Harvesting grapes saddles you with responsibilities to make wine, put away your tools and clean up the vineyard. But in the midst of endless work there are surprises both pleasant and problematic. On the pleasant side, finding old bird nests is one of my favorites. It is a good reminder that not all birds are after your grapes and that some can even be helpful. Moreover, it shows that the vineyard is a healthy habitat for a number of creatures that you might not even know about till they have already raised their young and left.
While birds are generally well-loved and, as can be seen in the pages of the North Columbia Monthly, are often identified and photographed, I will only name a few and move on. The picture is probably of a robin’s nest. They can be noisy and when large flocks pass through in the fall, they can devastate a grape crop in less than a day. So, I have bird nets and neighbors sometimes use recorded distress calls. I know when robins are hatching young because they tend to leave blue eggshells on a pathway. Chickadees, woodpeckers, nuthatches and many other birds frequent the vineyard. My favorites are bohemian waxwings and piliated woodpeckers.
But we also have cats. So, I discourage bluebirds and any bird that I really like because the vineyard can be a dangerous place for them. Before I go any further with this, I want to lay down a principle about the health of any biome. “The greater the diversity of species available in any habitat, the greater is its health.” Before you shrug your shoulders with a physical “whatever”, I want to elaborate on some not-commonly-accepted ramifications of this maxim starting with gophers.
“Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 species are all endemic to North and Central America. They are commonly known for their extensive tunneling activities and their ability to destroy farms and gardens.” (Wikipedia) Even in this first paragraph of the Wikipedia article gophers are thrown into the category of pests and varmints. Agreed, they are hell on garlic, potatoes, carrots… and many other garden crops. I admit to trapping them with good old fashion lethal gopher traps when they get close to those crops. We also have a self-seeding plant in the garden known as Gopher Purge, (Euphorbia lathyrism), which does discourage them. But getting back to our principle about diversity, gophers have some good qualities and a place in enhancing the ecosystem. Bear with me.
Most of my vineyard is not a garden. I don’t own a tractor. The top six inches of the soil is the most active part of the ecosystem. Turning it over, incorporating organic matter that breaks down and rots is the source of a lot of natural nutrition in the soil, especially when you are adding amendments like leaves, manure and biochar or cover crops like clover and vetch. Gophers enhance that process. I have seen them wipe out young vines and other plants. Where there are a lot of gophers, I suggest cutting the bottom out of the plastic pots that most plant starts come in to protect the upper 8 inches of roots from gophers. Walking the rows there is no visible damage to the older vines where gophers are present.
Gophers like plants with juice. They can’t visit the local watering hole. Moist, loose soil is their favorite. Their mounds encourage ruderal plant species, plant species that are the first to colonize disturbed lands. Native climax species eventually return but many forbes and flowers fall into the ruderal niche. It looks to me like gophers like to eat quack grass. You have to like that. They are called “pocket gophers” because their cheeks serve as pockets to use in transporting and hoarding food. When that food rots deep underground, it provides plant nutrients far below the surface where you would normally fertilize.
We’ve looked at gophers from both sides now, and you have to admit that they can get out of hand. Enter the gopher snake, (Pituophis catenifer deserticola). So, in some people’s minds we have just gone from bad to worse. Bear with me. They do look a lot like rattle snakes. Gopher Snakes even imitate rattle snakes when defending themselves by coiling up, flattening their heads to look like rattle snake heads and even striking out but it’s a head butt and not a bite. They are not poisonous. They eat voles, mice and other pests besides gophers including other snakes. Bottom line, they are also great to have around. The last one I saw was inside my 50-year-old pickup truck and leaving quickly in a hole through the floorboard. They can climb to eat birds and their eggs. Mostly, you won’t see them if they are underground eating or digesting gophers.
Also underground and mostly unseen, are yellowjackets, another creature that is probably on your I-hate-these-things list. Not so fast. Yes, they are nasty and relentless when disturbed. (I try to put a small flag by any underground nest I find so as to avoid it from then on.) Only fertilized queens survive the winter. They take a couple of months to ramp up production and can build colonies of 5000 workers. Early on they eat a lot of insects to feed protein to their young larvae. That is their biggest benefit. Their hives are made of wood pulp. The hives do not survive the winter in our climate and are digested by fungi when they rot. Not only is more fungus underground good for the soil, the hives can contain the yeast that will emerge again on new fruit, a benefit for my wines that are fermented with natural yeast.
You may not be warming up to this idea that diversity is healthy given these three examples. I haven’t even gotten to skunks, squirrels, racoons and several kinds of insects. But for each one of these I can cite examples of how they enhance the biome. More about that later. It works for plants as well as animals. Weeds tell us about our soil. We will do well to understand them before we attack.