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.
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