

Mice respond well to mint

In a report that came out in April, researchers from the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, detailed how a mere whiff of menthol, an essential oil extracted from mint leaves, improved cognitive function in mice. I’m not sure if we need or want our mice to be any smarter, but that’s what happened to every test animal. However, this is not the most intriguing part of the study.

In addition to normal mice, the research team got their hands on a strain of transgenic mice that were modified to have the kind of brain plaques that cause Alzheimer’s disease in people. These poor mice got dementia quite young. To the researchers’ surprise, brief daily exposure to mint oil for six months was enough to completely halt cognitive decline in mice with Alzheimer’s.

The cool thing about mint is that it’s easy to grow. In fact, the hard part might be keeping it in check. It prefers moist, rich soils, but seems to thrive just about anywhere. Place a fresh mint sprig in water, and it will begin to root in a week or so. Once the roots are fairly well developed, transfer it to a corner of your property where it won’t be a nuisance if it spreads. Dried mint can be kept in glass jars for use in winter.

Essential oils improve brain function

A topically related study at the University of California at Irvine this year took aromatherapy one step further. Published in July, the report states that diffusing trace amounts of essential oils into the air during sleep improved brain function 226 per cent in adults age 60-65. The odorants used in the six-month trial were not specified, but it’s a safe bet mint oil works as well, if not better, than other scents. I’ve already begun doing this at night. I’ll let you know when I feel 226 per-cent smarter.

Study looked at effects of maple syrup

In 2016, scientists from the University of Toronto went public with findings – which they admitted were preliminary – that maple syrup helps prevent Alzheimer’s. Natural phenolic compounds in maple syrup seem to keep tangles and plaques from forming in the brain. It’s only right that this research took place in the maple capital of the world. Since that time, studies in the U.S. continue to affirm the results from the earlier work at the University if Toronto.

Exercise, good sleep habits, a balanced diet and plenty of social interaction will help protect brain function. It’s best to avoid smoking and limit alcohol as well.

Given this new information on the benefits of eating syrup and sniffing menthol, I think we should all add mint ice cream topped with maple syrup to our diets. Just to give our brains a leg up. There’s no sense taking chances.