A Small Ecosystem

So last fall I cut down a clump of willows in my mother’s back yard in Salmon. They were rapidly shooting up into something a pulp mill would be interested in. I mean, these guys were over six inches in diameter. I thought maybe they were responsible for the tangled mats of reddish roots that I had to sift out of the vegetable plots every time I turned over a forkful of soil. So I got out the Swedish bow saw and down they came. Let more sunshine into the garden in the mornings. But now the stumps are covered in a lush growth of new shoots, about six feet high, and the leaves are inhabited by swarms of aphids. Presto! New habitat. Crawling over the aphids, like theater patrons trying to get to the aisles, are ants. They aren’t the same ants that built a pyramid of spruce needles atop the old apricot stump – those are big and red and cranky. (I got rid of them by turning the hose on full force and washing the needles away and then leaving it there to flood the soil. They moved to another stump in the front yard. That’s okay. We can do this all summer.)

No, the aphid-tending ants are smaller and brown. Also present are ladybugs and ladybug larvae, feeding on the aphids. And although the internet is replete with violent videos of ants tearing ladybugs limb from limb to defend “their” herds, this is not happening here. The ants ignore them. They coexist.

You see where I’m going with this. Ants and aphids and ladybugs. Humans and elk and wolves. For that matter, humans and cows and wolves. Sure, wolves eat a few cows. But do they eat enough? Enough to keep the cows alert and in top physical condition; enough to bring their natural protective instincts to the surface again? (With apologies to Edward Abbey’s riff on coyotes). Aurochs, after all, coexisted with big predators for hundreds of thousands of years in Europe. They weren’t scared of no wolves.

But hypocrisy is everywhere. I severely maimed a willow clone to make life easier for domestic zucchini. I sowed panic and disruption and probably death among the young and helpless, just because ants bit my mother when she clipped grass too close to the nest. I tell myself that an organic garden on a quarter of an acre is a far cry from the thousands of exotic cattle nearby that make life hard for sage grouse, pollute streams, and act as unwitting bait so men in helicopters can gun down wolves. And it is. But it’s still a footprint.

Here’s a good article from Wikipedia about aphids. Did you know that ants eat the aphids’ sugar-rich shit? That’s why they tend them. Really.