Three days of roaring winds have brought change, destruction and new complexity to the Woods. This week I thought of following John Muir and climbing a tall tree in a tempest to feel the full effect of the storm. The roar of the winds was intimidating. Heavy canopy branches were falling. They had broken and been hanging since the October 2020 ice storm. Green leafy branches, were ripped and falling from the exposed upper canopy. I waited.
Friday the winds had calmed and I went to see the Woods. Small branches were strewn everywhere. A few large trees were split in two, or tilted to the ground. A big middle-aged walnut was down, coming to rest with its canopy branches touching the ground and supporting the bole. It may live on for years if the roots can supply enough water. A broken juniper bole had slashed down an equal-sized upper bole of a good-sized sugar berry. If these dramatic winds are our new climate normal, I wondered how our Cross Timbers forests will adapt. The entire fallen mess of branches created new forest mazes to be navigated by squirrels or avoided by deer. Beneath some of the fallen crowns, new shelter was created from seasonal cold rains and ice. Cedar bark beetles will burrow beneath the bark and create niches for other insects to follow. Woodpeckers will chisel the bark to find the beetle larvae. Eventually armadillos will dig beneath the broken sugar berry into the soil to create snug winter burrows.
In three days of strong winds, weeks of above normal warm temperatures were whisked away and replaced with cooler than normal autumn days. The forest canopy is still filled with green leaves, many tinged with yellow, but now the upper canopy is looking ragged, stripped of most of the high leaves. I wonder what the sudden pulse of new green leaves and small green twigs will do for the brown food web, the communities of small arthropods, decomposing fungi and other organisms that make their living recycling nutrients from parts of plant dropped to the forest floor.
