BIOPHILIAC
THE UNDERWORLD What’s going on under our skis and snowboards—and how might our winter fun impact nature?
words :: Leslie Anthony On a sunny morning after a glorious early February snowfall, my partner and I were riding a chairlift when we noticed a set of animal tracks cascading through the new snow beneath us. Unlike the tracks we’d often seen in the meadow at the top of the lift, which tended to be from several different creatures crisscrossing the lift line from one forested patch to another, these had a more deliberate feel. From the bottom of the run beneath the lift to almost the top—a considerable distance, I might add—the footfalls went directly from one specific spot to another and stopped, showing evidence of investigation or, in some cases, eager digging. This pattern immediately got my attention. The tracks clearly belonged to an animal on the hunt for another, and sure enough, at two different places where the former had stopped to dig, the snow was stained with the blood of the latter. Fascinating. The tracks were too large and widely spaced to belong to a long-tailed weasel, the perky predator whose summer brown coat shifts to winter white, perfect camouflage for prowling the subnivean (under-snow) world for the voles, mice and shrews that remain active throughout the season. But they were also too small to be a coyote. Fox maybe? American pine marten?
Which animal had made the prints, however, mattered less than what these showed. Each of the spots the animal more or less beelined to before checking it out was a de facto mound of snow—a skier-made mogul. And it was always a mogul, never the compressed troughs
Was there a correlation between the mogulmaking by skiers and snowboarders on this run and a congregation of prey beneath them? between. I can’t attest to whether these mounds harboured clumps of vegetation or stumps or rock piles, but they definitely contained critters. And because the hunter clearly knew something about what was going on beneath certain moguls, I had to wonder: Was this a form of subsidized predation—the term employed when an anthropogenic action or construct directly or indirectly makes it easier for an animal to find its prey? In other words, was there a correlation between the mogulmaking by skiers and snowboarders on this run and a congregation of prey beneath them? If so, it was both interesting and news to me. But maybe not surprising. Ski areas have all sorts of known effects on the ecosystems MAXIME LÉGARÉ-VÉZINA
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