Mammals of Washington, Volume 2: University of Kansas Publications Museum of Natural HistoryDalquest, Walter Woelber
Science
Mammals of Washington, Volume 2: University of Kansas Publications Museum of Natural History
Dalquest, Walter Woelber
Mammals -- Washington (State)
Great movements of mammal species came after the retreat of the
Vashon-Wisconsin ice. The greatest of these was the spread of the Rocky
Mountain Fauna northward and eastward to the Pacific. In this process,
northeastern Washington was inhabited by animals that probably came from
Idaho and Montana. Some of the species from farther north, as for
example the caribou, may first have been forced into Idaho and Montana
by the glaciers. The invasion of northeastern Washington probably was
not a mass movement of an entire fauna, because invasion seems to be
still going on. As yet the woodchuck and striped ground squirrel of the
Pend Oreille Mountains have not crossed the Columbia River, a
relatively minor barrier in northeastern Washington. The mountains west
of the Columbia are occupied instead by the yellow-bellied marmot, a
member of the Great Basin Fauna, and there is no ecologic counterpart in
these mountains of the golden-mantled ground squirrel.
Also the invasion of the Cascade Mountains by a number of Rocky Mountain
species may have been an intermittant or gradual movement. The red
squirrel and Rocky Mountain subspecies of jumping mouse now are present
in the extreme northeastern Cascades, where they possibly arrived
relatively recently. The squirrel is competing with the coastal species
already present and may eventually supplant it. The same may be true of
the two forms of jumping mouse.
The invasion by the Rocky Mountain Fauna was rapid as compared with that
of the Pacific Coastal Fauna. Evidence of this was presented in an
earlier paper (Dalquest and Scheffer, 1944: 310), where it was shown
that the gophers of the _douglasii_ group, isolated during the Vashon
time in the southern Cascades, made only a few feeble postglacial
movements and then only when conditions were ideal. In this same time
the _fuscus_ group of gophers moved from Idaho and virtually surrounded
the range of the _douglasii_ group. This tendency to immobility seems to
have been characteristic of every member of the Pacific Coastal Fauna.
If the retreat of the Vashon and Wisconsin glaciers occurred at the same
time, both faunas had an equal opportunity to invade the deglaciated
area. Yet, the Pacific Coastal Fauna actually moved northward along the
coast only to the Fraser River area, and slightly farther in the
Cascades.
Possibly the two glaciers retreated at different times. The Wisconsin
Glacier was a piedmont glacier, fed by valley glaciers to the west and
east, and may have disappeared when the feeder glaciers dried up. The
Vashon Glacier was instead an ice cap, supposedly self-supporting much
in the same manner as is the Greenland Ice Cap, and may have persisted
longer than the Wisconsin glacier. If it did persist longer it formed a
barrier to the northward emigration of coastal species of mammals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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