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.
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