land's end

the yellow Earth with rifts, ridges, rims
painted by an evening sun
watered by a scattered rain
orange bison calves beckon to motherly grunts
their long limbs stiff from sleep
it's time to move.
ahead, the people gather predicting the grizzly's path
as her golden-tinged cubs wrestle and roll toward thick blue-green sage, almost camouflaged
and still ahead a gray wolf abandons an elk carcass
goldeneyes display on a quiet lake
whose water is tilled in V-shape
as a young beaver glides to pause at a log most distant from land's end
where for a moment
pausing is
  the only thing to do.

Facultative species turn into obligate in forested wetlands

Facultative species in wetland habitat are not strictly confined to the wetland (i.e. are not obligate) until perhaps they are endangered by habitat loss in the surrounding landscape such as the Florida panther or the Bengal tiger, or the threatened species in forested peat swamps in SE Asia: orangutans, sun bears and clouded leopards. Perhaps these species become obligate out of necessity (their survival depends on it). According to Stoneman (1997), several mammal species in peat forest occur outside their previously known ranges including the marbled cat and slender tree shrew. For how many species is such a habitat shift actual, rather than an artifact of survey effort (i.e. how many species' distribution maps actually include wetland areas such as mangroves, which are so difficult to survey)? And how do species previously occuring only in terrestrial ecosystems adapt to successfully exploit the wetland (e.g. do they 'follow the tides')? I thought that these are questions which we'd have more time to pursue being that forested wetlands support old growth more than do adjacent upland forests (according to Aram Calhoun, author of Forested Wetlands in Maintaining biodiversity in forest ecosystems) as they are relatively difficult to access and log and to convert to agriculture. But the IUCN has just recently issued a press release on the state of the world's mangroves, and their future is bleak- even more bleak than peat swamp? These wetland habitats are still refugia for some threatened upland species, and the time to figure this into our valuation of these ecosystems is NOW.