Community of Trees

Walking into the SW corner of the forest, leaving traffic noise along the road behind the protective wall of vines and junipers, stepping into the peace of the real forest. The real forest trees are young and old: stately old giant bur oaks and sprightly young sugarberries. They are straight and tall as a green ash or gracefully bowed as an elm. It is a diverse community. The trees talk to one another. Ethylene and other compounds are the language. Roots and mycorrhizae are the internet. They respond when a neighbor has been attacked by elm disease or armillaria. They witness the short floods that come and drown the soil for a day or a week. They feel the fall of the old neighbor. They witness the play and gambol of smaller creatures around their base: deer, raccoon, squirrel, opossum, rabbit, skunk, box turtle. They stand, in the cold and ice of winter, against the night winds. They are there when storm winds come and break the branches and trunks of the tallest.

Walking into the forest, you can see the neighborhood, the community, if you let your eyes go un-focused, and wide, to see all the young trees and old, tall and straight or bent and broken.                                                    

Their silhouettes in the half hour before dark against a darkening gold sky, reveals the individual forms, grown and created by the particular interplay of species and the genes of individual trees, a neighborhood of competing canopies and the accidents of windfalls.

Its Late Autumn What's Green in the Woods.

Lovely, unusual Friday 17 Nov. in Norman OK. 82 F. Tomorrow high will be 59F. I went for a walk in from the NW Entrance by the NW Pond at 5 PM. Soft warm Woods. Funny and noticeable to catch the first small currents of evening cool and note where they come, down the ravine, down from the top of the tall tree. This is when the secrets of the forest come out.. when the cool air saturated with scents of the forest, vines, leaves, boughs and soil, the rich scents come out on the cooler air in laminar flow.
The trail and all the Woods was crinkly dry with fresh fallen dry leaves. No rain for several days. The leaves from the pecans were the most noisy underfoot. I wonder about the noise different kinds of leaves make in the woods, under a group of big catalpa or bur oak or pecan or willow or sugarberry and elm. The sounds are very different to me and I think the animals in the Woods, white-tailed deer, raccoon, rabbits, skunks, mice, opossum, owls etc.  they must know this too.. and maybe it helps them know where a walker is.
Last week as I was exiting the Woods just west of the NW pond in the evening, I saw a raccoon-sized animal running scurrying to the right in front of me to take cover. I caught enough of a view to recognize the armadillo; and a moment later walking at a regular pace I was standing in a roughly 40 foot diameter circle the armadillo had overturned, searching the leaf litter for worms, snails, millipedes and other dinner items.
I love being out in the Woods in the evening. Tonight after sunset all the western perimeter was orange with light. As the sky grew darker and darker the irregular massed orange clouds grew more intense orange.. finally a rich dark orange invaded with lenses of black before dark.
The wind today especially but really over the past week has fairly suddenly brought down almost all the leaves. The biggest cottonwoods are bare to their tops. It has been a good year for them.

There are the evergreens in the understory: Ligustrum privet, Lonicera honey-suckle - Japanese and Amur, Liriope monkey grass, Juniper cedar, Geum Avens, Verbesina Frostweed  (fading yellow from late summer flowers), Smilax greenbrier, Rosa, multiflora rose, Euonymus strawberry bush, Symphoricarpos deerbush, Elaeagnus autumn olive (fading yellow), a few Ilex holly, Viola spring violets, Allium spring onions,  Chasmanthium fish-on-a-line.

The two ponds were both well up, at 2.4 ft in depth. The NW pond still fills out over the swamp to the western wetland.

Walking along the paths this time of the year there are scores of twig branches cut by twig girdlers and dropped to the forest floor. Each of these has been cut off from defensive resins of its tree and eggs from the cerambycid have been placed along the stem. Fun to collect a bunch of these short branchlets and see what emerges next year.

Night and the Woods

Beautiful night for the Woods. Full moon floating high in a sky filled with clouds, mild night temp, low 60's and moderate wind, enough to stir the trees but not chill. I went for a walk at 9:40, three hours after sunset.
I started in at the NE Gate ascending the Tree Loop trail heading south and wondering about the sound. The sound of highway traffic permeated all through the Woods, growling, thundering, roaring almost non-stop. Until the light turns red and drivers slow their cars and wait a minute to again unleash their roaring engines.
I wondered how far I would need to walk away from the road until the sound of the crickets trilling was as loud as the sound of the cars. I was surprised. I walked all the way to the south end of the Tree Loop, down the slope to the Wash across westward to the North South Trail and south along it to the far southern side of the Woods. Traffic was becoming more distant and somewhat quieter but still each pulse of traffic was easily discernible. I walked SW behind the shelter of a low long tree-covered dune and sat on a comfortable old branch from the big bur oak fallen there. There the trilling crickets were almost as loud as the highway.. almost.
The trees along the south boundary were impacted by the tornado-like wind moving along the southern boundary.

Tornado Notes

Saturday night at 8:30 the tornado watch turned into a warning with a tornado at the Riverwind Casino that tracked along Highway 9 past the Weather Center and Oliver's Woods.
Saturday morning the storm was forecast for that evening; the Woods had had a good week or two to dry the flood water in the SW; so I decided to go walk the Woods in the morning. I took along blue paint to refresh the trail blazes for the year. I entered the SW Gate and could walk everywhere. The flood water was gone, although the ponds, East and North West were still fairly high.
There were a pair of box turtles mating, one small white-tailed deer that kept 50 meters away from me, and lots of small to medium sized branches down from the big windstorm a week earlier.
The big cottonwood east of the NW Pond is tilting more and more and it looked to me that the windstorm had pushed it a bit more. I think it will come down in the next year..and that will be a huge change in the surrounding woods. Through the Woods there were lots of small to medium branches down from the windstorm but no big trees across trails. Then Saturday night the approaching storm front produced a crackling lightning sky and eventually a brief EF-1 tornado.
Sunday I went early to look and see what had happened. Not much. Along S Chautauqua by the Woods small leafy branches had been ripped off the tops of tree and thrown on to the road.. but not so many. At the NE Tree Loop there were one or two old dead small trees that had blown over. Apart from that there was not much. The Woods suddenly lost about 20% of its leaves with the wind; but there are still 75-80% remaining.. many still green. Mosquitoes were moderately persistent and annoying even with DEET.  Sunday the cold front came in with the storm. The western wash was full of flowing turbid water. The old Elm Bridge crossing is no more.

Back to the Woods

Early September. I've been away from the Woods most all summer.
Saturday morning at the NW Gate. Brief, two hundredths of an inch of rain at dawn has wet leaf surfaces glinting in the eastern light but left the ground below largely undampened. Sun illuminated perfect orb webs spun here and there across the trail, mostly the white-backed Micrathena. The trail to the NW pond all looked well and untrammeled, not many visitors recently. Trees looked  like they had done well this growth year, mildest and wettest August in 10-15 years. NW Pond was covered with a good healthy growth of scum, good organic matter, lots for aquatic herbivores to eat. Eastern Pond is about one third full with dark water.. almost black prob. from leached tannin.
A few flowers blooming: some Elephantopus elephant's foot and yellow asters along the eastern Tree Loop.
Mosquitoes were fairly abundant, but not pests with a little DEET. Much of the floor of the NE Woods, west of the Wash had been scoured by flooding in the recent heavy rain Tuesday Aug 22. The water must have breached the western levee north of Island Crossing and flowed SW across the Woods, pushing leaves, branches, logs with it and leaving bare soil - soon to be recovered with autumn leaves. Leaf litter and debris pushed all the way along N Loop Trail to near the Eastern Pond.
  Nice growth of fresh mushrooms, clump of Coprinus deliquescing east of the Eastern pond. Various round puff ball spheres soft orange. Beautiful fresh white shelf fungi.
  Around the tree loop there were 20-30 full fresh plums down below the Mexican plum, fairly sweet with considerable tannin to pucker the mouth. Down along the main East west trail there were fresh green pecans clipped and dropped by squirrels. The green shells with a wonderful lemony tannin pungency.
  South end of the Tree Loop the oldest red bud had fallen across the trail. I thought about trees I had seen alive in the Woods, growing, blooming; had seen die; had watched decay; that are now fallen. Some years gone by. I thought about friends at home, high school classmates, recently passed. Nice to see vigorous trees here old and middle aged and know they will be standing here after I am gone.

Storms and the Woods

Five days ago the Woods had a good 0.7 inch of rain followed by a storm three days ago with strong 80 mph wind gusts and another 0.9 inch.  Yesterday, Saturday afternoon I went for a walk in the Woods from the NW entrance.

I was impressed with the amount of fresh blow down - very interesting. The cottonwoods seem to have lost the most - small branches with clusters of green leaves and larger diameter limbs. One of the largest cottonwoods  (#123) by Carpenter's post now looks like it will fall. The roots on the west side are lifted and the massive tree looks more tilted. (Thoughts of the 'Home Tree' from the film 'Avatar'.) Box elder, green ash and catalpa also lost lots of green canopy. I was surprised how light catalpa branches are. Interesting time to walk around and examine leaf clusters fresh on the ground. Some interesting galling and other herbivory.

  The trail loop I walked (NW entrance to East Pond, Northern Loop to Island Crossing up to the Tree Loop, around that clockwise down to the Elm Bridge Crossing, then back west via the East West Trail) - is blocked in several places by blow down, but you can get around easily enough.

  An interesting time to go see and think about disturbance giving new forest structure. There are a lot of broken trees and new rich resources on the ground. 

The rain produced a crop of small bronze-colored agarics through the Woods. Caps the size of half dollars.

Oliver's Woods is Falling Down

Wow, what a lot of change in the Woods! First time in there in a few weeks.
The western central Woods has had a half dozen of it largest old bur oak snags fall this past month, taking down middle-aged elms and green ash with them.  In more than a decade of visiting the Woods, I've never seen this much windfall and change. The big bur oaks have been dead from flooding in this section for many years. Their roots have finally rotted away. The wet soil from many 2017 spring rains and the moderately gusty wind storms 20-40 mph have brought many dead trees down and broken, decapitated or crushed the young/ middle-aged elm, green ash and others growing around them. (Potential dendrochronology co-occurrence of good wide ring width intervals from abundant rain and stormy weather, with more scars from falling trees wounding survivors?)
Western trails blocked in two places by one massive bur oak and one other.
Under the big persimmon trees, small urn-shaped off-white flowers are falling. The sound is like the beginning of a light rain shower. Faint pleasant smell of melon.
Around the big pecan trees, there are temporary carpets of spent catkins. Near the cottonwoods, there are small tufts of white cotton drifted to ground. The dark soft organic soil in the west is covered here and there with thousands and thousands of new bright green seeds dropped from green ash. So much effort is spent in reproduction. Now spent and done. Trees are devoting their time and resources toward growth now.
I notice all the abundant animal digging along the west side of the Tree Loop (armadillo?).
The Wash from the Elm Bridge southward is layered in new blonde sand. There must have been a new construction project washout somewhere upstream.