Friday- Sunday July 10-12 there were two strong summer storms in Norman OK with some rain and powerful 70 mph winds. Wednesday the 15th I returned to the Woods to see how it had fared. I entered at 10 AM through the SW Gate and walked north along the West Trail. This section of the Woods has been continuously underwater for more than a half year, since sometime autumn 2019 and I had not seen any of the changes during the past half year or more. With the standing water completely gone, patches of sedges are thriving, growing thick 3-4 feet high. On the bare forest floor, until recently underwater, there were thousands of two inch high young trees, green ash, persimmon, sugar berry and others, opening their cotyledons and starting a race to grow as much as possible before winter. There were a number of broken tops of green ash and sugar berry and some trees down, but the trails, in most cases, are not impacted. The Carpenter cottonwood is down and I will need to reroute some of the NW trail. The wetland west of the NW pond is mostly, but not all dry. The NW pond is still substantial and has about a foot of water depth remaining. The same is true for the East Pond.
The Woods was quiet, few flying insects, no mosquitoes. I did not notice late summer flowers in bloom. It felt like a summer hiatus for the Woods. Birds were quiet.
This may be the time when vigorous deciduous trees can secure growth they've produced this year. Earlier they've invested in growth of new shoots and leaves, new diameter growth, a new crop of seeds. The soil still has enough water at depth so that middle-aged leaves can continue photosynthesis and replenish stores of starch in the roots, enough to make it through droughts, long cold winters or other challenges, and still have carbohydrate fuel to produce the annual burst of spring growth. Growth of the roots of trees, herbs and shrubs along the trail also helps build soil health, provide fine roots and new fuel for nematodes and a thousand other species of micro-invertebrate and microbial symbionts.
I checked on the one patch of oriental bittersweet I've been attempting to eradicate, and was happy to only find a couple dozen growing sprigs of Celastrus. I pulled up all that I found and felt like I was slowly winning the battle. I know it is not done.
I saw just one white-tail running away northwest as I walked along Hackberry Alley.
There was a lot of standing water above the old location of Elm Bridge, a good resource for raccoons, opossums, bathing birds, bees, and all the other creatures in the Woods.
Along the Main SW trail, in patches for 300 meters above the (dry) beaver dam, there was again the odd, light yellow fine sand laying in fresh lines on top of the darker dry organic soil. I suspect this is sand that has been blown from the Canadian River on prevailing SW winds; but it could also have been deposited from the large Saharan dust storm that moved over Oklahoma in the last three days of June, or the dust storm from Colorado, Kansas and western Oklahoma during the first week of June. It would be interesting to know if an elemental analysis could decipher which of these sources was most significant.
Friday, July 17, 2020
Fallen giant
There are thousands and thousands of trees in Oliver's Woods. One of the three greatest has fallen.
The third largest cottonwood in Oliver's Woods. I have thought of this as the 'Carpenter Cottonwood' after Charles Carpenter who worked all around this tree and the surrounding ravines cut into the upper terrace, documenting the decades-long lives of the box turtles that live in Oliver's Woods. Carpenter and his students established a grid in Oliver's Woods for their observations with lasting steel posts each 4 foot long and one inch diameter. Sixty-five years later, there are a dozen of these posts, of the original three or four dozen, that remain in place, revealing the old grid. One of these posts was within a meter of this cottonwood and the tree now lies above it, the post fully visible.
I've walked by this dominant tree more than a thousand times in the past fifteen years and always marveled at the diameter of its central trunk, the height and spread of its canopy and the heavy massiveness of its limbs. I've noticed when its leaves begin to yellow and fall and when the first new leaves of spring arrive again.
For the last five years, the tree has been tilted strongly to the east with a halo of soil lifted around the roots. Almost unimaginable weight of the massive tree has been supported by the remaining roots, through winter ice storms, spring-summer near-tornadoes that knocked over smaller pecan and coffee trees on the other side of the Woods. Providing a life, a home, or a perch for woodpeckers, hawks, owls, squirrels, countless species of beetles and other insects.
Now the tree is down and has left a gaping hole in the forest, a light gap which will attract basking butterflies in the early spring and through the warm season. The gap will quickly fill with fast growing shoots of new trees taking their opportunity to reach for the light. The trunks of the old tree will last for a decade or more and serve as a home to longhorn and jewel beetles, weevils and fungus beetles, polypore fungi, tiny ants, agile basking robber flies and a whole community from the Woods.
The third largest cottonwood in Oliver's Woods. I have thought of this as the 'Carpenter Cottonwood' after Charles Carpenter who worked all around this tree and the surrounding ravines cut into the upper terrace, documenting the decades-long lives of the box turtles that live in Oliver's Woods. Carpenter and his students established a grid in Oliver's Woods for their observations with lasting steel posts each 4 foot long and one inch diameter. Sixty-five years later, there are a dozen of these posts, of the original three or four dozen, that remain in place, revealing the old grid. One of these posts was within a meter of this cottonwood and the tree now lies above it, the post fully visible.
I've walked by this dominant tree more than a thousand times in the past fifteen years and always marveled at the diameter of its central trunk, the height and spread of its canopy and the heavy massiveness of its limbs. I've noticed when its leaves begin to yellow and fall and when the first new leaves of spring arrive again.
For the last five years, the tree has been tilted strongly to the east with a halo of soil lifted around the roots. Almost unimaginable weight of the massive tree has been supported by the remaining roots, through winter ice storms, spring-summer near-tornadoes that knocked over smaller pecan and coffee trees on the other side of the Woods. Providing a life, a home, or a perch for woodpeckers, hawks, owls, squirrels, countless species of beetles and other insects.
Now the tree is down and has left a gaping hole in the forest, a light gap which will attract basking butterflies in the early spring and through the warm season. The gap will quickly fill with fast growing shoots of new trees taking their opportunity to reach for the light. The trunks of the old tree will last for a decade or more and serve as a home to longhorn and jewel beetles, weevils and fungus beetles, polypore fungi, tiny ants, agile basking robber flies and a whole community from the Woods.
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