Early winter woods wander and discoveries

 I entered the Woods through the NW entrance Monday mid afternoon to enjoy some of the peace and quiet there. Just thirty feet into the Woods, I caught a glimpse of fur, thirty feet down slope, and stopped to investigate. It was a recently dead opossum resting on the fallen leaves. No sign of injury, fur coat unruffled, small black ears folded down and face composed, as if it had just gone to sleep. I remembered the recent discovery that mink are being infected with corona virus and rabbits in North America are being decimated by a new highly contagious rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus, and wondered if this could be a result of some spread of a virus into wild animal populations. So much about the lives of wild animals that we don't know. Beyond the first trail junction, the peaceful 'toe slope' pond, swamp wetland is well-filled (2.5 ft) with water rising from the water table, a good sign. The water was covered with winter pollen. I saw no sign of the small minnows or insects that live there.

  South of the big tree grove, I stopped to watch a brown wren hopping from branch to branch in a tangle of fallen branches beneath a big cottonwood. The bird seemed not to fly but to 'pop' or levitate, jumping from branch to branch, active and energetic. I wondered how they find enough food to sustain themselves on a late December day.

  I decided to walk most all the non-flooded trails and see what the Woods were like, on a mild afternoon in early winter. By the old Elm Bridge crossing, bunches of Allium wild chives were bright green. Early winter chickweed and unidentified crucifers were producing small green leaves, low against the soil. A flock of a dozen robins were foraging, hopping about, turning over dried leaves, looking for small snacks, invertebrates, worms, pill bugs, etc. Various patches of the Woods' dried leaf litter, have been vigorously turned by foraging armadillos, leaving characteristic trails like small vacuum cleaners pushing through the leaves.

Above beaver dam, the water was backed up in small shallow pools around the roots of the elms, not flowing. 

In the center of the Woods, a quiet piece of soft dried leaves looked inviting and I laid down for a nap. Not many places now where you can do that and listen to robins foraging around you. 

Fifteen minutes later, opening my eyes, I looked at the forest of trees, many bent or broken, trumps snapped, major limbs lost. I enjoyed thinking about the multidimensional kaleidoscope of green leaves that standing living stems will produce in the spring. Their above-ground stems, trunks, and branches have been severely damaged, but the roots below matter the most for longevity. They will produce the new crop of leaves to sustain rapid new growth in the coming April.

Time to head home. I stopped again to admire the huge structure and massive bulk of the summer 2020 fallen cottonwood. Then made my way out of the Woods.

 

Destruction and Creation in Oliver's Woods.

The October 27, 2020 ice storm in Norman OK was the most intense disturbance the Woods has experienced since 2007. Massive trees were toppled or lost large branches, weighing tons. Branches or trunks of large cottonwoods or pecans smashed smaller hackberry (most common), red elms, box elders, coffee trees, chittamwood, wild plums, blackhaw and other species growing below.

Tangles of debris changed the Woods. Leaves that still are on broken branches, make shelter for warm-blooded birds, raccoons, squirrels, opossums, rabbits, bobcats, white-tailed deer, and other vertebrates. Green leaves stripped to the ground in the storm, provided an unusual boost of nutrients available for soil microorganisms, herbivorous mites, springtails, and their predators. Large limbs or small branches pressed to the ground gave a burst of new resources for fast-colonizing fungi and the beetles and arthropods that depend on the fungi. Armadillos will find more of these invertebrates as they forage through dried leaves.

In the first half of the 20th century, sections of the central and southwestern Woods were horse pasture, with scattered pecans, bur oaks, walnuts, green ash and cottonwoods. The sparse, large pecans and fast-growing cottonwoods became the dominant trees in the over story. When the ice came, these trees were the most exposed. The ice added hundreds of pounds at the ends of large branches sixty or seventy feet up, that already weighed hundreds of pounds. When large canopy branches or trunks crashed down, they fell on top of younger understory trees, plus Smilax greenbrier, Ampelopsis and Vitis wild grape, Cocculus moonseed vines, Ligustrum privet and Elaeagnus autumn olive shrubs and others.

The top of some massive cottonwood trunks, laying on their sides, are eight feet up, new elevated highway corridors for squirrels, mice, raccoons, and other vertebrates through the Woods. They provide architectural complexity and enrich the structure of the Woods habitat. Food for scolytine bark beetles, cerambycid longhorn beetles, buprestid jewel beetles and other insects that bore through the bark and introduce decay fungi. Populations of bark beetles and others will increase rapidly for the next few years in the Woods. Food for woodpeckers hunting for beetles.  New habitat for millipedes, snails, centipedes, ground beetles and isopod pillbugs or roly-polys where fallen branches are in contact with the wet soil. Large decaying logs will make homes for warm-blooded vertebrates living in their hollows. Other downed trunks such as walnut will resist decay and insects and last for many years or decades, providing long lasting structure and habitat.

Wednesday I went to the Woods twice to clear trails and to observe.  The roaring NW wind was whipping along Chautauqua past the NW entrance. Stepping into the Woods, was like stepping into a church. Within 30 feet it was almost still. The wind was blocked by the upper slope and the surrounding trees. Cardinals, robins and other woodland birds filled the under story, sheltered from the storm, shaking the tree tops thirty or forty feet above them. I would like to know what the resident birds in the Woods know, where the best shelter is, near water and winter berries. I would like to know what the resident white-tailed deer know, where to go when cold is coming. At four o'clock there was a herd of a half-dozen deer at the north end of Hackberry Alley, moving southeast.

The Woods have seen a loss in abundance of wildlife with construction years ago of the new city transfer station, blocking the movement of wildlife into the Woods from the wild land along the Canadian River. The October ice storm re-introduced chaos, complexity and diversity.

A Hard Day

 

I returned to the Woods on Monday morning planning to clear more of the trails with my chainsaw from the broken trees left by the October ice storm. I began at the SW Gate and encountered a lot of heavy branches down from the big bur oaks there and hackberry. After a few hours of work with the saw and hauling branches I had worked to a location midway along the south border fence behind the transfer station. A sudden violent movement 50 feet away along the fence line caught my eye.

A white tailed doe was caught in the fence with one foot tangled in wire up at 5 feet. Who knows how long she had been caught there. Must have tried to jump the fence.

I immediately made my way out to the car and drove to the Animal Shelter on Jenkins. They answered when I rang the bell and I and described the situation. One of the officers grabbed some big wire cutters and drove his truck back to the SW gate. We walked to the deer and he approached it carefully, as it was struggling. He cut the fence and the deer immediately 'ran' 20-30 feet, but using only its front legs. The officer watched it for a while. He was hoping for her to get her back legs back under her. He was joined after ten minutes by another officer. The doe could not walk (or survive) and they told me they would euthanize her. I left and drove to the Tree Loop to work there. I heard the two shots at 1 o'clock.

I was quietly sad thinking about the life of that wonderful creature until I quit and left the Woods.

Lots of thoughts floated through my head but I was struck by its struggle to live.

 

Disturbance and Return

 The October ice storm was the most severe disturbance of Oliver's Woods since the December 2007 ice storm. I returned to the Woods this morning to see the aftermath. The autumn ice and 2-3 strong windstorms subsequently, brought down numerous very large upper main stems of trees. Pecans were particularly impacted. I entered the Woods via the NW Entrance. It took some work with a chainsaw to clear heavy, tangled branches blocking the entrance. I also filled a trash bag with contents of an earlier trash bag containing spent personal protective gear, disposable medical gloves, styrofoam cups, plastic water bottles and such, probably stolen by dogs or coyotes, ripped open and scattered there. Good to have that gone. 

  I carried the saw to the massive cottonwood - one of the three largest in the Woods, that had fallen this summer and blocked the main NW Trail. The alternate path I earlier had cleared bypassing the blockage this autumn, was itself now blocked by a tangle of debris beneath a huge upper trunk sheered off a pecan, one of the largest pecans in the Woods. I saw that a simple reroute of the trail could return to the original trail path with some clearing of large diameter cottonwood branches and other tangled debris. After a few hours I had cleared and reopened the NW Trail past the NW Pond, past the fallen cottonwood, to East Pond and east to Hackberry Alley and out the North Trail. Lots of pulling and hauling of branches.  The new return to the old trail is an improvement because it now goes to and along the massive, partly elevated fallen cottonwood. This is a sight to ponder and absorb.

  With a half day of work, I cleared trails in the NW section. I need to do the same from the NE Gate through the Tree Loop and eastern side of the Woods; and from the SW Gate and the southern end of the Woods. If I ended my efforts to maintain the foot paths, the Woods would close itself off into the wild, mostly inaccessible tangle,  that it was naturally twenty years ago when I first walked there.