January Cave (100 km southwest of Calgary) is an office-sized solution cavity in Mississippian limestone on the south flank of Plateau Mountain. In the early 1980s, Jim Burns, now of the Royal Alberta Museum⁽¹⁾, tested cave earth for Early Man artefacts but found none. What he did find in a meter-deep hole were thousands of little bones dating to around 30,000 radiocarbon years ago. They were mostly of marmot, pika, mouse, vole, and lemming, which, except for two arctic species, live in Alberta today. He concluded that the cave sheltered raptors, perhaps eagle or owl, who hunted within a 5 km radius and returned to the cave to eat their prey (Burns 1991).

Pollen diagram from January Cave. Clumps of herb pollen were common, indicating mass deposition in flowers. The pollen spectra from living moss polsters represent modern atmospheric transport of mostly tree pollen. Fossil pollen counts are in the North American Pollen Database.

To reconstruct the vegetation, he got me to try pollen analysis on the cave earth. Although cave earth is notorious for being barren, a gram of January Cave earth, when treated with HCl and HF and concentrated on a 15-µm sieve, yielded about 60,000 pollen grains. Microscope slides were dense with pollen, half were identifiable and half were degraded ghosts. In contrast to the modern regional rain of tree pollen, the cave earth had hardly any tree pollen. Most pollen grains were new to me and most turned out to be from entomophilous herbs of alpine tundra. Apparently, the mid-Wisconsinan hosted treeless tundra inhabited by small herbivores that enjoyed eating tundra plants just before becoming raptor prey. Pollen of their last meal as well as their bones came to be fossils in January Cave.

January Cave at 2040 m asl is in a subalpine forest of Pinus contorta, Picea glauca and Abies lasiocarpa. Alpine tundra above 2440 m today supports Polygonum viviparum, Caryophyllaceae, Epilobium, Polemonium and Compositae such as Artemisia, Liguliflorae and Tubuliflorae pp. including Saussurea. Genera absent from the local tundra but that grow elsewhere in Alberta include Thalictrum and Claytonia. Phlox inhabits tundra in British Columbia and the western Arctic.

This is another example of how birds, in this case raptors, were responsible for an unusual fossil pollen assemblage. The detailed story of Canada geese supplying herb pollen to Crawford Lake, Ontario, (McAndrews 2005) is described in McAndrews and Turton (2007): it includes a glorious colour plate of organic varves, fossil pollen and goose turds.

References cited:

Burns, J. A., 1991. Mid-Wisconsinan vertebrates and their environment from January Cave, Alberta, Canada. Quaternary Research 35:130-143.

McAndrews, J. H., and C. L. Turton, 2007. Canada geese dispersed cultigen pollen grains from prehistoric Iroquoian fields to Crawford Lake, Ontario, Canada. Palynology 31:9-18.

McAndrews, J. H., 2005. The goosing of Crawford Lake with prehistoric corn pollen, Canadian Association of Palynologists Newsletter 28(2):5-7.

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This article first appeared in CAP Newsletter 29(2):8-9, 2006. It is included here with permission of Jock McAndrews.
⁽¹⁾Dr Jim Burns is no longer at this institution.