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.

Early winter woods wander and discoveries

 I entered the Woods through the NW entrance Monday mid afternoon to enjoy some of the peace and quiet there. Just thirty feet into the Woods, I caught a glimpse of fur, thirty feet down slope, and stopped to investigate. It was a recently dead opossum resting on the fallen leaves. No sign of injury, fur coat unruffled, small black ears folded down and face composed, as if it had just gone to sleep. I remembered the recent discovery that mink are being infected with corona virus and rabbits in North America are being decimated by a new highly contagious rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus, and wondered if this could be a result of some spread of a virus into wild animal populations. So much about the lives of wild animals that we don't know. Beyond the first trail junction, the peaceful 'toe slope' pond, swamp wetland is well-filled (2.5 ft) with water rising from the water table, a good sign. The water was covered with winter pollen. I saw no sign of the small minnows or insects that live there.

  South of the big tree grove, I stopped to watch a brown wren hopping from branch to branch in a tangle of fallen branches beneath a big cottonwood. The bird seemed not to fly but to 'pop' or levitate, jumping from branch to branch, active and energetic. I wondered how they find enough food to sustain themselves on a late December day.

  I decided to walk most all the non-flooded trails and see what the Woods were like, on a mild afternoon in early winter. By the old Elm Bridge crossing, bunches of Allium wild chives were bright green. Early winter chickweed and unidentified crucifers were producing small green leaves, low against the soil. A flock of a dozen robins were foraging, hopping about, turning over dried leaves, looking for small snacks, invertebrates, worms, pill bugs, etc. Various patches of the Woods' dried leaf litter, have been vigorously turned by foraging armadillos, leaving characteristic trails like small vacuum cleaners pushing through the leaves.

Above beaver dam, the water was backed up in small shallow pools around the roots of the elms, not flowing. 

In the center of the Woods, a quiet piece of soft dried leaves looked inviting and I laid down for a nap. Not many places now where you can do that and listen to robins foraging around you. 

Fifteen minutes later, opening my eyes, I looked at the forest of trees, many bent or broken, trumps snapped, major limbs lost. I enjoyed thinking about the multidimensional kaleidoscope of green leaves that standing living stems will produce in the spring. Their above-ground stems, trunks, and branches have been severely damaged, but the roots below matter the most for longevity. They will produce the new crop of leaves to sustain rapid new growth in the coming April.

Time to head home. I stopped again to admire the huge structure and massive bulk of the summer 2020 fallen cottonwood. Then made my way out of the Woods.

 

Destruction and Creation in Oliver's Woods.

The October 27, 2020 ice storm in Norman OK was the most intense disturbance the Woods has experienced since 2007. Massive trees were toppled or lost large branches, weighing tons. Branches or trunks of large cottonwoods or pecans smashed smaller hackberry (most common), red elms, box elders, coffee trees, chittamwood, wild plums, blackhaw and other species growing below.

Tangles of debris changed the Woods. Leaves that still are on broken branches, make shelter for warm-blooded birds, raccoons, squirrels, opossums, rabbits, bobcats, white-tailed deer, and other vertebrates. Green leaves stripped to the ground in the storm, provided an unusual boost of nutrients available for soil microorganisms, herbivorous mites, springtails, and their predators. Large limbs or small branches pressed to the ground gave a burst of new resources for fast-colonizing fungi and the beetles and arthropods that depend on the fungi. Armadillos will find more of these invertebrates as they forage through dried leaves.

In the first half of the 20th century, sections of the central and southwestern Woods were horse pasture, with scattered pecans, bur oaks, walnuts, green ash and cottonwoods. The sparse, large pecans and fast-growing cottonwoods became the dominant trees in the over story. When the ice came, these trees were the most exposed. The ice added hundreds of pounds at the ends of large branches sixty or seventy feet up, that already weighed hundreds of pounds. When large canopy branches or trunks crashed down, they fell on top of younger understory trees, plus Smilax greenbrier, Ampelopsis and Vitis wild grape, Cocculus moonseed vines, Ligustrum privet and Elaeagnus autumn olive shrubs and others.

The top of some massive cottonwood trunks, laying on their sides, are eight feet up, new elevated highway corridors for squirrels, mice, raccoons, and other vertebrates through the Woods. They provide architectural complexity and enrich the structure of the Woods habitat. Food for scolytine bark beetles, cerambycid longhorn beetles, buprestid jewel beetles and other insects that bore through the bark and introduce decay fungi. Populations of bark beetles and others will increase rapidly for the next few years in the Woods. Food for woodpeckers hunting for beetles.  New habitat for millipedes, snails, centipedes, ground beetles and isopod pillbugs or roly-polys where fallen branches are in contact with the wet soil. Large decaying logs will make homes for warm-blooded vertebrates living in their hollows. Other downed trunks such as walnut will resist decay and insects and last for many years or decades, providing long lasting structure and habitat.

Wednesday I went to the Woods twice to clear trails and to observe.  The roaring NW wind was whipping along Chautauqua past the NW entrance. Stepping into the Woods, was like stepping into a church. Within 30 feet it was almost still. The wind was blocked by the upper slope and the surrounding trees. Cardinals, robins and other woodland birds filled the under story, sheltered from the storm, shaking the tree tops thirty or forty feet above them. I would like to know what the resident birds in the Woods know, where the best shelter is, near water and winter berries. I would like to know what the resident white-tailed deer know, where to go when cold is coming. At four o'clock there was a herd of a half-dozen deer at the north end of Hackberry Alley, moving southeast.

The Woods have seen a loss in abundance of wildlife with construction years ago of the new city transfer station, blocking the movement of wildlife into the Woods from the wild land along the Canadian River. The October ice storm re-introduced chaos, complexity and diversity.

A Hard Day

 

I returned to the Woods on Monday morning planning to clear more of the trails with my chainsaw from the broken trees left by the October ice storm. I began at the SW Gate and encountered a lot of heavy branches down from the big bur oaks there and hackberry. After a few hours of work with the saw and hauling branches I had worked to a location midway along the south border fence behind the transfer station. A sudden violent movement 50 feet away along the fence line caught my eye.

A white tailed doe was caught in the fence with one foot tangled in wire up at 5 feet. Who knows how long she had been caught there. Must have tried to jump the fence.

I immediately made my way out to the car and drove to the Animal Shelter on Jenkins. They answered when I rang the bell and I and described the situation. One of the officers grabbed some big wire cutters and drove his truck back to the SW gate. We walked to the deer and he approached it carefully, as it was struggling. He cut the fence and the deer immediately 'ran' 20-30 feet, but using only its front legs. The officer watched it for a while. He was hoping for her to get her back legs back under her. He was joined after ten minutes by another officer. The doe could not walk (or survive) and they told me they would euthanize her. I left and drove to the Tree Loop to work there. I heard the two shots at 1 o'clock.

I was quietly sad thinking about the life of that wonderful creature until I quit and left the Woods.

Lots of thoughts floated through my head but I was struck by its struggle to live.

 

Disturbance and Return

 The October ice storm was the most severe disturbance of Oliver's Woods since the December 2007 ice storm. I returned to the Woods this morning to see the aftermath. The autumn ice and 2-3 strong windstorms subsequently, brought down numerous very large upper main stems of trees. Pecans were particularly impacted. I entered the Woods via the NW Entrance. It took some work with a chainsaw to clear heavy, tangled branches blocking the entrance. I also filled a trash bag with contents of an earlier trash bag containing spent personal protective gear, disposable medical gloves, styrofoam cups, plastic water bottles and such, probably stolen by dogs or coyotes, ripped open and scattered there. Good to have that gone. 

  I carried the saw to the massive cottonwood - one of the three largest in the Woods, that had fallen this summer and blocked the main NW Trail. The alternate path I earlier had cleared bypassing the blockage this autumn, was itself now blocked by a tangle of debris beneath a huge upper trunk sheered off a pecan, one of the largest pecans in the Woods. I saw that a simple reroute of the trail could return to the original trail path with some clearing of large diameter cottonwood branches and other tangled debris. After a few hours I had cleared and reopened the NW Trail past the NW Pond, past the fallen cottonwood, to East Pond and east to Hackberry Alley and out the North Trail. Lots of pulling and hauling of branches.  The new return to the old trail is an improvement because it now goes to and along the massive, partly elevated fallen cottonwood. This is a sight to ponder and absorb.

  With a half day of work, I cleared trails in the NW section. I need to do the same from the NE Gate through the Tree Loop and eastern side of the Woods; and from the SW Gate and the southern end of the Woods. If I ended my efforts to maintain the foot paths, the Woods would close itself off into the wild, mostly inaccessible tangle,  that it was naturally twenty years ago when I first walked there.