Random Odd thoughts on dry Mid-winter Sycamore

Out to the Woods this afternoon at 3. It has been dry, dry, for a long time. Three months with < 1.4 inches... forty-five days with less than 0.25 inches. But the leaves in the litter have lost the crunchiness of the long dry late autumn. Now, as I walk along, the leaves underfoot all sound the same. In November they were distinct species with different sounds as you walked through.
Entering from the NW entrance, it is dry, but the NW pond has good extensive water. No problem drying down. There is a large area west of the East Pond, where the soil is wet enough to almost be muddy (not quite), plenty of water there. There must be good water table water seeping out/ up through this area. The water in the Wash is almost gone, but there remains a pool between the old mimosa stump and the corroded big pipe.
Three white-tailed deer were wandering around together. I sang aloud to them and then went another way, to not worry them. No sign of the pack of three dogs from earlier in the fall. I think Animal Control must have been successful in getting them to come in to food and shelter. ~ 10 inch tall 'thistle' bird feeder been strung on left side of trail over couple of sugarberries from camo-colored line. Have to discover if graduate student or who is watching this.
Few weeks ago I was near the north end of the Two Pecan Trail when I was surprised by a sudden explosion of scurrying just 20 feet away. First instant glance was running gray-colored squirrel-sized thing. It ran only a second, maybe 30-40 feet and stopped, an armadillo. I leaned against a tree and watched it for 5 minutes before it scurried behind a big rotten log and disappeared into its hole den.
The armadillos (and maybe skunks) have been foraging extensively plowing through the dry leaves to the soil layer searching for snails, beetles, grubs, other invertebrate food.
At the south end of the Two Pecan Trail, 70 feet NE of the southern big pecan, I noticed a lone young sycamore, small 5-6 inch diameter, maybe 30 feet tall. All by itself. Not many other sycamores in the Woods. How did this get here? I bet on this site, it becomes a giant tree, larger than the largest of the present cottonwood patriarchs in the Woods.
Mild, almost warm 50F day today, but we've had some periods of the coldest days of the winter. Weeks with lows in single digits and highs below 20F. The warming soil after that was odd. Dry soft inch thick layer of duff sitting on top of hard, frozen, lower, soil.

Winter Kill

Cold arctic air over the Central Plains with light north wind. I went to the Woods yesterday to see its quiet bare, winter face. I entered via the NW Pond - not frozen, although it was below 0 C. I think it may be frozen in a couple of days with the -14 C forecast for tomorrow. Just up slope from the pond I noticed an adult opossum lying on the leaves. It looked life-like as though just sleeping. I suspect it had been dead less than a day. First thought was distemper or some other disease, combined with the cold. There was a burrow just up slope 5 feet from it, may have been its home. Cold tough weather here will likely kill many animals over the next few days.
Up the N Ravine path, the trunk of a substantial sugarberry had broken and blocked the trail. I took the saw and cut through the large log, hoping it would not seize and bind the saw. Was lucky. Need to freshen trail paint blazes on this section. Should update data on Tree Loop and finish remaining numbered metal tags there.
I walked most of the trails and did not see the three dogs. Maybe Mark Bechtel, the new Norman Shelter manager, had some success in removing them. Saw one small ruby-crowned kinglet playing/ foraging in front of me (day before). Wonder how they survive, if they do, in the deeper cold. Need to roll up vinyl rolls and close and tidy-up old herp traps. The Woods are quiet now. Life has retreated underground, under bud scales, into deepest shelter.

Gentle Rain returns

Yesterday the two month drought in the Woods came to an end with a long slow rain.  It began very gently for hours and lasted until almost midnight. The total was a good solid inch of rain. This afternoon at 4:30 I walked along the Tree Loop to see how the Woods had changed. There was a wonderful new smell of wet fallen leaves. The forest floor that had been crinkly dry for so long was now getting on with decomposition. The rich, earthy, hay-like smell was slightly sweet in the mix of oaks, elms, sugarberries, pecans, hickories and juniper at the northern beginning of the Loop. West across the Woods in the pure stands of green ash, the smell was sharper, a clean acidic smell. Because the rain had been so gradual, most of it soaked into the parched ground. The Wash was filled, but it did not look like there had been overland flow.
I am delighted to find another blackjack oak a bit off the Tree Loop trail, only the third in all of the Woods. It is the same size and age as the other two. It is located about 50 feet east of the juniper #91. A large dead oak(?) fell on it and has bent the top; but the tree looks like it is surviving well enough and should go on and grow.

Green Ash and Southwest Woods are Falling Down

All through the WSW section of the Woods, there are a large number of old trees coming down.  Long-dead bur oaks, big green ash and sugarberries. Windstorms have brought down an unusual number. I remember entering the southwest gate, and hearing the crash of a big tree falling a hundred yards north. Late this summer we also had many large canopy dominants snapped in half by strong winds. These seem to mostly have been big green ash and some big pecan. Their broken crowns filled with dead leaves, stand out in the bare forest of late November. Some will provide an extra bit of shelter on a cold winter night. I am curious how many of these will sprout new adventitious branches and new leaves. Trees that have been crushed by the falling larger trees and have lost their crowns have sprouted new leaves late this summer and these are now a fresh green while all the surrounding deciduous leaves are withering and falling.
Little bit smaller scale, the Oncideres twig girdlers have brought down an unusually large crop of branch tips this fall. I am curious what might emerge if I collected 40-50. Short science project. They seem to be mostly on pecan and elm, with a few of other species.

After an unusually wet, mild late summer, the past 50 days we've had no rain. The leaves in the Woods are crackling dry underfoot. The two ponds are still surprisingly well filled. By the East Pond, and by the second largest cottonwood south of there in the Big Tree Grove there are two unusual Euonymus bungeanus (?) wintergreen shrubs with leaves still green as the Woods becomes bare.
I took a saw to a couple equally large Lonicera maackii Amur honeysuckle shrubs growing in the dense brush along the West Dune Trail.

I have encountered two dogs running free in the Woods this autumn, the same two dogs on two different occasions. Both times in the east and southeast Woods. I have chased them off but I need to watch and see if they are coming back to the Woods. One is like the Budweiser dog, a bull terrier and its following companion is a lighter brown longer-legged dog.

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.