...very important-unbelievablg old tree growing out of cliff near base. Rappel to base and access from here. I’m not sure how I will core it. May need monster corer. I suspect this is a thousand years old.1
Our latest work is primarily a conservation effort. With funding from private foundations such as Global Forest and The Richard Ivey Foundation, and from the provincial government through Ontario Parks, we set out to conduct an inventory of the oldest trees; an initiative called the Niagara Escarpment Ancient Tree Atlas Project (NEATAP). How old are they? Where are they? Our previous research had led to the discovery of some very old dead cedars lying in the talus at the bottom of the cliff, but unfortunately, the resources were never available to permit a search for the oldest living trees along the Niagara Escarpment, even though previous random spatial sampling of tree ages had led to the discovery of living trees over 700 years in age. In 1995, the oldest living eastern white cedar was found during a study investigating the impact of rock climbing on the age structure, density and morphology of these trees. Two 800-year-old cedars were found in one of five random areas selected for sampling at the imposing cliff in Mount Nemo Conservation Area. Was this the oldest living tree on the cliff faces of the Niagara Escarpment? Does the maximum age of these trees vary between sites? What habitat factors contribute to longevity in this species, and will tree-ring chronologies from these trees reveal information about past episodes of climate change? Throughout the course of our research, local land managers and landowners have asked us if we know the age of the oldest tree on their properties. Some shook their head in disbelief when we told them that the antiquity of the forest as we had described it was based on “blind” or random sampling on the cliffs. We had never sought old trees! We concluded that a strategic targeted effort to locate the oldest trees at each cliff site would provide valuable information to those individuals making land use decisions along the Escarpment. After all, you can’t preserve something if you don’t know where it is. What does this fieldwork entail? How does one find the ancient cedars along the Niagara Escarpment? Pete takes you into the field on his quest to find the ancient trees.
Sometimes I am struck by the intense absurdity of it all. On a typical day, I can wake up in the morning, commute to my place of work within the most densely populated region of Canada and (with apologies to Gene Roddenberry) go where no one has gone before. This is possible because much of the Niagara Escarpment cliff face is still unexplored space. For this reason, I never take a venture onto the cliff face for granted.
Access to the cliff face usually involves hiking over level ground. As one approaches the edge of the cliff, it appears as a horizon line, with the darker green of the cedars announcing the presence of the ancient forest.
Peter Kelly uses an increment borer (in his left hand) to collect a core sample for determining the age of a cliff-face cedar at Rattlesnake Point. Photo by Doug Larson.
A typical field day begins with a selection of forgettable clothing. This is clothing that can be accidentally ripped, stained or physically destroyed, i.e. misguided Christmas presents and/or jeans with paint stains from some forgotten art project. I pick up Raj Pal, my research assistant and an extremely talented rock climber. A thirty-minute ride later and we’re out of the car loaded down with equipment and heading down a footpath through a typical beech-maple forest. A telltale line of green cedar trees emerges from the mottled colours of the hardwood forest. Bright light filters through the morning haze. Similar to the way a hedge separates two properties, the cedars mark the boundary between cliff edge and open void. If you wander past this point, your next step; 30 metres straight down, will be your last. Raj perches himself on an exposed outcropping of limestone. He scatters the contents of his massive backpack on the ground to reveal a strange and colourful collection of objects more suited to the set of Star Trek than ecological fieldwork. Some items have mysterious shapes and names like grigri and jumar. Others are more recognizable including the long coils of multicoloured rope and the two-way radios. Raj uses webbing (flat lengths of interwoven nylon) and caribiners (D-shaped aluminum clips) to anchor the rope, while I put on the safety harness, tie myself in and disappear over the edge of the cliff.
Conducting inventories of old trees on vertical cliff faces can be a hazardous undertaking... but not for the reasons you might think. The most dangerous aspect of the job is not the time I spend in a harness dangling off the cliff. In fact, the time I spend on the cliff face is probably the safest part of the whole job. I am using equipment that has been lab-tested to withstand forces many times greater than the maximum forces the equipment will be required to withstand in a real-life situation. Every link in the chain between my body and the safety of the cliff top is always backed up. While I rappel down the cliff face using one rope, another person is feeding out slack on a second. Each rope is anchored by webbing (flat, finely woven ribbonlike fabric) to three points at the cliff top. The carabiners (D-shaped climbing clips) are doubled up. The rope set-up is so hyper safe that climbers routinely stop and gaze in bewilderment at the maze of rope and webbing that we have spun at the cliff top.
No, the most dangerous aspect of the job is navigating the talus; the jumble of rocks that accumulate at the base of the cliff. The talus vegetation is often a tangle of plants. Fallen logs, the dead ancestors of the cliff-face cedar forest above, are greasy when wet. The rocks themselves are often precariously balanced atop each other. Sheets of these same rocks still loom overhead on the cliff face like paleolithic guillotines. Carpets of jewelweed conceal the subtleties of the rocky surface below, making each blind footstep a lesson in faith. Poison ivy thrives in the rocky debris along with a number of leg-grabbing shrub and vine species. Step on the wrong rock and you will fall. Step off a rock and your leg might disappear into a yawning gap in the talus. Regrettably, the bottom of the cliff is the only place from which the cliff face can be properly surveyed. Unfortunately, walking across a slope of loose rock while gazing up at a vertical cliff face is not the easiest feat to accomplish. Throw in a pair of binoculars or a camera and the task becomes dangerous, especially when one of the old cedars emerges from around the corner.
Peter Kelly stands beside this massive 643-year-old cedar that has fallen over into the talus. It may look dead, but actually it is kept alive by one tiny living branch not visible in the photo.
This large, complex 1,073 year-old cedar is rooted on the cliff face at Lion’s Head.
Above right; The base of this double-trunked 941-year-old cedar, growing on the cliff in Smokey Head-White Bluff Nature Reserve on the eastern shore of the Bruce, has accumulated large numbers of loose rocks that have fallen off the cliff above.
Travelling in the talus requires concentration. On more than one occasion, just seeing an ancient cedar has sent me tumbling into the talus. I’ve gone around a corner, spotted a breath-takingly old, gnarled tree on the cliff face and found myself lying amongst the rocks a few seconds later. Staring straight up while standing on a talus slope (especially if I’m staring through the binoculars) often leads to a momentary sense of vertigo and a slight imbalance. When accompanied by an ill-advised foot placement or a leg-grabbing raspberry plant, the body can careen off balance in an unexpected direction. I lunge for a flat rock. It pivots. I leap sideways onto an equally unstable rock. Then on to another. Each time, I am thrown further askew, the pack on my back adding to the imbalance. Like a talus version of hopscotch, I leap awkwardly from rock to rock desperately trying to right myself. This strategy rarely works and the game ends in typical fashion with me tumbling into a rock of unknown shape or size but of predictable hardness and density. A few scratches, a throbbing tailbone and a bruised ego, a typical albeit spectacular talus fall. Only then do I realize that this impromptu resting spot is a large patch of poison ivy.
In some cases, eroded sea caves perched high above the current water level offer protected space for cliff cedars, including this 537-year-old specimen. Its upward growth appears to have been deflected by the roof of the cave.
The roots of this gnarled 8jç-year-old cedar travel straight up a vertical fissure on the cliff within Lion’s Head Provincial Nature Reserve.
The ancient cedars are truly awe-inspiring. It’s difficult to explain why. They lack the colour of a showy flower or the flash of a tropical bird. They can’t match the immense size of a coastal redwood or the power of a tornado, and they certainly don’t have the “cute” factor normally reserved for some members of our native fauna. Who wants to make a fuzzy stuffed toy bearing the likeness of an ancient cedar?! Yet, they are as fascinating as a faded medieval painting or a crumbling lichen-encrusted castle that has withstood the onslaught of a thousand years of change. The oldest cedars have sat wedged in cracks for just as long, holding reign over the landscape like some forgotten monarchy. Some have witnessed radical changes to the land below. For hundreds of years, they witnessed limited land use change, an occasional fire, a clearing for a small village or field. Suddenly, there was a new commotion. The forest cover disappeared and orchards, fields, roads, quarries, subdivisions, golf courses and malls popped up in their place. Some species disappeared while others invaded the new open spaces. Some such as herb-robert, garlic mustard and the dandelion appeared beside them on the cliff face as did a few industrious humans. They are the only living things in Canada to have witnessed such change. A few trees may be older but none of them find themselves so close to human encroachment.
The industrial complex of Hamilton is visible behind the cliff face at Rock Chapel. Cedars up to 400 years in age occupy these cliffs.
So what is the “search image” for these ancient trees? Most people associate antiquity in forests with great height and massive diameter. Forests composed of such trees have been part of the public debate over conservation for many decades. Doug spent three years working in and around these cliff forests before he had any idea that the small deformed cliff trees were ancient while the large robust trees were young. This lesson was first learned by Edmund Schulman in the 1950s when he was studying the ancient asymmetrical bristlecone pines of eastern California. It was in his famous paper, “Adversity brings longevity in conifers.”2 that he first presented the idea that plants growing slowly in extreme environments can outlive their productive cousins by several orders of magnitude.
There is a continuum of tree morphologies growing out of the cracks and crevices on the cliffs ranging from the archetypal tree, straight, vertical and lush, to smaller, gnarled and twisted individuals that may be minimal in length. The oldest trees are somewhere in the middle and even without the binoculars, they jump right out at you. They can be summed up by the following adjectives: deformed, stunted, gnarled, weathered, twisted, grotesque and beautiful. They bear the scars that hundreds of years of clinging to the surface of a cliff can bring. Alternating strips of living and dead wood, aborted axes, twisted stems, inverted growth form, gnarled wood, shortened internode length and a sharp taper are all characteristic of the oldest trees. Yet, no two trees are the same. Various unknown environmental factors and an unknown number of natural disturbance events over time have led to a broad diversity of morphologies in the cliff-face cedars. A relatively large and radially symmetrical cliff cedar that lacks the diagnostic morphological characteristics indicative of extreme age can be much younger than its stunted and gnarled neighbour.
This cedar is U-shaped. The tree grows down and then back up the cliff face from the horizontal crack in which it is rooted. The tip of the tree is at the same height as its hase; a situation that could only occur on cliffs!
After extricating myself from the poison ivy and contemplating the several weeks of scratching and scabs that await my skin, I radio Raj; he tags the cliff-edge location above the tree and I head back up top. Raj works his magic and finishes setting up the ropes. Since Raj can’t see the tree, it is important to accurately tag a location immediately above it. If I’m off-target, and I cannot reach the tree, I will have to return to the cliff top and Raj will have to reconfigure the ropes. I struggle with my harness and wonder out loud why any male voluntarily places himself in such a restrictive apparatus. I attach a locking rappel device known as a “grigri” to one line and attach the grigri to my harness. This device will control my descent. Raj will control a back-up belay line that he now ties into his harness. This is the safety line. If some unforeseen event incapacitates me or the rappel line, Raj will be able to assume control of my descent. There can be no accidents.
I now start gathering all the equipment I will need on the cliff face. I do not want to forget anything! Most importantly, I grab my helmet then I attach the genuine naugahide increment borer carrying case (where do naugas come from anyway?) onto my harness. Very little of the genuine naugahide can be seen anymore. It didn’t stand up to the wear and tear of the cliff, so it is now a long glistening beacon of duct tape. Next in line is the dull green “Made in China” shoulder bag that contains my field notebook, along with pens, markers, spare batteries, aluminum tags, wire, clippers, tape measure, Zip-loc bags, straws, masking tape and hundreds of fragments of leaves, twigs and branches that have worked their way into the bag over the course of the field season. I offset the weight of the corers hanging off my left side with the weight of the green bag on my right. Since I need space in front of me to work the ropes, I will use a carabiner to attach the large brilliant orange Pelican carrying case that holds my camera equipment onto the metal ring above my butt at the back of the harness. Next, of course, is the golf ball retriever. Excuse me? Yes, believe it or not, the golf ball retriever has become an integral part of our field gear. We paint the extended retriever in ten centimetre increments. It is perfect for measuring out or up from any position on the face. The golf ball retriever goes over my shoulder using a strap made from webbing and attached with duct tape (of course!). Last but not least, I hang my two-way radio from my belt. I’ve got so much stuff hanging from me, I feel about as balanced and mobile as a drunken sloth.
If I have ever had a fear of heights, I have long since lost it. This is a bad thing. I have always regarded a fear of heights as a rather healthy phobia even though it might seriously hamper my ability to pursue ecological research on cliffs. You might think that the genes that propel humans into stepping off perfectly solid cliff tops would have been selected against and filtered out of the population a long time ago. Not surprisingly, I have discovered that this danger to humans is one of the factors that has protected these trees long after their level-ground brethren were turned into furniture and paper.
Despite this lack of fear, the first step over the edge is always the most awkward. With my back to the open abyss, I press my feet firmly against the rock and slowly lean backwards in an attempt to align my body perpendicular to the face. If my feet slip, I’ll swing into the rock (and my feet have slipped – many times). At the earliest opportunity I stretch out and peer straight down. I’m checking my position against the location of the tree base to ensure that the two are aligned. I’m also anxious to get my first close-up glance at this tree.
It’s a magnificent specimen that is rooted on a small ledge no bigger than a foot stool. Its roots disappear into a series of ominous vertical cracks in the rock at the back of the ledge. There is no soil to speak of, except for a thin layer of dark organic matter that has fallen from above and accumulated at the back of the tree. The tree extends several metres straight out from the cliff face before ending at the stunted dead tip of the original growth axis. Two distinct strips of living bark-covered conducting tissue snake their way up the trunk beside the bleak whitened expanses of dead wood. Before the end they take a right turn downwards. From here they meander their way five metres along the new living axis of the tree (and former branch). Each of the living strips (punctuated by a series of emergent dead branches) culminates in two distinct clusters of sparse green foliage. It’s hard to believe that the two clusters of leaves that dangle many metres below its base are in fact the tree’s canopy.
Nearby, a number of younger cedars are perched like pupils gathered around their mentor. I am forced to endure jabs from their branches just so I can access the root base of the target tree. Once I’m comfortable and secured on the face, Raj will use a Global Positioning System to accurately record the tree’s longitude and latitude. I record a number of very specfic site variables including the dimensions of the rooting point, the presence and size of overhangs, the direction the cliff is facing and an assessment of rock stability. Raj lowers an old climbing rope marked in one-metre increments, which we use to measure cliff height, distance from tree base to cliff edge, and from tree base to the forest canopy below. A number of morphological measurements related to growth form are also recorded, including tree and axis height, basal diameter and stem-strip cover.
The age of the tree is determined with a handheld hollow coring device known as an increment borer. Like a biopsy needle, the borer is used to collect a thin 4-millimetre-wide piece of wood from the tree containing a lifetime record of annual tree rings. Unfortunately, while an increment borer is a relatively straightforward tool to use on level ground, it creates a whole series of problems on the cliff face. Newton’s First Law of Motion states that every body will continue in its state of rest unless propelled by “impressed forces.” In other words, an increment borer cannot be drilled into a tree if the user is dangling in mid-air and unable to apply an ‘impressed force’ in the first place! To rectify this deficiency in force I often have to wrap my legs around the tree or attempt to core with one arm while the other is desperately hanging on to the cliff face. This position gives new meaning to the concept of tree-hugging. Sometimes it’s not possible to core the tree near its base because the adjacent rock interferes with any attempt to turn the handle on the borer. It was also Newton who discovered the principle behind the fact that pens, field books, camera lenses and parts of increment borers will travel downwards rapidly when dropped from a cliff face.
I retrieve the tree core from the shaft of the borer using a long thin metallic U-shaped strip known as a sleeve or spoon. With one hand gripping the tree for balance, my other hand inserts the spoon into the borer where sharp teeth grip the tree core. Ideally, the core is then pulled from the borer with my third hand and stored for future analysis. Not surprisingly, since I (and most other humans) lack a third hand, I sometimes lose the core at this stage as it emerges from the borer. A slight shift in balance or a sudden updraft (it’s often windy on the face) and the core will blow free of its resting spot and perform an intricate ballet as it drifts into the dense vegetation of the talus below. If I manage to retrieve the core, I place it in a plastic straw and seal it until it can be safely extracted and mounted. I have discovered that the Mcstraws available in a certain unnamed mega fast-food chain are the perfect size for tree core storage.
A turkey vulture chick in its rock nest on a cliff face within Rattlesnake Point Conservation Area.
I finish up at the tree and tie a labelled metal tag to it. With the feeling gone from my legs, I descend towards the talus below. Hssssssssssttt! I stall my descent. Hssssssssttttrt!!! I hear an intense and persistent hissing that sounds like radio static coming from a crevice cave halfway up the cliff. Cliff faces provide habitat for a number of mammals, songbirds, insects and microorganisms, but I cannot think of a creature that makes a sound like this! While balanced on a small ledge, I peer into a dark void. A fetid stench drifts my way. A slight movement at the back of the cave and the sudden appearance of a looming shadow on the cliff face confirm that I have stumbled upon a turkey vulture nest. Within a couple of seconds, the chick, beautifully displayed in black and white down feathers, reveals itself and musters up another extended gut-wrenching hiss. I recall vague memories about the remarkable vomit-hurling capabilities of turkey vultures in distress. A quick recall of their diet and I beat a hasty retreat to the talus. I release myself from the ropes, loosen the harness and collapse onto the rocks. The feeling must return to my legs before I can make the trip back up to the cliff top.
The following day, the samples are removed from the straws and carefully glued into wooden mounts. A drill press with sanding head is used to reduce the rough surface of the cores to a smooth polish. Under a stereomicroscope, I count 581 rings in the first core. This core includes the pith (or first year of the tree’s growth) but ends with an outer ring that died an unknown number of years ago. I repeat the process with a different core that missed the pith but contained the current year’s growth as the outer ring. This sample contains 612 tree rings. Clearly, however, the tree is actually much older. The individual tree-ring widths are measured and a cross-dating program is used to match the patterns of variation in tree-ring widths between the two cores. The dead portion of the tree died in 1842, thus establishing the germination date as 1261 A.D., almost 740 years in age. An important tree, no doubt, but only one of the many ancient trees left to be discovered on the cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment.
This is the second oldest living eastern white cedar. It germinated over 1,300 years ago in 701 A.D.
