Snails, Cattails and New Trees

Marvelous warm day in the Woods, mid 60’s. I went to the NW cattail swamp. While the two ponds are still well filled and holding their depth, the swamp is mostly dry with the lack of rain (4/100ths inch in the past 3.5 weeks). The swamp had no standing water, but the soil was still wet/ saturated. I walked out into the cattails and looked back to the NW and observed the striking sharp boundary between the old dry dead gray cattails and the greenish, yellowish brown sedges.. a sharp contour line. I was delighted to find one of the 1955 Carpenter heavy steel posts where I had searched the cattails this summer in vain. Recorded location. I lifted willow logs off the wet swamp soil and found 6 or 7 clusters of young isopods, 80-100 in a bunch with 2-3 older (adult?) isopods with each cluster. There were also lots of snails, mostly the flat, round Helisoma with a good many Physa, with their rising spirals. The sedge contour band width was about 80 ft., beginning about 5 ft. NW of Carpenter’s post. The cattails in the central zone were like an amoeboid superorganism with lobes like pseudopods. Interesting to trace the advance or retreat of the boundary with annual precip changes.

I checked 75 of student’s 132 tree I.D.s.; and corrected one third. Must check the remaining 50. I added another 8 trees mostly in the NW corner. Many trees larger than 40 cm DBH are not tagged and not in the database. Too many, to do more than a good sample. Example: there are another 15-20 green ash the same size as the ones I recorded, distributed around the NW section of the swamp extending onto dry land close to Chautauqua. Now ~ 300 trees with permanent tags identified. Getting enough to begin to make a partial tree map indicating where the different species are primarily located.

South of the big cottonwood next to the Carpenter post a herp trap bucket was open. I fished around in the muck and found the skeleton of an armadillo. I need to take down herp arrays and firmly close the buckets.