continent and thus the belief that it might also occur on the island is understandable, especially given that the school textbooks in which its presence was recorded also had the function of introducing the island’s school children to the range of the animal kingdom‘“. However, there is no obvious explanation as to how an otherwise sound writer such as Sutherland (1861) could come to believe that there were hedgehogs on the island!

Food-chains and food-webs — The trophic or food- chain relationships of the mammalian fauna and game-birds of the island are schematically shown in Figure 2-1, which is an expansion of the equivalent figure from the French period report. The British period records add considerable island— based documentation for the feeding relationships shown in the figure, both for the natural food- chains, and especially for the interaction of the native mammalian fauna with the livestock-rearing systems of the European settlers.125 We can now also add the weasel to our diagram, which, though undoubtedly present, had gone unrecorded during the French period, and we need to acknowledge the loss of the wolf and caribou from the ecosystem by the mid-eighteenth century.

The importance of the beech forests — The British period records enable us to comment more fully on the importance of the island’s beech forests in sustaining some of the principal food chains of the island. The evidence examined in Appendix 1 indicated that beech was a very important tree in the upland hardwood forests of the island, with large areas of the island’s land surface being covered by beech forest. Beech produces a nut (traditionally called mast), which provides an important food source for many different animals.126 In the early records for the island we are told that the red and flying squirrels, the chipmunk, the partridge and the ’plague mouse’ fed on the mast, and evidence from elsewhere indicates that the passenger pigeon and the bear were also likely to have done so, as also, we may

124

Sutherland 1861; Bain 1890. ‘25 During the French period there had been no mention of native predators taking livestock or poultry, though undoubtedly there must have been occurrences of such.

‘26 Tubbs & Houston (1990) (p, 330), in a modern study, note that beech is “the only nut producer in the northern hardwood forest", and that beech mast is “palatable to a large variety of birds and mammals, including mice, squirrels, chipmunks, black bear, deer, foxes, ruffed grouse, ducks and bluejays".

252

pre5ume, were all of the other woodland mice and voles.127

Both in Europe and in North America, beech has long been known to be irregular in its seed production with unusually heavy ’masting’ occurring every few years. In the North American species such ”mast years” are reported to occur at two to eight year intervals‘”. The causes of a mast year appear to be related to the weather, the most recent study suggesting that it is the weather of the preceding two summers that triggers a high level of mast production: an unusually moist cool summer in year one, followed by very dry conditions in the early part of the summer of the following year will trigger high mast production in the third summer.129 This mast will mature and fall to the ground in the late autumn of

that third year.130

That the beech forests on the island exhibited such mast years is recorded by Stewart (1806) who said that beech mast was produced "in vast quantities in some seasons”. He made further reference to such mast years in his attempt to offer an explanation for the vole outbreaks, as had recorders during the earlier French period.131

This irregularity in the seed production of the beech tree seems to have had significant effects not just on the numbers of the ’plague’ vole. Stewart (1806) said that the three squirrel species (and especially the chipmunk) and the ruffed grouse also showed a ”great increase" in numbers. And though they did not enter the written record for the island, we may presume that all of the other feeders on beech mast would also have been affected, such as the black bear and the passenger pigeon, both of which would have been presented

‘2’ See footnotes 65 for the bear and 117 and 121 for the

passenger pigeon.

‘28 Tubbs and Houston 1990.

‘29 Piovesan and Adams 2001,

‘30 Tubbs & Houston (1990) state that ‘beechnuts' ripen between September and November and that the seed falls to the ground

after the first heavy frosts cause the burs to open and is completed within a few weeks.

13‘ Louis Franquet in 1751 and Joseph de La Roque in 1752 referred to such mast years during the French period (see Sobey 2002, p. 154), and Bishop Plessis (1812) was to do so again six years after Stewart wrote. We also find other evidence of such mast years in the journals of Francis Bain (1868-1885): on 2 July 1877 he wrote “beechmast very abundant" — if he was noticing the seed on the ground then the mast year must have been 1876; and on 22 October 1881 he noted “beechmast plentiful“, which must refer to the current year‘s seed production.