LIfe and death and new sights in the Woods

 The past week of November has been a delightful time to be in the Woods. Cold nights and cool mornings have eliminated worries about ticks and other arthropod pests. The Woods turned gold. For two days, I could stand and watch leaves raining down.. no wind.. leaves completing their abscission and dropping, floating down, thousands and thousands. Soundless, or maybe just the slightest rasp as each leaf joined the leafy forest floor.

  The Woods are dry with another La Nina controlling central Oklahoma weather. The two week Mesonet picture shows zero precipitation here for this month. The prolonged drying created deep open cracks and fissures in the dry forest soil. Who knows how deep these fissures may extend, and what communities of soil invertebrates, springtails, rove beetles, oribatids, rollie pollies, daddy-longlegs and other creatures may shelter there on cold nights? I remember an earlier dry La Nina when a sudden substantial rain finally began to fill the dry soil fissures. I watched as inch deep pools bubbled for two days with the displacement of deep air as water replenished the soil. Forest trees elms, bur oaks, pecan, southern hackberry, walnut, coffee tree, willow, black haw, sycamore, hickory and more need a deep winter drink. They've had a good year of growth from the spring and early summer but are going dormant now with their roots dry.

  This fall there are changes in the Woods. The usual herd of around a half dozen to a dozen white-tailed deer that normally shelter in the Woods during the hunting season is now down to two. I found their beds yesterday morning walking the trail up to the North Rim. There were two fresh depressions, leaves flattened against the soil, about 3 feet apart, where the two deer had spent the night. The new construction and fencing on the south boundary limits the movement of wildlife in and out of the Woods from the wilder river lands. I saw the first cottontail rabbit I'd seen in the Woods in months, when it burst out of a brush pile at my feet and dashed away uphill into the forest.

  There is also death and new life visible, surprises to be found. I was surprised to see a beautiful, recently dead opossum, laying above the trail by the NW pond. It looked so peaceful. I sat and admired it, the details of its coat and feet and head for a quarter of an hour. There was a shed snake skin, looked like maybe a small green snake, thin and about 6 inches. It has been more than two years since I've seen a snake in Oliver's Woods. I know they must be there, but perhaps not common. There were also small clusters of downy feathers, slate gray and white just east of the big catalpa trees. A predator had taken a junco for a meal. There is surprising new life (puzzling) in the Woods too. A single pair of Missouri violets in full bloom, cream white petals, tinged lilac blue with darker sharp lines marking the way to the nectaries of the flower. In the SE Woods, dozens of mulberry trees and red elms with fully flushed bright green big new leaves in the lower canopy. Stealing the opportunity for a little more photosynthesis with the continued mild November days and sudden increase in available light after the fall of the upper canopy leaves.

  On the higher slopes above the East Pond the dully incandescent orange of Chinese pistache tree leaves and the ragged empty crowns of the big pecans and hackberries show they are ready for the coming season.

November's Golden Woods, Treasure hunts.

 After a long warm autumn, we now have cooler days. Fall colors have come - and gone quickly in the Woods. The green ash turned to gold, the elms turned gold and green, the big bur oaks turned gold. Going to the Woods at the end of the day with late light was like walking under canopies of gold. Yesterday I met via Zoom with others that care about the Woods and have worked there. Today I went to the Woods in the cold morning to continue swingblade cutting of trails overgrown from summer and pulling away heavy broken branches blocking trails. Good to get it done when it is too chilly for ticks and other arthropods to be active. In the afternoon I returned to begin again documenting all of the intriguing natural history, old galls on mulberry and sugarberry trees, orange roots of Osage orange, animal burrows needed for cold winter days ahead, the animal and plant worlds changing gears preparing for the cold. At 3  I heard in the trees close-by a barred owl "Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?"  I returned the call but the owl was not impressed. A moment later the call was returned from away south in the Woods. For the past few years there have been at least two barred owls calling in the Woods.

  I decided to go for a treasure hunt and see if I could relocate a small patch of honey locust Gleditsia, the only ones I'd found in the Woods. Despite spending a few hours searching over the past two years, I'd not relocated them. But today my luck changed and I found the small group of four, with golden compound leaves in the general area I had remembered. Now photographed, by the box elder warped with galls, I am happy to know where they are again.

Privet death: seeing but not seeing

 Returned to the Woods Sunday, and I realized I had seen something weeks ago without really seeing it. The Woods seemed a little open and thin for late autumn. Then I noticed the Ligustrum privet. A bright fresh burst of green of new leaves about one or two feet high from the roots. The rest of the seven foot high stem was dead. Privet is one of, if not the, dominant invasive in the Woods. A European shrub, fairly innocuous as invasives go. In summer it provides creamy white flowers with nectar the European honey bees visit. It keeps most of its leaves in the winter. Thickets of privet provide some shelter on the coldest winter nights for birds and other animals from snow and freezing rain. The top 95% of most of the privet I was seeing was dead, most likely killed by the severe winter cold in February 2021.

  Privet competes with the native, natural Symphoricarpos indian currant or deer brush and other under story plants. Privet often wins, and excludes the native species that deer and other wildlife depend upon. The deer brush was less affected by the cold and is currently enjoying vigorous growth.

  It would be interesting to document the changes in the vegetation and condition of the Woods now, eight months after the deep freeze. What suppressed native species are now doing better? How does the insect population (pollinators/ herbivores/ predators) change?

  It is interesting to see the pattern of privet death vs survival. The cold air pooling, low places in the Woods have the highest percentage of dead privet. Raised portions of the forest, or places with good cold air drainage, have more of the live upper privet branches.