Prescribed Burns Rejuvenate Native Grasslands

This black oak savannah is near Windsor, ON.

by Helen Mason

For more than a decade I lived on a small farm at the extreme eastern end of the Oak Ridge Moraine. When pioneers first arrived in southern Ontario, this area was covered with tall grass prairies and oak savannah. The sandy loam soils were ideal for farming. By the time Catharine Parr Traill and her family arrived in 1832, the area where I lived already included settled farms. Much of the grassland had been cultivated.

Much of the former prairie is now farmland and pastureland.

In an effort to rejuvenate some of the original flora and fauna, the Nature Conservancy of Canada and Alderville First Nation plan prescribed burns around the end of April each spring. Exact timing depends on weather. Too much wind can make it hard to control fires.

Controlled burns play an important role in tall grass prairies and black oak savannahs, especially ones that have introduced European grass species. They allow native plant species to grow again.

This prescribed burn is in the Cypress Hills, SK.

Many native species disappeared because they are warm-season species that start to grow later than the European species brought by early farmers. European agricultural species tend to be cool-season species that start earlier in the season. They also have a longer growing season. As a result, they out-compete the warmer season native species.

A fire in early spring helps tall grass prairies and oak savannahs in several ways. It increases the percentage of oak in hardwood stands because oak is more fire-tolerant than maple and beech.

Indigo buntings inhabit weedy fields.

It burns the introduced grass species, which may have already started their spring growth, and slows the growth of woody vegetation. The native prairie grasses, which are deep-rooted and start a little later, are not harmed by such a fire. In fact, burns clear vegetation right to soil level. This allows plenty of sunlight for sun-dependent plants.

 

After a burn, the blackened soil quickly absorbs heat from the sun. The warmed earth encourages seed germination. Charred vegetation provides a handy fertilizer for the new growth. The new grass growth provides nesting material and sites for grassland species.

The savannah provides habitat for the endangered Eastern hognose snake.

The Case of the Totally False Fingerprinting Propaganda

A few weeks back, Jan Thornhill wrote a post about accuracy in the era of the Internet. It got me thinking about the biggest fact-checking challenge I ever encountered as a children's writer - and how glad I was that someone caught the problem before it made it into print. Here's the story.

by L. E. Carmichael

The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century was responsible for more than just technological breakthroughs and the novels of Charles Dickens. It also caused a major spike in crime rates, as people moved from the countryside into the cities looking for work - and turned to crime when they couldn't find any.

Urbanization also made it harder to reliably identify repeat criminals. In small villages, everyone not only knew everyone, they knew with a high degree of certainty which of their neighbours was likely to blame for the local crime wave. Not so much in cities, where many people lived surrounded by strangers. Witness reports were often useless, because criminals wore masks or otherwise changed their appearances, and there was no such thing as photo ID. Many governments instituted harsher penalties for career criminals, but these penalties couldn't be applied without certainty that the suspect in custody was actually a repeat offender.

Enter Alphonse Bertillion. A file clerk with the Paris police, he was the fussy, meticulous son of a statistician, and he had a revolutionary idea. A criminal could change his hair cut or moustache or even his name, Bertillon believed, but he couldn't change his bones. Careful measurements of body dimensions, like the length of the finger or the long bone in the thigh, could be combined to produce a one-of-a kind profile - the first (Western) scientific basis for identifying human beings.

The Paris police took a while to come around to this idea, but in its first year of use, Bertillon's system, called anthropometry, identified 300 career criminals. By 1888, it was implemented in all French police stations and quickly spread around the world.

Until 1903, when a man named Will West was taken to Leavenworth Prison in Kansas and identified based on his measurements as a repeat offender. But West swore he'd never set foot in the prison before. By a bizarre coincidence, West's measurements perfectly matched those of William West - a man already imprisoned in Leavenworth! While the men did, in fact, bear a strong resemblance to each other, their fingerprints were completely different. This incident was one of the reasons fingerprinting replaced anthropometry as the standard method of legal identification.

Or was it?

When I was researching Forensic Science: In Pursuit of Justice, I came across this story in not one, but several of my reference books. Since it appeared well-verified and was the perfect anecdote to explain how fingerprinting came to dominate criminal identification, I included it in the initial draft of Chapter 6. Imagine my shock when the content consultant* for the book told me the entire incident was a myth.

A myth.

As Simon A. Cole explains in his book Suspect Identities (a volume the consultant kindly referred me to), the West story was carefully fabricated and cleverly circulated as a means of promoting fingerprinting as a superior alternative to anthropometry. And while fingerprinting ultimately replaced Bertillon's method due to its numerous advantages, this incident was not one of them.

For mysterious reasons, I had more "fact" trouble while researching Forensic Science that with any of my other books (excepting maybe Fox Talk, because some of the science in that book is both new and controversial). I have no idea why this subject matter in particular was so affected by conflicting sources and legend-as-truth, but it just goes to show that fact checking is one of the most important steps in writing new nonfiction - especially for young audiences, who may not have the broader context needed to be critical of what they read.

What about you? Do you have a favourite fact that turned out not to be true? 

Calling all Nova Scotian kids' book lovers! I, and many other amazing local authors, will be signing at the Celebrating Children's Literacy Book Fair. It's on Saturday, April 23, from 8:30-1:30pm, on the NSCC Kingstec Campus in Kentville. Come out and see us!

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* Content consultants are experts that review my books before publication - they help me ensure that no errors make it into the final draft.

Another Book Birthday!

Have you ever wondered what to feed a platypus? Or how to keep a lion from getting bored with a never-changing menu of antelope, antelope, antelope? Zookeepers certainly have, and for them it's literally a matter of life and death.

Keeping hundreds of different animals fed and healthy is a mammoth job. And I wanted to know how they did it. Do zoos have boxes of index cards with favorite recipes? And if so, what are they?

The answer is yes, they do, and all last year I chatted with animal nutritionists at zoos all over the world to find out their go-to recipes and secret ingredients. I also found out more about the issues zoos are facing:  about whether or not animals should be kept in captivity, and what to do for animals whose habitats are disappearing. I learned about best practices in animal and habitat conservation, breeding and more.

For example, do you know how  - or why - it is important to hand-rear flamingo chicks in captivity?
You'll find the answer, and a recipe for a yummers smoothie here! You'll also find out why pandas get birthday cakes and tigers get popsicles ---really.

Worms for Breakfast: How to Feed a Zoo is published by Owlkids Books and is a Junior Library Guild selection. You can find the book at your favorite bookseller anywhere in North America.

Helping Kids Look at the Small Picture

By Pippa Wysong

When I was in the eighth grade, my homeroom teacher gave the class an exciting geography assignment. It was to write an essay on anything related to geography that we wanted to. We were to pick some part of the planet, go to the library, read up on the topic and write a paper. We could do this project in pairs.

Nothing wrong with starting small.
Just ask this caterpillar.
Claire Eamer photo

My friend Cathy and I discussed it and decided on the Sahara Desert. We knew nothing about it, but it sounded incredibly exotic. We had visions of relentless sunlight, drifting sand and camels. We both associated it with Lawrence of Arabia and Peter O’Toole’s dreamy blue eyes, which added to our naïve concepts of the Sahara Desert.

We proposed this to the teacher, who said it sounded like a fine topic and that we should narrow it down a bit.

“How can we narrow it down?” we asked.

“Go to the library and start reading. You’ll figure it out,” was his reply.

Off to the library we went, the first of multiple visits. We quickly discovered there were shelves full of books about the Sahara Desert. And we started reading.

With no other direction than “you’ll figure it out,” we were nervous about going back to the teacher. We were both shy and nervous at that age. His friendly directive, to our minds, was a command. The leap we made was that we had to figure it out or get a failing mark.

I decided to tackle everything about the Sahara Desert. Its geographical boundaries, minerals, population, and date palms. I wrote down things about various industries and oil, and quoted large tracts with weird terms like GDP and import-export jargon.

The paper had a lot of big passages in quotes with references (I knew not to plagiarize). Most of what was in quotes was stuff I didn’t understand but sounded important. I was amazed with what counted as ‘geography.’

Lambs start small too. It's not a bad thing.
Claire Eamer photo

In the end, we handed in 52 pages of sweat. Cathy contributed a reasonable five pages about the weather.

Later, in high school, a science competition was announced and I wanted to enter. The directions were “come up with an idea and tell the teacher.”

There were several of us who wanted to be part of a science fair, but “figure it out on your own” was beyond us. We needed directions to the starting line. Where other kids got their ideas from was a mystery.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, there weren’t the large number of science experiment books for kids and teens that there are now. (And I worry about some kids who may over-rely on these wonderful books because all the answers, including observations and discussions of implications, are taking away from kids figuring out some of those things themselves. Hopefully reading about those still helps them understand the critical skills used in science.)

I hear from friends’ kids that they still get the “start from scratch” and “figure it out on your own” directives. Good in some ways, stunting in others – depending on the student. Some of us who wanted to be part of a science project didn’t know where to look. We didn’t have parents who said “How about studying the effects of watering a house plant with coffee?” or “Here’s a neat way to build a model of a volcano.” I never did enter.

I’ve also seen parents say “I have to leave early to finish building junior’s science fair project” – but that’s an essay for another time.

Even racecars and racecar drivers start small.
Claire Eamer photo

Later, a reader in the eighth grade wrote to me at my Ask Pippa column, asking how she could do a science fair project relating to rust and her bicycle. I wanted to help, yet knew I couldn’t tell her what to do. But I wanted to give her something to help her get past the "start from scratch and figure it out" directive.

So I wrote back, suggesting she look up the word oxidation. I didn’t tell her that was the key concept behind rust.

Apparently it helped. I don’t know what her experiment was, but she wrote back months later thanking me, saying that the one word made all the difference. She had placed in the provincial finals.

The moral? Nudge kids towards a reasonable starting place. Or it’s too overwhelming and science becomes painful.

For more of Pippa Wysong's work, see her article Like Swimming Through a Pharmacy in Hakai Magazine.