The Golden Woods is gone

 This early December afternoon I went to the Woods to see the rapid changes. Over the last fortnight there has been a near simultaneous fall of all the canopy leaves elm, pecan, walnut, mulberry, Kentucky coffee tree, southern hackberry, post oak, cottonwood, green ash, red bud and others. With the newly bare canopy, it is interesting to see what green is left. The chittamwood trees holds their leaves late. The biggest bur oaks still have yellow and green leaves. A few exotic invasive species stand out. Bradford pear leaves are golden or red and the few individual young trees are like beacons in the late last light of day. Numerous young invasive Chinese pistache still hold their compound leaves, glowing burnt orange. Two or three Euonymus spindle trees are still fully green as are the climbing green Euonymus vines. Both are producing their 'bursting heart' fruit capsules with red seeds. There are many invasive green privet shrubs widely distributed, although most of these were top-killed in February and have only produced new green leaves in the lower 2-3 feet. The exotic Elaeagnus autumn olive shrubs have fared better. There are a half dozen hollies with evergreen leaves, and of course the native juniper evergreens. But the overall impression is now of a bare canopy, and a bare Woods. It is the time when the shape of the individual trees is most visible. In the summer, with the filled canopy, individual stems are lost in the riot of green. At sunset I paused a while and enjoyed looking up the stems of two or three old persimmons with their pebbly bark to the orange clouds overhead. The curving stem framed the glowing clouds above.

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.

A Roaring Sky

 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.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Coldest Days

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.

Winter Broken Richer Woods

 Early afternoon return to the Woods on a mildly cool, overcast day in late January. Entering via the Northwest Pond, I wanted to see more of the dramatic changes in the Woods from this winter's storms of ice and wind. 

Only a hundred feet down the trail, I heard a sudden, sharp rustle in the dried leaves, and looked up slope to see a fast-scuttling armadillo, alarmed by my arrival, making an escape run. The escape was hilariously short, maybe 20-25 feet, and then the armadillo seemed to have put enough additional distance between us so that I was out-of-sight and out-of-mind. I watched through binoculars closeup as it foraged with its back to me, pink brown ears stuck up in the air. After a moment or two, it paused and put its head up with its long pink snout and sensitive nose to sniff the air and see if there was danger nearby. I had not moved, and was still close by. Never mind. Reassured, it resumed busily foraging for grubs, worms, snails and any other tasty invertebrates that  might be found under the dry oak leaves.

Eventually, it moved out of sight up slope, and I remembered the undisturbed dead opossum located thirty feet away a few weeks ago. I looked, and found only a slight depression in the leaves and the old smell of carrion returning to the soil.

I walked on down the trail, beyond the first big pecan, and enjoyed the feeling of being wrapped in the Woods again, sheltered from sight and sound. 

At the wetland swamp before the NW Pond, there were bright green new saucer-sized rafts of FLAB (floating algal biomass), a sign of some warmer days over the past month, enough to power some fresh growth. At the pond (depth today 2.54 ft) there was a golden skim of juniper pollen, swirled in open contours curved by the prevailing west wind.

A small patrol of crows was producing a racket just ahead and I looked up in time to see a barred owl fly silently from its perch on a broken elm tree, around the top of the slope and out of sight, pursued by three crows. Two crows stayed back to warn that I was coming down the trail, but thought better of it, and quit after only a minute or two more.

A hundred feet farther along I departed the trail to investigate a shiny white piece of metal rubbish and then decided to keep going off trail. Going slowly off trail I always see more new things. I pay closer attention. I love that I can still get 'lost' in the Woods doing this, so that it takes me a minute or two to figure out where I am.

The Woods in the low-lying, west central area is quite wet, despite the lack of significant rain for three weeks. Shallow, bathtub-sized depressions are well-filled and ready for new batches of frog or salamander eggs. Written accounts from forty years ago describe hundreds of tiger salamanders, maturing in these pools and moving out of the Woods into surrounding farm fields. Today the Woods is cut off from surrounding fields by moderate traffic passing along paved roads, and on the south, by city utility buildings cutting access to the wilder river floodplain of the Canadian. The saturated west central soil and standing water in the basins represents a healthy, higher water table. However the water threatens to drown the forest of 50 year old small diameter ash trees. I noticed again the swelling of the base of these trees in response to too much water around the roots. I also noticed the swollen bases of the small group of a half dozen catalpa trees just west of the East Pond (depth today 2.28 ft). Half of the catalpas had cozy-looking hollows burrowed at the base that likely provided good shelter from winter cold.

In the SE corner of the Woods, some sandier soil is filled with early green, Allium wild leeks, Stellaria chickweed and early fescue(?) grasses, good snacks for nocturnal foraging of mice, deer and other grazers. No flowers, that I observed. The low green carpet of beginning growth reminded me of a recent favorite line I read in another blog, a quote from the mid 20th century Irish poet Edna O'Brien "Winter is the real spring". Now, in early mid winter, changes are beginning that will burst forth in the green growth of spring.

Walking out to leave the Woods, I noticed the open sky northeast of the East Pond where large canopy branches of pecan, elm and others had been ripped down by huge ice weight. The destruction of the late October ice storm adds to the feeling of a Woods in transition. Like the US population of aging baby boomers, the once dominant generation of the canopy trees have sustained enough damage and mortality over the years, to be opening up and producing a more heterogeneous forest. The roots and resources of the older survivors are deep. Their crowns have been shaped by years of winter storms and spring growth. Many of the older generation have been blown down, tilted, broken, drowned or crushed and now provide a richer variable architecture to the Woods. Their damage and destruction has allowed a varied under story of younger and middle age trees to grow and diversify the Woods. The open canopy and extra light will fill a new part of the forest floor with spring growth, and become a sunning place for spring butterflies.