Waiting for the Storm

Expecting tonight or likely tomorrow mid morning, a long-forecast rainstorm and cold front. This fortnight, stretching back to Oct 30, I've been able to get out to the Woods four times for good walks. No seed ticks! Zero. One adult tick. No turtles seen. The small group of four or five white-tailed deer has moved back into OWP for hunting season.
Watching the dry leaves come down.. now sixty percent (?) of leaves have dropped. They make a pleasant crisp rustle as I walk along.. and provide a smooth, old oak or old tobacco curing barn smell.. I associate with oak and hickory forests back east in autumn.

Out on Halloween's afternoon, a lovely day, there were robins flitting along the wash by the Elm Bridge. Distant calls of crows relaxed me into thoughts of distant times and places - like the calls of seagulls at the coast. Lots of deep brown Polistes wasps flying singly here and there.. likely new queens looking for a place to overwinter, under a chink of bark, in a rotten log. Down by the wash at 4:30, I could feel the cooler down drafts and drainage. Up at the top of the slope 100 feet north of the big walnut, two largish healthy persimmons look ready to drop their orange fruit..but nothing shook loose when I banged the tree with my shoulder. At the Elm Bridge, a nice place to sit and observe a couple of daddy long legs. Just west a woodpecker drilled on trees. There are so many broken trees, there should be good foraging.

October 30 I had walked in the SW Gate and headed east along the South Boundary trail and encountered a young dog, a black and tan mut trotting north into the Woods from one of the breaks through the fence along the south boundary by the trash station. The dog didn't seem worried..just trotted away from me into the thick juniper brush. I wondered if it might 'belong' to one of the trash station employees.

On Oct 31 I decided to mark with yellow and black stripe flagging a potential route for a trail extending from the west wide of the Elm Bridge south along the western side of the wash where it spreads into braided smaller channels; continuing southeast to the southern service road. At the southern end it comes into a zone of several medium large cottonwoods blown over, or broken northward with beautiful fresh green leaves of violets growing around the cottonwoods. The route I've marked emerges by the section of large culvert pipe sitting along the service road. I then walked west along the road to the southeastern end of the seasonally wet, tall ragweed half oval. Entering the Woods again at that point and continuing north northwest along the eastern edge to a line of new deep blue flagging Ian's Plant Ecology class marked, extending back to Barney Jct on the N-S fence line Trail. I am sort of happy with the route marked but want to walk it several times and see if it is the best way.

I returned a week later Nov. 6 with a saw to the South Boundary Trail and cleared away some of the old dead junipers and a medium size hackberry that had fallen lower across the trail close to, and east of the old rusted southern OWP metal sign.

On November 7 Russell and I entered the SW Gate and went to find Penfound's old tree plot extending east from near the Chautauqua fence. We found the old small steel stakes of the southern line. It extended 200 feet ? east then 100 feet ? north to the northern line. With Russell's help I tried to flag the straight shortest lines of what looks like the original plot.. need to check published dimensions from Penfound's paper, and mark the western edge. The long rectangular plot included several largish diameter green ash and a section of small diameter ash.. probably regenerated in the 1960's after cattle were removed.. now dying from crowding and flooding. Hundreds of stems rotten at the base, easily pushed over, the bases slightly swollen with aerenchyma in response to floods from the Lloyd Noble Parking area. An interesting 50 year snapshot of change in that forest plot.