I went to the Woods 4-5 this Thursday afternoon. Beautiful, with a light skiff of fresh snow outlining trees, and very cold. Two white-tailed deer running north on Hackberry Alley, a wren and a few other
birds scolding me for disturbing the peace. I wondered about
life in the Woods in the bitter cold coming. Armadillos and raccoons, rabbits and squirrels. Armadillos
were out foraging through the forest floor leaf litter after the snow
today - kind of amazing. Their long sensitive pink noses must have been
hurting. I hope most of the fauna of the Woods, box turtles, rabbits, mice, woodrats, stay deep in dens underground or inside hollow trees or under the largest old logs, for the next few days. Let the snow cover the entrance, and provide some extra insulation. Some of the woodland birds may struggle to survive the next five days. Nightly temps will be zero or negative Fahrenheit, wind chill may be minus ten to twenty F. They must eat to maintain their body heat. There won't be live insects easily available. There are winter berries from juniper, coralberry, poison ivy, and the invasives privet, honeysuckle, multifora rose, and autumn olive.
Some wonder if cold weather like this coming 4-5 days is good, or helps in controlling mosquitoes and other pests. Generally insects can take severe cold. What kills them is early warming, or mild days when they come out of dormancy and begin to grow, followed by late, hard-frost cold snaps.
I wonder if any of the exotic invasive plants are likely to be damaged? Autumn olive? Mimosa? Bittersweet?, Privet? Amur honeysuckle, Bradford pear? Multiflora rose? I doubt it. I wonder about potential tissue damage for native forest trees, oaks, pecans, hackberry, elms, soapberry, coffee tree, mexican plum or viburnum. I think as we approach zero Fahrenheit or low single digits and stay there for a few nights, there could be some potential to damage buds of natives.
There were bits and pieces of new broken branches down across the trails. I think they may be branches broken in the October ice storm that are gradually falling in windstorms. The sycamore, with its weak wood, had a particularly large number of broken branches. I wonder about the tradeoffs of oaks' slow growth of very strong branches and trunk vs faster growth of weak sycamore branches and trunk. If sycamore trunk and upper branches are undamaged long enough they may gain enough diameter to be strong. If they break when they are still small, the tree grows a new top and branches.
Down by Beaver Dam the water was frozen solid enough to take my weight (placed gingerly). Thirty five feet upstream, there was a four foot open patch of water, flowing. I wondered why it remained open. Perhaps a bit more shallow and faster flowing, although the flow is small. It will all be well frozen this weekend.
