Sky Silver a Great Blue Heron and Endless Mysteries

Out to the Woods at 10, before the noon-time snow and freezing rain comes. Stepping down the slope from the NW Entrance, the twigs and branches of the Woods are all adorned with silver from the sky. The freezing rain of yesterday, trickled down into inch-long icicles, distilling the essence of the surface of the Woods into frozen drops. Approaching the NW Pond, I disturb a Great Blue Heron and it flies away silently to perch in an old snag. The Woods are nearly still, and nearly silent. The light wind generates some creaking sounds from weighted branches. Two woodpeckers, with bright red heads fly up to perches, their foraging never done, their resources of rich burrowing beetles never exhausted. No deer visible out this morning. Settled into steep, south-facing ravines, sheltered from the north storm wind coming? A Barred Owl flies silently west across Hackberry Alley. Not much sign of the animal life of the Woods. A lone squirrel watches me closely for a moment, then runs up a tree, perches facing me again. Then slowly makes her way back to the ground in short jumps, but silently, frisking her tail at me, as if to challenge me, and shoo me away. She ascends another smaller 3 m elm, crosses to a tangle of grapevines connected to a larger elm and makes her way up. I wonder if the travel of squirrels is opportunistic and random; or if she has known, repeatedly used routes, Interstates connecting different trees and different places. Looks like she is just taking whatever route they can, but I bet she is following well-known routes.
Farther south in the Woods, where there is bare wet frozen soil, 'needle ice' has formed beneath flecks of bark, wood, broken shells of nuts, or small bits of rock. It has lifted and supports these an inch above the soil. I remember these from winter days in the red clay earths of North Carolina. They usually had a curious pronounced smell of wine or sour fruit. I check the ice needles here and there is no smell. I wonder why the ice needles form under small flecks of debris and not everywhere. Brown silty water is slowly draining out through the beaver dam, but low areas through the SW quarter of the Woods are underwater from the half inch rain Tuesday. West of the former Elm Bridge ice covers an irregular pool of water, roughly four feet by two. There are thirty or more contour rings around the ice sheet, resembling growth rings of trees. Why? Maybe as the pool drains and the periphery freezes, water is drawn by capillary action up to the ice; but why rings? Why not smoothly continuous? Always new things to discover and wonder about. Richness everywhere.

A drowned armadillo a day out of time

Went to the Woods this afternoon. 80 F February 15. It was a little bizarre how odd the day felt. I walked in via the NE Gate and the Tree Loop, crossed the Wash and wandered west along the trails.
At 4 the wind was still and the sky overcast. The warmth had odd insects out flying, a Polistes wasp, a heavy tachinid fly, a noctuid moth. None of these should have been awake- not until late March or April or May.
When I came to the East Pond I noticed the bubbles of methane production on the surface and then saw an odd sight. There at the shoreline, was a recently drowned armadillo. Armadillos are known to carry rabies (rare). Rabies causes insatiable thirst. Was the armadillo sick when it drowned? I pulled it from the water with sticks and buried it beneath a tree so other vertebrates would not get to it and potentially become sick.
The warmth of the day had broken the buds of an Elaeagnus autumn olive. They were just showing the bright green bits of the opening leaf buds. The Woods were very dry but ponds were more than two feet deep. All across the Woods, armadillos (also maybe skunks?) had bulldozed through leaf litter looking for invertebrates, snails, millipedes, beetles, isopods etc.
I saw two large white-tailed deer in the central Woods but was not close to them. Interesting how well their coat color blends with the overall color of the Woods. Tonight wintry winds are returning.

Cold Woods, New Sights Gophers

Winter walk in dry Woods, via the SW Gate. Cold late afternoon, twenty F but felt far colder. Gray skies and north winds. Quiet. Most everyone who could be indoors, was indoors.
Good time to explore off the beaten path. Find something new.  East of the NW Pond and 70 feet east of Walnut Jct, there is still a hanging 'thistle' bird feeder. 
All the leaf litter and organic soil around the nearby grove of five catalpas has been heavily turned over by a foraging armadillo ... looking for pecans, snails? Small group of three white-tailed deer moving northwest from Hackberry Alley. Tough time for larger animals. How to shelter against the day's cold, what to eat? How to live if you cannot hide or hibernate? The SW quarter of the Woods is filled with broken tops of ash trees, leaves still attached from the windstorms of summer. The well-used Main SW path has become a 'latrine' for some mammal, a fox? coyote? racoon? bobcat? Need to photo scat and figure it out. All will be washed away with first good rain. Leaving, I notice something I've not seen before in the Woods, piles of freshly turned dirt, gophers. The disturbed soil extended back to the south and the weedy drier ground outside the southern boundary.

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.