Winter Kill

Cold arctic air over the Central Plains with light north wind. I went to the Woods yesterday to see its quiet bare, winter face. I entered via the NW Pond - not frozen, although it was below 0 C. I think it may be frozen in a couple of days with the -14 C forecast for tomorrow. Just up slope from the pond I noticed an adult opossum lying on the leaves. It looked life-like as though just sleeping. I suspect it had been dead less than a day. First thought was distemper or some other disease, combined with the cold. There was a burrow just up slope 5 feet from it, may have been its home. Cold tough weather here will likely kill many animals over the next few days.
Up the N Ravine path, the trunk of a substantial sugarberry had broken and blocked the trail. I took the saw and cut through the large log, hoping it would not seize and bind the saw. Was lucky. Need to freshen trail paint blazes on this section. Should update data on Tree Loop and finish remaining numbered metal tags there.
I walked most of the trails and did not see the three dogs. Maybe Mark Bechtel, the new Norman Shelter manager, had some success in removing them. Saw one small ruby-crowned kinglet playing/ foraging in front of me (day before). Wonder how they survive, if they do, in the deeper cold. Need to roll up vinyl rolls and close and tidy-up old herp traps. The Woods are quiet now. Life has retreated underground, under bud scales, into deepest shelter.

Gentle Rain returns

Yesterday the two month drought in the Woods came to an end with a long slow rain.  It began very gently for hours and lasted until almost midnight. The total was a good solid inch of rain. This afternoon at 4:30 I walked along the Tree Loop to see how the Woods had changed. There was a wonderful new smell of wet fallen leaves. The forest floor that had been crinkly dry for so long was now getting on with decomposition. The rich, earthy, hay-like smell was slightly sweet in the mix of oaks, elms, sugarberries, pecans, hickories and juniper at the northern beginning of the Loop. West across the Woods in the pure stands of green ash, the smell was sharper, a clean acidic smell. Because the rain had been so gradual, most of it soaked into the parched ground. The Wash was filled, but it did not look like there had been overland flow.
I am delighted to find another blackjack oak a bit off the Tree Loop trail, only the third in all of the Woods. It is the same size and age as the other two. It is located about 50 feet east of the juniper #91. A large dead oak(?) fell on it and has bent the top; but the tree looks like it is surviving well enough and should go on and grow.

Green Ash and Southwest Woods are Falling Down

All through the WSW section of the Woods, there are a large number of old trees coming down.  Long-dead bur oaks, big green ash and sugarberries. Windstorms have brought down an unusual number. I remember entering the southwest gate, and hearing the crash of a big tree falling a hundred yards north. Late this summer we also had many large canopy dominants snapped in half by strong winds. These seem to mostly have been big green ash and some big pecan. Their broken crowns filled with dead leaves, stand out in the bare forest of late November. Some will provide an extra bit of shelter on a cold winter night. I am curious how many of these will sprout new adventitious branches and new leaves. Trees that have been crushed by the falling larger trees and have lost their crowns have sprouted new leaves late this summer and these are now a fresh green while all the surrounding deciduous leaves are withering and falling.
Little bit smaller scale, the Oncideres twig girdlers have brought down an unusually large crop of branch tips this fall. I am curious what might emerge if I collected 40-50. Short science project. They seem to be mostly on pecan and elm, with a few of other species.

After an unusually wet, mild late summer, the past 50 days we've had no rain. The leaves in the Woods are crackling dry underfoot. The two ponds are still surprisingly well filled. By the East Pond, and by the second largest cottonwood south of there in the Big Tree Grove there are two unusual Euonymus bungeanus (?) wintergreen shrubs with leaves still green as the Woods becomes bare.
I took a saw to a couple equally large Lonicera maackii Amur honeysuckle shrubs growing in the dense brush along the West Dune Trail.

I have encountered two dogs running free in the Woods this autumn, the same two dogs on two different occasions. Both times in the east and southeast Woods. I have chased them off but I need to watch and see if they are coming back to the Woods. One is like the Budweiser dog, a bull terrier and its following companion is a lighter brown longer-legged dog.

Community of Trees

Walking into the SW corner of the forest, leaving traffic noise along the road behind the protective wall of vines and junipers, stepping into the peace of the real forest. The real forest trees are young and old: stately old giant bur oaks and sprightly young sugarberries. They are straight and tall as a green ash or gracefully bowed as an elm. It is a diverse community. The trees talk to one another. Ethylene and other compounds are the language. Roots and mycorrhizae are the internet. They respond when a neighbor has been attacked by elm disease or armillaria. They witness the short floods that come and drown the soil for a day or a week. They feel the fall of the old neighbor. They witness the play and gambol of smaller creatures around their base: deer, raccoon, squirrel, opossum, rabbit, skunk, box turtle. They stand, in the cold and ice of winter, against the night winds. They are there when storm winds come and break the branches and trunks of the tallest.

Walking into the forest, you can see the neighborhood, the community, if you let your eyes go un-focused, and wide, to see all the young trees and old, tall and straight or bent and broken.                                                    

Their silhouettes in the half hour before dark against a darkening gold sky, reveals the individual forms, grown and created by the particular interplay of species and the genes of individual trees, a neighborhood of competing canopies and the accidents of windfalls.