Butterflies and Veg Plots in December

Saturday was warm 77 F. I brought a dozen more heavy stones for the West Trail, although with the continuing drought, the Woods, trails, sedges and cattails are all dry. There is some water in the NW pond. It continues to slowly increase, with no new rain. It must be water table flow from our one late September good rain. It is only a few inches in depth but a libellulid dragonfly was ovipositing there at noon.
I re-discovered E.L. Rice's 1966 one-acre plot just east of the West Trail. Eight or nine of his thin rebar posts marking the lines and corners are still there, 46 years later. With measuring tapes I flagged the boundary line of the old plot and reset the missing NE corner. Unpublished 1966 student term papers with analyses of the plot describe a very different forest filled with thousands of small green ash trees after the removal of Fred Oliver's livestock five years previously in 1961. Now the stand has sections of dense green ash trees 20 feet high each a little thicker than my wrist. Many of these trees (30-40%?)  are dead and can be easily pushed over. The swollen aerenchyma and adventitious roots above the soil are evidence of the ankle-deep, weeks-long flooding that drowned their roots. Other sections of the old plot are open, a few large 30-60 cm diameter, mature canopy trees, and almost no other trees.
I spent two hours of the afternoon with Callie and Daniel walking the trails and talking about projects. On the SW Trail we were approached by two white-tailed deer, a youngish doe and her younger yearling. They came on surprisingly close to us before before turning and running tangentially away. Seconds later we saw why - a pack of three dogs chasing them from the east. I took off running at the dogs, yelling and they ran away.. but deeper into the Woods. Not good. Up on the Tree Loop we had earlier encountered a large robust burrow recently dug out that had me wondering if a coyote had dug a den. Now I am sure it was the dogs digging up the home burrow of gophers or some other family group of ground dwellers. I'll have to see if I can get the dogs out of the Woods.
The warmth of the day had butterflies out flying, a red admiral, a checkered white Pontia and other brush-footed butterflies; a honey bee, a Polistes wasp and miscellaneous other insects. Odd to think that all this insect diversity is out there sleeping in diapause in the Woods, ready to be awakened on a warm day in winter; then go back to sleep through months of cold, before the spring.