Turtle Spring, Sweet Woods

Good 4-5 inch spring rains on 19 March and the warmest month of March on record for Oklahoma are driving a burst of spring growth. Yesterday all over the Woods every tendril of Lonicera honeysuckle was reaching out with new quick growth. Box elder saplings expanded new green stems and bright green leaves. Along the open trails in the NE quarter, grasses, chickweed, bedstraw, henbit and other annuals were quickly closing over the bare trail.
Two nights ago, I mowed a meter wide swath around the NE Tree Loop to keep it clear for the Phenology class to use. I went the next morning to enjoy a slow solitary walk around the Loop to catch up on each tree and what it was doing. I gave each tree a health score 1 good-4 moribund and concluded four trees I had flagged were probably dead.
Several mulberry trees along the loop have suddenly flushed leaves and produced their distinctive flowers which will become the fruit. I did not know the species was on the Loop. Sapindus soapberry and a mystery Carya are flushing new fresh leaves this week. The oaks, post, blackjack, bur and shumard are all pushing out new soft leaves red and green, or green tinged with yellow. Celtis hackberry are just a little behind the oaks with small bright green leaves expanding. Elm and redbuds have had their leaves out for a fortnight. Eleagnus Russian olive shrubs are covered in soft yellow flowers making the air sweet and attracting all the pollinators. The Eleagnus by the NE Gate at dusk is covered up in noctuid moths and small insects. Walnut and pecan seem to be the hold out species with few or no leaves produced in the crowns.. a few leaves just barely starting now.

Arthropods are beginning their year too. After dusk when I finished mowing the Loop I found a small cloud of several hundred chironomid midges gathered in a 50 cm wide column over the tailgate of my car.. a swarm of males waiting for mates. I found the first mosquito of the year in the Woods the next morning. There will be many more with the wet spring and abundant pools of standing water. Ticks unfortunately are becoming a problem again too. They are not abundant yet; but soon will be.

Bird song in the Woods is almost continuous now during daylight hours. Nesting season is here. I watched male and female cardinals bathing in the shallow pools below the beaver dam with flapping wings and flying water.. some meters apart, but probably a pair. I was delighted to find a three toed box turtle out along the Loop trail just north of the biggest walnut. It has been a long time since there were many of them active in the Woods. A tough hot dry past year probably had many of them just shut down and waiting in their burrows.
A week ago I was clearing the drainage below the dam and came upon a medium sized young adult snapper turtle scrunging its way upstream. Its shell protruded above the 2-3 inch deep water and it was nosing along under the rotten woody debris looking for a meal. I imagine it had worked its way up the drainage from the river. I hope it stays in the Woods, as the other snappers I think may have died in the drought and heat last year.

Two days after the rain, the northern trails were all drying and in good shape but the southern quarter including the Main SW Trail is still flooded with ankle deep water two weeks later. A week ago, in the evening, I flushed a flock of 5 or 6 ducks out of the flooded SW Woods as I walked along the trail in my water boots. This ponding of water and growth of surface floating algal biomass is marvelous to see. The warm shallow water over the forest soil is full of ecology. Around the pools of drying shallow water along the Two Friends trail in the SW, scores of crane flies are gathered, probably laying eggs where there will be good rotting leaf litter in the weeks ahead. A large healthy slime mold has crawled up on to the cut big pecan tree that fell across the EW Fence Line Trail near the east end. It has produced its thin outer shell of lime and is turning into a spore mass. I collected some of the spidery bright golden threads of slime mold plasmodium from the base of a young dead elm by the water east of the hollow cottonwood.

I see white-tailed deer 3 out of 4 trips to the Woods now.. most often three deer, but sometimes a larger group of 8-10.. down by the beaver dam heading north or just east of the East Pond, or crossing the shallow water east of the Grandfather cottonwood.

Jackson has helped me identify, I believe correctly, the mystery Lonicera that has puzzled me in the Woods west of the Bur Oak Bridge for a few years now, Lonicera maackii, Amur honeysuckle, an invasive Asian species.