The Great Heat

 Oliver's Woods Sunday morning the 24th of July. I went early at 8 to work when it was cooler.

I wanted to check the trails after a long seven weeks away and see how the Woods had fared during the great heat. The past six weeks has been one of historic June-July heat and drought. Day after day of increasing temperature rising over 100 F to triple digits, with no rain. I wanted to know how the trees, insects, vertebrates and biota were handling it all. I parked below the SW gate and walked a little ways until the main trail was blocked by a large tangle of branches broken from the crown of a dead elm. The trail ahead was also overgrown thickly with tall sedges. I took the south boundary trail. 

The ground there was bleached with heat, but the deep-rooted bur oaks looked OK. They had had a good wet spring and early summer. On the Two Friends Trail, I quickly encountered a disheveled opossum six feet up in a small persimmon, looking reluctant to put forth the energy to climb farther, if I was not going to approach closer. When I did approach closer, it slid around the opposite side of the tree and climbed a little more - slowly. The opossum and I regarded each other for a few minutes and I walked on north through the brush on the western end of the old windblown dune. Herbaceous annuals like Elephantopus, elephant's-foot were wilting, but small shrubs like Symphoricarpos buckbrush were not.

There were lots of dead branches, but not from drought. They were the abundant invasive exotic Ligustrum privet. Their tops had been killed by exceptional cold weather in the February 2021 freeze. I cleared them where they had curled downward into the trail - and disappointed orb weavers that had spun their webs overnight. There were just a few mosquitoes, hardly any, and it was too dry for ticks.

Katydids kept up their rising and falling droning sound. There were some wrens buzzing and woodpeckers drumming, a little ways deeper into the Woods. Descending the forested dune to the big cottonwood, the soil was dried into irregular polygons of organic silt muck. Each polygon was bound in place by roots from below and some from the sides of the polygons. I grew excited contemplating the abundant sheltered niches produced by the deeper fissures, 3-5 inches deep on all sides of each polygon. Out of the sun, in cooler and moister habitats, sheltered from the hot dry diurnal environment. I wondered how many species of arthropods and other invertebrates would be there now. What were the communities of these summer crevices like? What would happen to these crevices and their communities in the first moderate rains? An 'Ecology of Crevices'.

I spotted one young white-tail dashing away from me through the young box elder. I had disturbed its quiet refuge where humans rarely ever intruded in the summer months. Back on the south side of the Woods closer to the quiet trash Transfer Station I heard a dog barking and saw the same stray dog that had been in and around the Woods for two thirds of a year. It barked and behaved like it would aggressively defend against any approach.  I left it and walked on west to clear broken branches across the south boundary trail. To my surprise, the dog came after me, quietly. It approached, stopped, yawned and then looking a bit nervous, passed by within five feet of me. I worked a while longer and then walked to an old oak log to sit and write. The dog approached me, probably hungry, but not aggressive. It lingered near me within 5-10 feet for a few minutes and I thought it probably has good potential as a 'rescue' dog. I know it does not belong in the Woods hunting rabbits and other vertebrates, disturbing the animals in the wildlife refuge. In my mind  I named the dog 'Oliver' and wished it well.. in a good home.

Heading north into the central and northwest Woods I was struck by the abundant 1-2 meter high growth of box elder leaves. They were a sort of green bandage covering the wounds of the woods, the places where trees had fallen, where other trees had been crushed. The box elder dominated the head high under story and made the Woods a place of hiding where all its animals could find escape and refuge.

Since my most recent previous visit in early June, large pecan branches  have fallen throughout the Woods. Green when they fell, their new leaves are now a relatively bright cinnamon brown. Must have been some stronger June winds to have ripped them down from the canopy, and pecan branches may not be that strong. By Carpenter's big fallen cottonwood large catalpa leaves are bright green and growing fast to benefit from the newly opened space. Smaller poison ivy leaves are sprouting here and there as well. Poison ivy had become uncommon as I removed it from trail sides and the closed woods was not optimal for it. I will renew my campaign to remove most of it from trails to make them safe for students who may not recognize it.

The NW Pond and East Ponds were both quite a sight. The NW pond was dried to a small remnant shallow pool, maybe one third the diameter of the spring. A large old snapper turtle moved slowly along in the muddy water over the soft muddy bottom. Master of the pond. There were scores of young frogs hopping along the shoreline and I thought the snapper was probably harvesting as many as it could hold. This may well have been the best feed of the year, the time that kept the quiet unmoving snapper alive through cold winter months. The East Pond was even smaller, the size of a few bathtubs united. No turtles foraging there, but there were the same hordes of small frogs hopping across the muddy shore of the pond.

Exhausted from clearing large tree tops and branches from trails, I emerged back into bright light and hot sun at noon.

Wild Woods

 Today I returned to the Woods through the NE gate, after several weeks of April & May away. The trails are almost hidden, full of green life they will hold until autumn.

Fifty meters up the trail, there was a noticeable mammal smell, like a deer, perhaps bedded down taking a siesta before I disturbed it. There was a square patch of the overgrown trail cleared, as if it had been marked as territory, although breeding season is months away.

Mosquitoes were abundant, but manageable, with some DEET applied.

From the NE Gate the under-story was rank and abundant, healthy. Some non-native Johnson grass, but more of the native coral-berry, elephant's foot and other annuals. With a mild spring and recent good rains, all the under-story herbs, plus the shrubs, and trees are healthy and sprinting, with their most rapid growth of the year. It will be a good year for early summer growth of the trees. With little or no human traffic, trail-side plants are extending their fine roots, rebuilding the soil, rapidly pushing up new stems and pushing out new leaves. Replenishing and renewing the forest (and capturing carbon returned to the soil.) The thick under-story below the Pipeline trail was flashing with iridescent Ebony jewelwing damselflies Calopteryx maculata. Frogs made swift, long leaps through the green grasses, leaving the overgrown trail. A new two meter tall streak of fruity-smelling flux extends down a medium diameter elm, attracting beetles, ants and flies.

Throughout the Woods, fluffy cottonwood seeds are floating, descending and drifting to new locations. The seeds may grow or fail. But who will use or eat the diaphanous resource of cotton that drifts and coats the ground? Collembola springtails? mites? fungi? bacteria? There is an ephemeral feast of the cotton available.

Spiders webs are back across the trails, but not many. I wonder when their webs will be abundant.

Along the Two Pecan trail just north of the hanging branch tree there was a mature box turtle upside down. It looked like it had inadvertently tipped over into a shallow, cup-sized depression of dried leaves and sticks and had not been able to turn back over. Who knows how long it had been trapped there? days? weeks? Thinking it might be alive, I smelled the shell and there was no whiff of decay so I was hopeful. I left it right side up and hoped it would not be there when I returned.

Along the levee I stopped to pull up more English ivy near and north of the big walnut #194. There was still quite a good bit, even after some dedicated efforts to pull it out in April. The same was true at the oriental bittersweet location. After scores of hours pulling and attempting to eradicate these two species, I think they may both outlive me in the Woods, and may dominate it. Could be a dystopian way of locking up carbon from the atmosphere. Interesting idea to unleash / encourage all the fastest growing invasives everywhere to lock up carbon in maximum growth (not serious). Interesting transition now happening with collapse and decay of the tallest invasive Ligustrum privet shrubs that were killed in the intense cold of February 2021. Watching to see if it fully returns, or if Ligustrum loses some ground to other species.

Southwest of Elm Bridge by the one white PVC marker, there was a carrion smell, perhaps a small dead armadillo, raccoon, or opossum, or part of a deer carcass. Very light winds wafting the smell. I tried using spider silk and then cottonwood cotton to get the direction of the faint breeze, but even then, could not find the source. Burying beetles and vultures would be better.

Returning north through the Big Tree grove, a large green ash has newly fallen, #502. The sunlight was bright and strong in the patch it cleared. Interesting to see which new herbs and regrowth will move in and be the first to take the sunlight.

Back at home a quarter of an hour later, I did a quick check for ticks. Found one adult and two tiny seed ticks. After a shower and a change of clothes I checked the car seat and found one more adult tick and five more tiny seed tick nymphs. Not surprising after grubbing around in the Woods pulling ivy and bittersweet. I remember this tick abundance in Oliver's Woods when I first began to explore there 20 years ago. I want to visit the Woods every day but the tick abundance keeps me largely away until frosty autumn days.

The Woods are waking up.

Marvelous spring days.

  Out in Oliver’s Woods a dance of warm days alternating with cold fronts and spring rains have warmed and wet the soil to push up green shoots. Chickweed and its small white star flowers, false garlic, Japanese honeysuckle, euonymus, blue violets, spring grasses and dozens of other species.  The forest floor is green.

  Overhead, the forest canopy is changing. Slippery elm two weeks ago flushed out chartreuse samaras. Box elder is the first to open its leaves. Cottonwood bud scales, shiny and glistening, are falling to the ground as the big cottonwoods prepare to come alive. The community of forest trees is waking up.

  Morels have been popping up, a delight for sharp-eyed mushroom hunters.

  Flowering shrubs, the non-native Elaeagnus autumn olive, have opened cream yellow flowers. They profuse the air with a sweet smell and attract bright yellow tiger swallowtails. The warm sunshine on the forest floor also brings out to bask and feed, orange Anaea goatweed butterflies, orange and black Polygonia question mark butterflies, acrobatic orange skippers, and elegant red-spotted purple butterflies.

  Also basking and feeding are big fierce-looking snapper turtles in east and northwest ponds along with red-eared sliders. One turtle adopts a peculiar posture, perched on a small floating log, body 80% above the water, in warm sunshine, and head and neck hanging down submerged in the pond waiting for passing prey. 

The shell of a recently dead snapper was sitting in deeper water at Island Crossing, about twenty feet from where I saw a snapper sitting quietly underwater about ten years ago. I wonder if it may have been the same individual. I think so.

  Joan showed me a bald eagle circling west of the NW entrance to the Woods. Quiet late morning walks are filled with calls of cardinals, buzz of wrens, startling cry of red-tailed hawk, taking flight from two pursuing crows. First skinks of the year scuttle quickly off the trail into the green new honeysuckle sprouts on a sunny slope above the NW Pond. Happily a yellow-crowned night heron has adopted the NW Pond and others join it.

The Woods are waking up.

Stopping by Snowy Woods

 Saturday afternoon, our daytime temps warmed enough so that I went for walk in Oliver's Woods. I walked in via the NW Pond. The sharp repeated one note call of a flicker punctuated the quiet. I watched as the bird worked its way down the trunk of small dead green ash by the edge of the pond. I wondered again how they could find enough food to sustain themselves on cold winter days.

On the trails, the ground was soft, for the first time in months. Enough snow had melted and seeped into the upper inches to re-hydrate the humus. A herd of 5 white-tailed deer danced away from me twice as I wandered through the refuge. Wildlife thoroughfares, hidden highways known and regularly used by the denizens of the Woods were revealed in the snow. Tracks of opossum, raccoons, deer, armadillo, and others (skunks?) Interesting to see where they followed regular human trails and where they diverged and went their own way to their well-known destinations, I've never visited.

 The small stream was running too deep to cross with my hiking boots.

The trunks of fallen cottonwood giants, southern hackberries, pecans and elms were topped with white crests of snow on top of the horizontal trunks wet with melting snow.

  Surrounded by snow, dark melt water pools, the size of two or three bathtubs, some inches deep, were filling. They will be used by frogs, salamanders and various aquatic insects in the next few weeks.

  On the way out of the Woods passing the NW Pond again, the call of a barred owl off to the east left me wondering if the snow made its hunt more difficult or easier.

 

Blustery winter day in the Woods

This blustery winter afternoon (25 F &  25 mph N wind ) I went to the Woods to see how life was responding to an abrupt change from balmy winter days at 60 F.

Path to the NW pond passes quickly into the protected lee of the upper terrace. The force of the N wind drops away. First moment in the quiet of the lee, I disturb a barred owl that flies away southward from its perch above the pond. Perhaps watching for small prey coming to the water, or more likely, just sheltering from the wind.

The NW Pond has not frozen (yet) and as I stepped out to the edge, I saw deep swirls in the water of some invisible vertebrate, probably a turtle on a last foraging opportunity before the night air chills to the low teens and the pond freezes over.

In the sedges at the southeast corner of the pond, a group of three large white-tailed deer stand and stare, only for a couple of seconds, before dashing away with their white tail flags flashing.

The Woods provides snug winter homes for many animals that can shelter deep back in earthen burrows or hidden in the protected core of old snags. Squirrels, mice, coyotes, raccoons, other fur bearers. Armadillos dig holes in the earth that everyone uses. Box turtles burrow deep into ravines full of fallen leaves and stay there all winter.

A pair of downy woodpeckers inspect old hackberries and flocks of robins are busy foraging, turning over leaves in search of arthropods, beetles, snails and any other small snacks they find before the dark and cold tonight. Where do they go then? Up into twiggy canopies protected from predators, or in some lower niche seeking protection from the wind? I don't know.

The forest floor is very, very dry from the months of little or no rain, The stronger than normal winds over the same time, have blown the dried leaves away from exposed bits of the trail. The soil there is bare, while three meters away, dry leaves sit in wind-blown piles. I wonder if soil fauna can migrate. As drier, colder winter days come, do they migrate downward into protected, warmer, moister layers? If so, how deep? Earthworms, but also, all the micro-arthropods, springtails, mites, tiny spiders, millipedes; and even smaller, the microbes. Do they move away from the drying cooling layers of the upper soil? Can microbes migrate inches? feet? or do they just go dormant, dry up, and produce resting stage spores to wait for warm spring rains?

Through the Woods, the blustery winds that blew all last night, have brought down more old branches broken in the October 2020 ice storm, that have been hanging dead, or broken and partly alive over the year plus. At the edge of the northern terrace, there are captured visions of violence. Large trees snapped, large boles shattered where other leaning trees have fallen and hit them. It might be interesting to census the Woods for broken trees.  Which species are the strongest? Probably the big bur oaks. Which species are weaker? Pecans, cottonwoods, hackberries/ sugarberries. These grow plenty large, but are always dropping heavy limbs or sections of their main canopy. Ash, chittamwood and elms are tougher and do not splinter as readily when strong winds toss the trees, or bring them down.

Winter days are good days to see new patterns in the Woods. From up top of a fallen log I look out and see the large expanse of green wild 'onions' or chives' Allium around me. But this large irregular patch has a border. Inside the border, lots of green, outside the border, none. What makes the difference? What set the limit? Soil type? depth of silt or amount of sand? On one side closest to the Wash it is likely inundation, too much water, too long. A little farther south an almost equally large patch of dried grasses stands with foot high yellow stems above new green winter leaves. Again, the patch is defined, restricted, with a clear border. At the NW Pond a sharp border exists between the sedges and the cattails. What sets the border?  If I were floating higher above the Woods 30-50 feet up, I could see sharp boundaries around different stands of trees. Green ash in the SW quarter. Willows in the SE quarter with a sharp border set by wet soil.. and maybe others where location is more random walnut, coffee trees, soapberry, wild plum, hickory, post oak, chittam. Are the invisible animals, the micro-arthropods similarly arranged in either well-defined locations or randomly scattered in a manner that is typical for that species? Probably so. Enough questions in the Woods to never know it all.

Coldest day

 12 Fahrenheit. 

After weeks of 'unseasonably', pleasantly mild December days in the 50's, 60's and above, a powerful cold front brought 0.75 inch rain and in 24 hours abruptly dropped our dawn temperature to near single digits. I returned to the SW Gate at 2 PM, interested to see how the sudden change had affected the Woods.

I disturbed an owl near the largest cottonwood and it flew silently south through the Woods. Walking east then north, to connect to Two Friends Trl, I passed the old leaning elm I had watched falling apart, for a decade or more. A large portion of the bole that had fallen, had a new distinctive reddish hue from some unusual decay fungus digesting the rotten wood. 

Wandering NW I came to the fallen big cottonwood and found illuminated ice stalactites hanging below the tree at two points. Rain had soaked its way through the massive bole, picking up a caramel colored mixture of decay products, then  dripped out at two points separated by 20 feet. I looked and could not find any reason for the water to have exited at those points. Another example of hidden ecological structure that develops, invisibly until revealed by unusual conditions.

It was a sunny afternoon at the NW pond, with 20 robins gathered at the SE corner, the warmest part of the shoreline where free water had melted and was available.

The Woods were quiet. No human truck noise on this second day of January. No insects or arthropods moving after last night's deep cold. Winds with the front had shaken a few new branches down, but nothing significant.

Quiet peaceful winter Sunday afternoon. Happily.

As I was leaving, a large white dog (stray, no collar) bounded into the Woods from the SW corner, saw me and ran east along the south boundary. It was the same dog I photographed in the Woods weeks ago. Not good that it is still here and using the Woods as part of its range. It could be an effective predator and its scent could intimidate vulnerable wildlife.

Rip Van Winkle Winter Day

 Cold (17F) winter morning. Decided to go to the Woods to see if the NW Pond had frozen over; but prudently waited until the afternoon, when it was a pleasant 38F. Wandered in past the NW pond to the big down cottonwood and decided I would find a sunny, warm, south-facing tree trunk. I sat and rested against a big box elder, with the warm sun on my face. Enjoyed a half hour nap, like Rip Van Winkle. Woke up looking through the forest of green ash and wondered just how many big trees I could see. It seemed like hundreds. Fun question: how many trees in Oliver's Woods? I think I'll try to estimate. Maybe make counts at random locations along twenty 20 m x 5 m transects and extrapolate to 67 acres. I'll guess somewhere between 67,000 and 190,000. 

Sitting quietly I began a 'Seton watch'. From my comfortable sunny seat I noticed strands of gossamer blowing in the wind.. and wondered if the abrupt change in the weather had produced a fluctuation in the local electric field and gotten spiders to go "ballooning" - as suggested by Morley, Gorham and Darwin. 

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/spiders-fly-on-the-currents-of-earths-electric-field

Electric Fields Elicit Ballooning in Spiders.  Erica L. Morley and Daniel Robert.  Current Biology 28, 2324–2330  July 23, 2018

I set out on a slow ramble avoiding the trails. I love to get lost in the Woods and see what new things and thoughts I find. Let new questions roll into my head. 

I came to an (unusual) group of four sycamores, two tall and two smaller. One of the trees looks like it could compete for the tallest tree in the Woods. I should start carrying around a forester's prism and recording the heights of the biggest trees I find. It would be interesting to know. Barring violent storm breakage, the sycamores could easily become the largest trees in the Woods. Four centuries ago this species was the largest species in the eastern US. Giant sycamores grew along the Mississippi River.

Patterns in the Woods reveal the past. I came to an old dead juniper with limbs top to bottom, a 'wolf tree' characteristic of trees growing in open fields or trees with lots of room and no over story competition. Then I saw another dead juniper much the same, and a third. They were in a line, suggesting they may have once lined the side of a road through the Woods - then perhaps an open field. It would be fun to map other limby juniper snags in the Woods and see if it was possible to reconstruct a map of where the old wagon roads may have been.

Last week I was wandering in the Woods in dry crackling leaves. Looking down at my feet, there was an accumulation of scores of small shells in a shallow depression, the size of a bathtub. Sphaeriid Fingernail clams and Physella aquatic snails (identified by mollusc experts at Oklahoma Biol Survey). No water for a quarter mile in any direction. Last winter & spring that portion of the Woods had been flooded under a couple inches of water for many months. The flood was contiguous with water from the cattails south of the NW Pond, an area that could normally sustain populations of aquatic molluscs like these two species. They would have been stranded in the small depression when the summer came and the forest dried.