The Blue Snow of Lanark County

Now, I know you think this is going to be a Paul Bunyan story, or maybe something out of Big Joe Muffaraw of Ottawa Valley fame. But rather than Bunyan’s “big blue ox” or Muffaraw’s famous bullfrog, the blue snow of Lanark County is real, verifiable, and widespread. You’re welcome to come to my river lane and check it out.

It’s actually entirely natural and occurs every winter, but has only been a “thing” for the last hundred years or so. This is because the culprit in the story is the European Buckthorn, a nasty invasive species which has spread across north-eastern North America. My woods are full of it, a sworn enemy, and year by year I’m beating it back to extinction, along with its equally nasty ally, the prickly ash.

It’s not for no reason that the European Buckthorn is a successful invader. Its leaves sprout earlier than its competitors in the spring and are the last to drop in the fall. It grows much like a vine and tangles itself around more desirable trees, eventually choking them. And its berries have two qualities evilly calculated for survival. First, they hang in the branches until long after every other fruit has perished and dropped, leaving themselves as the only choice for hungry winter birds. But, diabolically, the fruit contains a powerful laxative, causing the flying birds, to put it delicately, to distribute the Buckthorn seeds far and wide. If Dr. Evil were a tree, he’d be a Buckthorn.

But the Buckthorn has at least one natural enemy: the Eastern Cottontail, the humble brown wild rabbit of our area. Frankly, cottontails don’t much like Buckthorns, or at least Buckthorn bark, but in late winter when a metre or more of snow is covering all the food one might prefer, the stuff is right in front of your twitchy little nose, and, well, it is food. And icky food is better than no food.

And so it is in Lanark County, and much of North-Eastern North America, rabbits spend late winter eating large quantities of Buckthorn bark. It’s kind of like you and me – if it’s either bread crusts or starvation, then bread crusts it shall be. For our bunnies, it’s Buckthorn bark.

So here’s the funny thing: when the rabbits eat tons of this stuff, a phytochemical is introduced into their pee which is initially clear, but once the ultraviolet rays of the sun strike it, turns blue. Smurf blue. Popsicle blue. Cotton candy blue.

And so in late February and early March, the snow of Lanark County has these almost fluorescent patches of blue snow which would look far more appropriate in a midway than a quiet ski trail. All because of a weird chemical in an invasive tree and the late-winter hunger of our little bunnies.

Now you’re probably wondering how Norm is going to work a moral into this story, and to be frank, it’s not easy. But in truth it does cause us to stand back and admit that the world is far more complex than we think, that the cause-and-effect relationships which result from such unintended consequences as the interaction of our local rabbits and a casually introduced invader could never have been guessed.

We live in a time when it seems many of the power players of the world have flipped the table, everything is up for grabs, and uncertainty rules. Which is true. But what none of us can guess is how this will all play out. Some things we can reasonably predict, but more often than not results obtain which nobody could have guessed.

So when it may seem that all kinds of ugly invasive species are taking over our political and social worlds, there are factors and undercurrents currently unknown and undetected which will play out in the most surprising ways.

In the meantime, keep calm, and don’t eat Buckthorn bark!