All the trees falling down and a sensory landscape

Yesterday evening at 5 I entered the SW Gate to take a late walk along the south boundary trail.
The pooled water covering much of the rest of the SW Woods left the southern boundary mostly dry and I was able to skirt around the few wet areas. At the junction with the west dune trail I headed north, crossed over the dune and came to the standing pools of deeper water filling the main southwest trail. There was a cool light wind from the west north west and I stood there to see if I could smell the water filling the Woods. I've been thinking about the landscape of smells and sounds recently and thinking about how vertebrates encounter this. I try to pay attention to how sound changes as I pass by a barrier, a thick copse of trees, a building or wall on campus; and how that sound is different from sound across an open Woods or open lawn. It is not just a reduction in sound from a barrier, but a change in tone, pitch and other qualities. The sort of complex changes one would expect to see as a wave passes the edge of a barrier. I think there is much to be learned there.. and probably is something that wild animals, white-tailed deer, cottontail rabbits, raccoons etc already use.
  In a similar vein I am paying more attention to the spatial arrangement of smells. But this may be better for a later post. I pay attention to the wake of smells from passing people, diesel vehicles, plumes vented outdoors from fryers in food kitchens and restaurants. Sometimes these smells are area wide and general. Sometimes they are spatially discrete and I imagine an almost visual border or boundary of the smell. I think wildlife deal with olfactory landscapes, too. A light changeable wind will produce a very different olfactory landscape than a steady breeze.
Wednesday 30 December I walked into the Woods via the NE Gate Tree Loop at 2:30. I was interested to see how many trees had come down in the 2-3 day wind, rain and ice storm that followed Christmas Day. Almost all of the trees had fallen SE from the NW storm winds. There were old elms killed by Ophiostoma and sugarberry snags broken off at meters above the ground. There were dead branches and long tilted or partly fallen snags that had settled lower. Might be interesting to record the direction of fall of most of the large snags in the Woods and see if there is a pattern. It would be even more interesting to try to detect cohorts of fallen trees and see if they shared a common direction of fall within a cohort.
On both the big cottonwood fallen across the SE-South central connector trail, and the big willows near Heather's South Boundary power cable, there are fresh oyster mushrooms. I enjoyed a bite of a fresh mushroom from the cottonwood. I thought the mushrooms growing from the willow might not be a good idea because of all the runoff flood and waste water around there.
Since the storm came through, the Woods have been quiet. No flocks of robins busy foraging or bathing down by the stream, no hawks flying overhead, no rabbits dashing away. There have been white-tailed deer each time. There were five there on the 31st, east of the second largest cottonwood. I stopped to sing to them and they watched me for a while, then returned to browsing on Symphoricarpos  coralberry shrubs.
Back to the water: the western wash is filled and flowing slowly. Water is flowing out gently through the old beaver dam draining the SW Woods. The SW corner of the Woods is a bit like an estuary. Flood water rushes in there, flowing uphill when substantial rains fall quickly. The floods push soil litter, fallen leaves, sticks, even heavier logs westward and deposit the flotsam in concentrated rafts. They leave bare patches along some of the way. Where the flood water remains it should kill, eliminate or radically alter the micro-arthropod community; drown it or force it to relocate to high ground meters away. The East Pond has been above 2.5 feet in depth. Yesterday it was at 2.26 feet. The NW pond has been over 2.5 feet up to 2.6. Both ponds are staying full but I do not see signs of life colonizing the ponds. It might be interesting to watch and see how phytoplanton, zooplankton and aquatic invertebrates re-colonize the ponds.