Fragrant Woods and Wildlife

This Sunday morning may be one of the finest days of the entire year in the Woods. The air was soft and warm - high 50's. The sky a low overcast. After the 10 inches of snow (1 inch of water) this month and subsequent quarter inch of rain Thursday the 24th, the ground was soft and springy .. alive with new growth. Where there is bare soil, the early low growth of Stellaria chickweed, Galium bedstraw, something like Erodium heron's bill with dissected leaves and something like Lamium henbit.. all are just beginning ..not over an inch high. Patches of new Festuca fescue? are growing bright green and somewhat taller along the northern portion of the ragweed delta.

The leaves of last year, until a month ago still crunchy dry and brittle, are now matted down on the soil and soft. A small drift of oak leaves behind a fallen log up on the slope gave a rich fragrance of old oak, old barrels, or an old wooden barn in the spring.

Elm flower buds are breaking open. Tapping the branches I released a small puff of pollen. The Lonicera honeysuckle area west of Hackberry alley is visibly greening with the earliest low leaves. Small foraging spiders the size a pea are out moving around on the leafy forest floor. I walked through one strand of gossamer and walked into one small orb web.

South along the N-S fenceline trail I was delighted to find a striped skunk Mephitis mephitis trundling north up the path unaware of me. It stopped 40 feet away from me at Barney Jct. and headed east. I followed it and after a couple hundred feet the skunk looked up and noticed. Up went the tail and after another moment by the big cottonwood it was visiting, it headed east towards, I presume, its home in the cliff of old logs, broken culverts and other junk at the western edge of the old compost facility. Beautiful animal.

I returned south along the N-S fence line trail and found the good-sized area 30-40 square meters.. where the skunk had been hunting.. burrowing under the leaves and into the top inch or two of soil hunting for grubs, beetles and other insects or worms.
West of there, a small group of three deer trotted off towards the beaver dam.
Yesterday, Saturday the 23rd at 4 P.M. there had been two groups..maybe 10 deer total north and east of the SW Gate. There had also been the dog pack crossing the northeast Woods N of the Northern Loop. The same five: two yellow retriever like dogs, two black lab type dogs and the one German shepherd type mutt.

I sat for a while by the tall stump and watched the Woods. I listened to the various birds foraging and singing and noticed the woodpeckers. The Woods there are in a transition. Well distributed, (75-120?) yr old large diameter, pecans, elms and hackberries are breaking down. Their large diameter spreading trunks and limbs weakened by fungi and broken by wind, ice and age - are falling among a thicker growth of small diameter 5-40 yr old green ash, elm, hackberry oak and shrubby viburnums.
Eventually the new smaller diameter trees should become the new canopy and fill the Woods. Disturbance, including borers removing species like the green ash, will alter the succession. Eventually the large open grown trees that once stood in a grazed open floodplain until 1960, will succumb and provide the large snags and hollow down logs used by a new generation of wildlife.