Trees – Page 24 – Via Negativa

August 1, 2007February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Festival of the Trees 14: in katydid time

Hi everybody, and welcome to the 14th edition of the Festival of the Trees. I’m a northern true katydid, Pteryphylla camellifolia; you can call me Pterry for short. I’ll be your guide here today. And who better? Starting at the end of July here in central Pennsylvania, I gather with a few million of my closest friends to make music in the treetops every night. It’ll get louder and louder as the month wears on. We like trees so much, we’ve learned how to disguise our wings as leaves, and we make music the same way the trees do, by rubbing our leaf-wings against each other. It sounds like this. Human scientists have various theories about why we stridulate in unison, but the answer is simple: we got rhythm! It’s like, we’re all shaking in the same wind, man.

Pennsylvania blogger Jason Evans at The Clarity of Night had a poetic post about the midsummer forest back on July 7: a little before my time, of course, but I sure recognized the mood.

Given enough rain, trees grow like crazy in the summer heat — especially if they’re members of the species immortalized by the beloved children’s classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, as Brooklyn blogger Missy recently discovered. “If you’re not careful,” one of her commenters warned, “that tree will grow through your window, into your open mouth, past your nasal cavity, and right into your brain while you’re sleeping.”

On these hot summer days, it’s natural to long for a good hard thunderstorm to cool things down. But sometimes the trees don’t take it so well. Trees in a storm were the subject of a poem, Storm, at Beloved Dreamer, as well as a photo essay here at Via Negativa, Death of oak tree.

It’s also apparently the season when neighbors with central air conditioning take their chainsaws to beloved shade trees. Julie Dunlop at Pines Above Snow — a great new blog that takes a literary approach to conservation — draws lessons from a neighbor’s assault on an American holly in “The Tree No One Knew.”

What could I do to convince a neighbor not to chop down a healthy tree? How could I communicate with someone who holds such different values? I ask myself, should I even speak out when we live so closely packed and must get along? These are questions environmentalists face every day, in large and small scale dilemmas. I look at the holly stump with grief and regret, at the [neighbor’s] cherry with joy and fear.

In a pair of posts at the cassandra pages, Beth Adams contrasts the attitude of her rural Vermont neighbors with the residents of her adopted city, Montreal. In Vermont, “a white-painted tire planted with bright pink impatiens has been placed on the stump of the huge maple that used to tower over our street; those neighbors to the west have been singlehandedly responsible for cutting the two oldest, tallest, and loveliest trees in the neighborhood.” She takes some consolation in the weedy vigor of her own back lot. But among her Montreal neighbors, she finds evidence of a different attitude. After a neighborhood tree was struck by lightning in a recent storm and had to be cut down, Beth’s husband J. reports, “there was a woman standing there next to it, and when I went by I heard her saying a prayer in French for the tree.”

Of course, many trees are doomed by the building of human houses and housing developments in the first place, as Paulette (Becoming a Renaissance Woman) has been finding with the trees in her own subdivision. “We built our homes on the edge of a forest with a developer who didn’t take enough care with the trees,” she writes. At the poetry blogzine Bolts of Silk, Sue Turner dreads the coming of “a developer’s ax” to a stand of cedars. And Beau at Fox Haven Journal, in a brief tribute to an old leaning tree, quotes William Blake: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.”

The solution, of course, is to plant more trees. Artist Maureen Shaughnessy (Raven’s Nest) ticks off the benefits, such as, “In one year, an acre of trees can absorb as much carbon as is produced by a car driven up to 8700 miles,” though she also notes that “the average tree in a metropolitan area survives only about 8 years!” Maureen also sent along a link to her other blog, Land of Little Rain: five free desktop wallpaper images of trees that she’s created.

Trees with character

I’ve been keeping my antennae out for cool tree-related items around the web. One of the better arboreal faces I’ve seen was a big hit on Flickr back in May. And the August issue of Outdoor Photographer magazine includes a piece on old growth in the East — what it is, where to find it and how to photograph it — by freelance writer/photographer/ecologist George Wuerthner.

Speaking of photographing old growth, Portuguese blogger Pedro Nuno Teixeira Santos of A sombra verde submitted the link to a photo post featuring olive trees — three very impressive individuals. I can spot faces in all three trunks! And from Ireland, Windywillow has some charming photos of old trees in a park in Dublin.

Old trees have a charisma that’s hard to resist; you can see how attached I’ve become to this big old black walnut. Lynn at Hasty Brook shared some photos of ancient, twisted cedars at Gooseberry Falls, on the shores of Lake Superior. The pronounced spiraling in the grain of one cedar trunk prompted a lot of comments from readers, so I thought I’d do a little online sleuthing. (Katydid antennae turn out to be better at broadband reception than most Verizon DSL modems!) I found an abstract for an article which appeared in the journal Trees – Structure and Function back in 1991: Function of Spiral Grain in Trees, by Hans Kubler, a forester at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Through spiral grain, conduits for sap lead from each root to all branches. This uniform distribution of sap is indicated by the paths of vessels and tracheids, and has been proven experimentally by means of dyed sap injected into the base of stems or taken up by roots. Trees receiving water only from roots at one side of the root collar nevertheless stay green and continue growing. Spiral grain in bark distributes food from each branch to other flanks of the stem and to most roots. Experimental interruptions of the sap and food conduits caused the cambial zone to reorient new conduit cells in new directions, bypassing the interruption. In particular, spiral grooves cut into the stem surface caused spiral grain. The new cells reorient through division and growth. Although spiral grain is largely under genetic control, trees appear to have a spiral grain especially where needed for distribution of water when root spheres are dry at one side. Compared with straight-grained trees, spiral-grained stems and branches bend and twist more when exposed to strong wind, in this way offering less wind resistance and being less likely to break. Through the bending and twisting, snow slides down from branches rather than breaking them, but the main function of spiral grain is the uniform distribution of supplies from each root to all branches, and from each branch to many roots.

Pretty cool, huh? Also in the far-out factoids department this month, courtesy of Rurality: wooly pine scale, an insect that looks exactly like bird droppings. And did you know that there was such thing as bark lice? Check out “Tiny curiosities,” from the always-informative Burning Silo.

Trees as sources of inspiration

Unlike us katydids, your ancestors came down from the trees millions of years ago. But many humans apparently still feel a close kinship with trees. LaRonda Zupp (The Ear of My Heart) describes a particularly good example of this kinship in “My Mother and Her Trees.” Her mother years ago got into the habit of giving tree-nicknames to the grandchildren, and now other relatives clamor for tree-names, too. As for herself, she identifies with the eucalyptus: “Being a nurse all her life, she felt this tree represented her the best as it is known for its medicinal qualities. […] My mother also laughed at her own choice of tree names and said that the peeling bark of the Eucalyptus reminded her of her own thinning hair and cracking skin.” Human and arboreal aging are also compared in “Gnarly,” a poem by Joan Ryan at Riverside Rambles, which concludes, “each day as I age more I envy the tree.”

Trees are a perennial source of inspiration to artists. Karen at trees if you please recently featured the tree paintings of Elmore Leonard, which do interesting things with the spaces between branches.

At a blog called Original Faith, spiritual counselor and author Paul M. Martin writes about a white birch tree from his childhood as an example of a home-grown sacred symbol. “Even now,” he says, “this long dead tree still photosynthesizes sentences for me.” If that sounds a little far-fetched, check out Lucy’s luminous photos of birch bark at box elder.

Kasturi at not native fruit quotes a poem about spiritual love from Hadewijch of Antwerp, who compares herself to

the hazel trees,
Which blossom early in the season of darkness,
And bear fruit slowly.

Trees can make you imagine all sorts of interesting things. Artist Steve Emery (Color Sweet Tooth) makes a good case for the proposition that all trees are hollow: “What any tree climbing child discovers is that the hearts of trees are wonderfully open, and I recall as a child feeling like I was climbing up into the globe of a hot air balloon when I pulled myself up the sugar maple where our bird feeder hung.” A recent post here at Via Negativa also turned on a childhood memory of climbing into a maple. And writer Lorianne DiSabato of Hoarded Ordinaries submitted a wide-ranging essay, “Listening to Trees,” which included this story:

The neighborhood where I grew up had few children for me to play with, so I spent a lot of time engaged in quiet, self-entertaining pursuits such as reading. The maple tree that stood in the courtyard between my family’s and our neighbor’s house — the same tree that is inextricably connected with my first memory of death — was my childhood companion and confidante, sheltering my childish thoughts as I lay dreaming below.

What is it about maples, I wonder? We katydids aren’t particular, though I’m personally rather fond of black walnuts, as you can tell. So I was delighted to see a series on insect inhabitants of black walnut trees at Pocahontas County Fare this month: spittlebugs; membracids; an assassin bug (yikes!); and a glimpse of the black walnut canopy. Which is where I’m headed now, I think.

J. L. Blackwater at Arboreality is right, the light through the trees at sunrise is stunning, but I’m feeling mighty exposed here on this trunk. After all, I’m not a sphinx moth, with wings evolved to look like bark; I belong with the leaves. Besides, I think it’s high time I gave photosynthesis another shot.

Next month, the festival will move to a Raven’s Nest. Please send links to maureenshaughnessy (at) gmail (dot) com no later than August 30.

July 15, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Money tree

Back in the 1970s, when I was a kid, an old vineyard covered most of the slope behind my parents’ house. At the bottom of the slope, near the edge of the woods, there was a medium-sided red maple with big, spreading limbs where I used to climb and sit by the hour, dreaming of the tree house I would build. Sometimes I lay on the ground underneath the tree, gazing up at the imaginary floors of a several-story structure.

The horizontal part of the lowest limb contained a crack parallel to the ground, about an inch wide and 6-8 inches long, and one spring, on an impulse, I hid a couple of quarters in it. I liked the idea of keeping money in a tree, for some reason. I left it there all summer while birds nested and fledged in other trees and foolhardy hornets dangled their paper cities within easy slingshot range. Sometime in late October, after all the leaves had come down and I was no longer tempted to dream of green rooms, I remembered the coins in the crack.

Thirty years on, long after the last of the grapevines were killed by the burgeoning deer herd and the maple tree died and fell over, I find I have two competing memories about this. In one, I retrieved the coins, which had become a little rusty around the rims, and put them with the rest of my allowance money, to be spent probably on Edgar Rice Burroughs books. In the other, equally plausible memory, the quarters were gone — found by a raccoon, perhaps, or by one of my brothers. One way or the other, I’m sure I never climbed that tree again.
__________

Remember to send tree-related blog posts to me (bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com, with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line) by the end of the month for inclusion in the next Festival of the Trees.

July 9, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Death of an oak tree

The storm came in quickly over the ridge, bringing rain and lightning and strong gusts of wind.

Nine miles above, the sun shone. Below that, darkness and chaos: hurricane-force winds, temperatures a hundred degrees below zero. We are fortunate that most of the drama in a thunderstorm is over our heads; what we see is mostly the violence of catharsis.*

A couple days later, I found a big old red oak, a property-line tree, reduced to a tall, jagged stump. Even from a distance, I could tell this wasn’t the storm’s fault. Wind-thrown red oaks tend to go over roots and all — and it’s a good thing, too. Over the course of millennia, such regular uprooting is one of the few ways a forest soil gets turned, and many native species of plants and animals have come to depend upon the complex, pit-and-mound microtopography that results. Bole snap, as it’s called, is more typical of other species, such as the chestnut oaks that dominate these ridgetops. This, too, serves its purpose: standing dead oak snags are havens and cornucopias for wildlife.

A glance inside the stump confirmed my suspicion: carpenter ants were the true culprits here. Odd, isn’t it, that we refer to such masters of demolition as carpenters? Then again, their homes are no more destructive of forests than our own. And we are no less heedless of coming storms…
__________

*See “Fly Me to the Clouds,” by Paul VanDevelder, in the July-August issue of Audubon magazine.

July 7, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Festival of the Trees returns to Via Negativa

I volunteered to host the next edition of the Festival of the Trees here at Via Negativa on August 1. So if you’d like to be included, please post something about trees or forests by July 30th and send me the link (bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com), with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line of your email. You can be as scientific or as poetic as you like.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, the Festival of the Trees is a blog carnival — that is, a regular gathering of links to blog posts on a particular topic (in this case, trees), each time hosted at a different blog. For more about the FOTT and what we’re looking for, see the About page of the coordinating blog (and be sure to visit some of the past editions linked from the sidebar). I’m one of the two co-founders of the Festival, along with Pablo of Roundrock Journal, and hosted the very first edition on July 1, 2006.

Today’s Deep Thought: Sometimes, you can see a forest in a single leaf. Especially if it’s a fallen leaf that contains a small reservoir of rainwater.

June 12, 2007February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Snyder-Middleswarth Natural Area

A large black snake lay motionless on the moss beside the trail just past the signboard for the Snyder-Middleswarth Natural Area. My hiking buddy and I had driven over this past Saturday afternoon to pay homage to one of Pennsylvania’s most spectacular old-growth remnants before it is altered forever. The air was crystal-clear, adding to the cathedral-like effect of shafts of sunlight reaching down through the canopy.

Just past the snake we began to find spectacular, red and orange polypores — the hemlock varnish shelf…

and the fungus beetles known as Megalodacne heros, colored to match. Those that weren’t busy eating were busy mating, true to their family name Erotylidae, and some managed both at the same time.

In fact, things are looking very good for hemlock varnish shelves and the beetles that love them at Snyder-Middleswarth for a decade or more to come. That’s because the hemlock trees are dying,

300-year-old giants falling victim to an insect barely bigger than the point of a pencil, the hemlock woolly adelgid. Their egg masses are often compared to the ends of cotton q-tips, an image more in keeping with the kinds of places where human beings go to die.

The eastern and Carolina species of hemlock are especially vulnerable, though occasional individuals do show resistance. It may take a century or more for their native predators and diseases to catch up with the adelgids and bring them more into balance with the eastern forest ecosystem, though they will probably always remain an outbreak insect. In a few centuries, we may have new old-growth hemlock forests in Pennsylvania.

But in the meantime, another climax species — yellow birch — seems poised to take over at Snyder-Middleswarth. Almost every fallen hemlock log we saw bore a thick fur of birch seedlings. Forest ecologists refer to these as nurse logs, which is a bit misleading: birches and other tree seedlings prefer to sprout on logs not because they are fertile nurseries — they aren’t — but because they offer relatively sterile refuges from soil microbes inimical to seedling growth.

The word seems to have gotten out that the giants are dying — that’s the only way we could account for the dearth of visitors on a perfect Saturday afternoon in early summer. We walked slowly along the trail above the inaptly named Swift Run, looking at everything and listening to the songs of hermit thrushes and winter wrens. In three hours, we only heard a couple planes go over. It’s a deep ravine far from any highways — one of the quietest spots in all of central Pennsylvania.

I renewed my acquaintance with several plants that I don’t get to see too often, including starflower (Trientalis borealis) and mountain holly (Ilex montana). And we encountered botanical oddities like the fern fist above, one of several we found, probably the result of some wasp or another hijacking the ferns while they were still unfurling in order to make gall-like brood chambers from the crippled fronds. (If anyone has a better guess, I’d like to hear it.)

But mostly what caught my eye were the dead and dying hemlocks. I know that new hemlock seedlings will sprout up after the adelgid population crashes, and some of them may even survive future outbreaks. But it will be a long time before the forest once again has trees with this much character and presence.

It was 7:00 o’clock by the time we made our way back to the parking area. Much of the ravine was already in shadow. I turned around for a last, long look at hemlocks bathed in cathedral light.

Slideshow.

June 5, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Rock city

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post, A woods named Fred.

Hearing the thunder, we decide to pick up the pace a little — from one mile an hour to maybe two. It’s well past lunch time, though, and we finally stop to refuel at a cluster of Volkswagen Beetle-sized boulders. A few have managed to acquire a thin layer of humus over the millennia, and sport miniature gardens of Canada mayflower and Solomon’s seal, as in the above photo. Just like the small exclosure I wrote about last Friday, such boulder-top gardens suffer very little deer herbivory and are a good indication of what the forest floor might look like if deer numbers were kept at a saner level. Tree seedlings often take advantage of these miniature refuges, as well, but the thin soil offers little support for many species. For trees such as yellow birch and red spruce, rock-top purchases present little problem, but we don’t find either species along the Fred Woods Trail. Neither black birch nor eastern hemlock seems quite as successful; we find a number of them that have grown to a decent size on top of a rock, then toppled over in an icestorm or a strong wind, taking the humus with them.

I like that this is a mixed conifer-oak forest, though. I’ve encountered outcroppings of the Pottsville conglomerate in various parts of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and due to the variety of forest types and land-use histories, no two are alike. Even where the land has been horrifically treated, as at Dolly Sods in the Monongahela National Forest or the Wolf Rocks portion of Pennsylvania’s Gallitzin State Forest, the bare rock stands as a visible and charismatic reminder of an indomitable core of wildness.

The sun is still shining as we finish our lunches and resume our slow perambulation. The thunder seems to have moved off a little, maybe. We explore a small assemblage of bus-sized boulders and wonder if that’s what all the fuss was about. But then we come to a fork in the trail, with a Vista in one direction and a Rock Loop in the other. Not much of a contest there.

And then we are in the rock city, and it takes our breath away.

The surrounding vegetation might not be as lush, but the rocks themselves are every bit as magnificent as those at Bear Heaven in the Mon. The mossy parts are just as mossy, the iron oxide-y parts are as brightly colored, and the rock tripe is even bigger: we find two of the leathery lichens that are as big as serving platters. “The air can’t be too polluted here,” L. remarks.

Even the graffiti is tasteful: all of it incised, none painted. The oldest dated examples go back to the beginning of the 20th century, and one graffito from 1935 refers to a Civilian Conservation Corps unit, so it’s obvious that some sort of trail was here long before the completion of the entire Fred Woods Trail in 1980.

The graffiti is concentrated in a one-hundred-foot-long canyon, the narrowest portions of which would offer a bit of a challenge to anyone heavier than about ten stone. Even narrower fissures and caves allow sounds to travel through the rocks in strange ways. It’s easy to imagine the kinds of things that vision-questing teenagers must’ve seen here over the decades. The impression of enchantment is almost overwhelming…

…though some visitors seem to have taken a more irreverent view.

The rain holds off until just after we finish exploring the densest section of the rock city. We’ve gone a few hundred yards further when L. spots what appears to be the biggest boulder yet off through the woods, as big as a mansion. As we approach it, though, the top half resolves into a dense cluster of hemlocks, some probably of great age despite their relatively short statures, judging from their basal diameters.

My camera batteries have given up the ghost a short time before, so I’m a little out of sorts. It doesn’t help my mood when I notice a grove of mountain laurel bushes that are almost all dead, probably from a combination of deer browsing (yes, deer do eat laurel, even though it is mildly poisonous to them) and the various blights whose effects we have been noticing throughout central Pennsylvania. On the other side of the grove, another boulder curves upward like the prow of a ship. We are literally just standing and staring at that when a close crack of thunder signals the onset of a downpour. We duck under the shelter, and though we both have umbrellas with us, I convince L. that we’d be better advised to sit it out — it can’t last more than half an hour. We settle onto a couple of flat rocks that appear to have been placed there for that purpose by some previous visitors.

The rain comes down in sheets, and for a while that’s all we can hear. But after ten or fifteen minutes, it starts to slacken off, and I hear an odd sound — a cry off in the woods. A minute or two later, L. hears it too.

“That’s a person! Somebody’s over there.”

“I don’t think that’s a human being. Why would anybody be wailing?”

There’s not much of a wind, but the tree tops do seem to be swaying. “I think it’s a tree,” I say. “Dead trees can make all kinds of ungodly noises when they rub up against living trees.” I’m eyeing a particularly large example of this about a hundred feet away.

The rain stops twenty-five minutes after it began. We’ve polished off a bag full of dried pineapple pieces and are anxious to find out who’s been doing all the wailing.

We discover the culprit just ten feet away, resting against the limb of a chestnut oak: it’s a dead tree, all right, but much smaller than the one I’d had my eye on. Enough to scare the crap out of anyone who’s tried to camp here recently, though, I’ll bet.

And perhaps we should’ve been more frightened then we were about hanging out in that rock shelter. The next morning, L. will find a deer tick and have to go the emergency room to get shots for Lyme disease.

We pick our way slowly back along the wet trail. We smell the hay-scented fern hundreds of yards before we enter the younger woods. It smells nothing like hay now, if it ever did: an ambrosial odor that keeps us guessing even after the evidence of its humdrum origin is all around us.

For more photos of the Fred Woods Trail, see my photoset here, and another, by blogger Gina Marie, here. It was that photoset, in fact, that first tipped me off about the place. Thanks, Gina! And thanks also to Gary Thornbloom’s “On the Trail” column, which I found archived here [PDF].

June 1, 2007March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Shooting Bambi

Hot off the presses this morning: Festival of the Trees 12 takes a meditative look at trees and forests, while I and the Bird turns 50 (editions, that is).

Meet Bambi. This fawn must’ve been less than 48 hours old yesterday morning, judging by the way it wobbled when it walked, and it displayed no fear of the strange, bipedal creature standing in the middle of the road. Its mother was nowhere in evidence; she must’ve gone off foraging after giving her fawn strict instructions to stay put. But like a lot of young ‘uns, the fawn clearly had other ideas. I happened around the bend just as it trotted down through the woods and teetered on the edge of the bank. I switched my camera to video mode and shot a short clip (I’m new to video editing, so I apologize for the poor quality). Notice how quickly and effectively it hides when a car approaches.

Note, too, the relative openness of the forest floor behind it. This is a look that all of us who have grown up in Pennsylvania and other parts of the eastern United States have grown well accustomed to over the last fifty or sixty years. But it isn’t natural.

Now meet a baby shagbark hickory. Notice the fence behind it: this is inside a 400-square-foot deer exclosure right on the top of one of our dry ridges, the sort of environment where we have become especially accustomed to looking at brown leaf litter and the occasional patch of moss. Shagbark hickories are great trees, but we don’t have too many of them under about the age of sixty, and three of the nicest ones were felled in an ice storm in 2005. The loosely attached shingles of bark that give the tree its name make especially attractive roosts for many species of forest bats, which, as voracious consumers of insects, are thought to play something of a keystone role in eastern forest ecosystems. But like most woody plants, shagbark hickory seedlings are highly palatable to white-tailed deer, especially in winter and early spring when there isn’t much else to eat.

Here’s a corner of the deer exclosure, showing the contrast between inside and out. We have plenty of Solomon’s-seal down in the hollow, and now that the deer numbers are down throughout the property as a result of a decade of good hunting, we’re starting to see spindly, first- and second-year Solomon’s-seal appear in the flatter, more accessible areas on top of the mountain. But nowhere does it look as healthy as in this little exclosure, which is now ten years old. I had never seen Solomon’s-seal with two and three parallel rows of flowers before this spring. This suggests that even the de-facto wildflower refuge areas in the steepest parts of the hollow are still suffering from over-grazing. This is the kind of baseline data that you can’t get from historical records, because 100 years ago, very few people were taking notes on such things.

Bare ground is almost nonexistent inside the exclosure from March onwards — as I think it would be almost everywhere, were it not for our adorable cloven-hoofed friends. Yes, white-tailed deer are a natural part of the eastern forest ecosytem, but their numbers have been greatly inflated by the elimination of the two principal predators on adult deer, cougars and wolves. Nor is it just a numbers game. When deer and elk are actively predated, they change their behavior from what biologists refer to as an energy-maximizing mode to a time-minimizing mode. That is to say, they stop hanging out in the open or along forest edges, browsing and grazing to their hearts’ content and making as many fawns as possible, and instead they take cover — like the fawn in the video — and spend as little time as they can out in the open. That’s why most deer are killed on the opening day of regular rifle season here in Pennsylvania each fall: as soon as they realize they’re in danger, they bed down and hardly move for the next two weeks, except at night. The more ambitious hunters are getting proficient in archery and muzzleloader hunting so they can take advantage of earlier seasons, which begin in October here. Some of us would like to see deer seasons of one kind or another stretch for six months or longer, more effectively imitating year-round natural predation. Of course, the hunting would be much tougher under such a scenario, which is why the slob hunters in our state set up a howl at every attempt to manage white-tailed deer from an ecosystem perspective.

Our original inspiration in creating our deer exclosures was a visit to a fifty-year-old exclosure in northern Pennsylvania — Latham’s acre.

It was like stepping into a lost world, a world filled with wildflowers, shrubs, and saplings only rarely seen in much of Pennsylvania’s wild lands. Thick beds of Canada mayflower, Solomon’s seal, round-leaved violets, partridgeberry, Indian cucumber-root, white baneberry, jack-in-the-pulpit, and red and painted trilliums blanketed the forest floor. Alternate-leaved dogwood and red elderberry shrubs, as well as tree saplings of many species, such as black birch, sugar maple, shadbush, black cherry, and American beech, occupied the understory. The vegetation was so thick that we could barely see from one end of the acre to the other. The middle canopy, which has been eliminated from many of Pennsylvania’s forests by too many deer, was especially impressive. That is the area, researchers have found, where most of our neotropical migrant songbirds, such as wood thrushes, rose-breasted grosbeaks, and black-throated blue warblers, nest and feed.

You may have noticed the wood thrush, scarlet tanager, Acadian flycatcher, and worm-eating warbler songs in the video I posted. We’re fortunate in having at least some mid-level canopy in portions of our woods, and in time, with good hunting, we hope to have much more.

You can read about how we set up the larger of two deer exclosures here. I’ve also started a new photoset for pictures of the two exclosures, which I plan to take every year for documentary purposes.

May 29, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Growing an old-growth forest

What the numbers from all the studies tell us is that nature-shaped forests are far more diverse woodlands than those manipulated by humans. The complexity of old-growth environments may turn out to be their most important attribute in terms of being self-regulating autopoietic forest systems.
–Robert Leverett, “Old-Growth Forests of the Northeast,” in Wilderness Comes Home: Rewilding the Northeast, C.M. Klyza, ed., Middlebury College Press, 2001

A couple weeks ago, my mother gave a short walking tour to a couple of guests who were seeing our woods for the first time. “It looks like something out of the Lord of Rings!” they exclaimed. I guess if you’re used to looking at younger forests, the portions of Plummer’s Hollow that have avoided lumbering since the mid- to late-19th century might look pretty impressive by comparison. Our forest doesn’t yet meet even the most minimal definitions of old growth — for example, a median age of half of the dominant tree species’ maximum longevity in the majority of stands — but it does exceed by several decades the average age of private or public forests in Pennsylvania, and is beginning to acquire a number of standard old-growth characteristics that add up, perhaps, to a general impression of enchantment.

The older trees get, the more character they develop. And even apart from the age of its individual members (or at least their aboveground portions), a more mature forest is qualitatively different from a younger one. More and more species of lichens, fungi, insects and other key organisms form increasingly complex food webs. Though foresters are wont to think of old growth in terms of individual stands of large old trees, forest ecologists will tend to stress the age of the over-all forested landscape. The longer a forested landscape goes without being clearcut, or completely leveled by a catastophic disturbance such as a large tornado or a canopy-destroying fire, the more structural complexity it acquires. Icestorms, diseases, strong winds and insect invasions take their toll, while shade-tolerant tree species bide their time in the understory, waiting for a gap to open in the canopy.

Young forests tend to consist of trees of just two to three species, all about the same size, and with very few rotting logs or standing dead trees (snags). In the northeast United States, natural stand-clearing disturbances are quite rare, but the dominance of industrial forestry has made this kind of forest the norm, and more diverse forests like ours the exception. However, it would also be very unnatural for extensive sections of a Pennsylvania forest to resemble Mirkwood in The Hobbit, or Fangorn in The Lord of the Rings. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagination, an old forest seems to have consisted almost entirely of old trees, but in most places around the world, some kind of landscape-level patchiness would develop as various small-scale disturbances create openings of various sizes. The nature and frequency of these disturbances — what ecologists call the disturbance regime — is as important as climate, soil, and species mix in determining the character and compostion of the forest.

Our over-riding management goal for the wooded portions of the property — close to 600 acres — is to grow an old-growth forest. But what will future old-growth look like? Chances are it will not resemble the forests that covered Pennsylvania in 1600 to any significant degree. Several species of keystone ecological importance are extinct, such as the passenger pigeon; regionally extirpated, such as the cougar and the gray wolf; or reduced to a pitiful remnant by an introduced disease, such as the American chestnut. Like most upland forests in the Appalachians, our mountain was once covered by these tall, slow-growing, long-lived trees; now their sprouts (as in the above photo) are lucky to reach 30 feet before succumbing to the blight. The loss of their nut crop — more copious and far more dependable than acorns and hickories — must’ve had a huge impact on many species of wildlife.

And that’s just one example. Many other native tree species are falling victim to introduced diseases and insect pests, including dogwood, eastern hemlock, butternut, American beech, and various species of ash. The composition of the shrub and forest herb layers are changing dramatically as new, exotic plant species move in. The soil itself has been fundamentally altered in many if not most parts of Penn’s Woods, first by massive erosion following the wholesale clearcutting of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and then by acid deposition and, most significantly of all perhaps, the introduction of non-native earthworms.

I’m increasingly reluctant to dwell on these issues with first-time vistors to Plummer’s Hollow, though, just as I haven’t blogged about them very much. I think it’s better to let people be inspired by a vision of something special and enchanted, even if that vision might seem a little naí¯ve, than to try and give them a crash course in unpleasant environmental realities. I do tend to stress the impact of white-tailed deer, because that’s something we have at least a chance of ameliorating, and our 15-year-old deer hunter program in Plummer’s Hollow is beginning to show some dramatic and positive results.

Why manage for old growth? A survey of available literature suggests that, while every forest is different, generally speaking, large tracts of old-growth forest in Pennsylvania should be unexcelled providers of:

Breeding habitat for a wide range of birds whose populations reach their greatest density in old growth, including winter wren, Acadian flycatcher, black-throated green warbler, Blackburnian warbler, magnolia warbler, Swainson’s thrush, brown creeper, and blue-headed vireo
Habitat for embattled native fish and other organisms endemic to forested, cold-water environments, including the prized brook trout as well as a number of state threatened and endangered species
Habitat for the federally endangered Delmarva fox squirrel (now absent from PA), and possibly optimal conditions (especially with the spatial patchiness characteristic of old growth) for two other endangered species–small whorled pogonia and Indiana bat–and cerulean warbler, a candidate for listing as threatened on the federal Endangered Species List
Excellent, perhaps optimal habitat for species in danger of extirpation or facing steep declines in Pennsylvania such as northern flying squirrel, green salamander, sugar maple longhorn beetle, yellow-bellied flycatcher, and eastern woodrat
Optimal habitat for many sensitive, slow-dispersing wildflowers that may require over 150 years to fully recover from the effects of clearcutting
Optimal habitat for top carnivores such as northern goshawk, barred owl and (arguably) fisher, plus some presently absent or of uncertain occurrence in Pennsylvania: pine marten, gray or red wolf, eastern cougar, and lynx
Optimal conditions for salamanders (top carnivores and likely keystone species in the forest litter) and essential refuges for these logging-sensitive organisms
Optimal conditions for some forest-dwelling bats such as eastern red, big brown, silver-haired and hoary bats
A full complement of native ferns, mosses and liverworts
A full complement of native forest lichens
A full complement of fungi, including mycorrhizae and other soil microorganisms essential for forest health, nutrient uptake by trees, and recovery after a disturbance
Structural diversity, including pit-mound microtopography, nurse logs for tree seedlings, habitat and runways for small mammals and herps, and standing snags
Superior masting by many trees, such as white oak, red oak and American beech
A full complement of native forest insects and other arthropods
Functional and genetic resistance to insect pests
Functional and genetic resistance to disease
Formation of unique biogroups of trees–interspecific communities with distinct physical and physiological traits–through root grafting and and the formation of fungal bridges (shades of Tolkien!)
Seed banks with a full range of genetic variables for commercially desirable tree species
Timber of unparalleled quality
Baselines for scientific research, including on strategies for successful recruitment and stand replacement
A full range of natural soundscapes
A source of aesthetic and spiritual values unattainable elsewhere
The creation of optimal forest soils through accumulation of humus in the O and A horizons, periodic mixing of horizons by uprooting, and the formation of macropores
Groundwater purification and storage (old trees use less water for growth)
Flood control through maximal absorptive capabilities and stream bank stabilization
A dependable source of coarse, woody debris essential to the ecological functioning of streams in forested ecosystems
Clean rivers, bays and oceans though maximal prevention of siltation
Drought prevention through transpiration to the atmosphere
Sequestration of carbon dioxide
Amelioration of local, regional, and global warming

For more on Pennsylvania old growth, see here.

April 27, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Trees in the suburbs

Most Americans live in an in-between place, neither quite town nor country. Sometimes there are sidewalks, and sometimes there aren’t. Such places still tend to be called suburbs, but now that so many of their residents work as well as live there and don’t commute into a city at all, that term seems more than a little dated.

My South Jersey cousins referred to the place in these photos as “our development,” which I found interesting. They’ve lived there for ten years, in a house that was new when they bought it; the oldest parts of the subdivision go back twenty years, they told me. But they continue to think of it as a development: something new. Something without a history yet.

But the land has its own history, of course, suggested most visibly by the trees. Although many of the trees in front yards were planted when the houses were built, many backyards had larger trees that were obviously decades older than the houses. This particular development appears to have been built on top of a mosaic of farm fields, wooded hedgerows and small woodlots. The trees in the above photo marked one edge of the development, a beauty strip separating the community park from a commercial zone. The park is basically a sports field circled by a running track, with only a single clump of trees next to the swing sets. We’re looking across a muddy construction site toward a new Lowe’s — a mega-hardware store that includes an indoor lumber yard. To the right of the picture, a five-acre chestnut oak and mountain laurel woods is fiercely posted with “No Trespassing” signs. At its heart: a private residence of about the same age and design as those in the adjacent development. This is a graphic illustration of one factor driving the growth of suburbs: our love of privacy. And by “us,” I don’t just mean Anglo-Americans. The overwhelming majority of immigrant homeowners live in the ‘burbs, too.

One of the things that distinguishes many of the most recent housing developments, at least in this part of the United States, is the plethora of fences. Very few back yards were without a tall wooden fence separating them from their neighbors. Does this reflect a growing concern for the safety of children, I wonder? By contrast, older towns and suburbs tend to have, if anything, low fences that one can see through — the proverbial white picket fence.

Though my cousins’ development seems to qualify as a genuine neighborhood, where kids play in the street and residents of all ethnic backgrounds mingle easily, I think most activity still takes place either indoors or in backyards. I saw vestigial front porches on a few houses, but I don’t think people spend a lot of time sitting on them watching the cars go by and chatting with their neighbors, as they might in an archetypal small town like the one near me (Tyrone, PA).

The typical American home is becoming positively Arabic. In place of a courtyard or pergola we have the pressure-treated deck, but the spatial emphasis on a private walled garden (or lawn) inaccessible from the street is identical to what you’d find in old Damascus, from what I read.

Trees play a vital role in the modern exurban landscape. For one thing, they provide visual relief from the uniformity of lawns and fences. A small woods like the one at the end of this street can add several thousand dollars to the value of each adjoining lot. My cousins were more practical when they bought their house, though, realizing that the developer was making no promises about preserving any woods. They settled for a thin strip of pines in their backyard.

Trees are often signifiers of place, as well. Where small towns had Oak and Elm Streets, the suburbs have Maple Drives and Cherry Lanes. And it’s not uncommon for suburban subdivisions to bear names like The Pines, Park Forest Village, or Gray’s Woods.

Under the backyard pines, as in so many of the other yards that I could see into, my cousins put a playhouse for their kid. As a species, I think, we are drawn to the company of trees. The other thing fueling the spread of the suburbs, aside from our love of privacy, is our love of nature — or at least a certain vision of the bucolic. Natural habitat is disappearing not because we hate nature, but because we want to live in the middle of it. I include myself in that.

Front-yard trees are more for show. The cherries were in blossom when I visited in the middle of April, held for a couple of weeks by the unusually cold weather. For some, this might evoke New Jersey’s official nickname, the Garden State. But in fact that nickname dates back to when the sandy fields of South Jersey grew crops instead of houses. Before the invention of the refrigerated truck enabled California’s Central Valley to supply produce for the entire nation, New Jersey’s small farmers kept much of the northeast in fresh vegetables.

What will happen when the price of oil becomes too high to support the shipping of food across continents? At about the same time, if Peak Oil Theory predictions are correct, much of the suburbs will become uninhabitable, unless they are quickly reconfigured to put essential goods and services within walking distance of most residents, and unless the larger houses, increasingly expensive to heat and air-condition, are replaced with earth-sheltered, passive-solar structures. The big box stores will go out of business when their centralized supply chains collapse. So it doesn’t require any great stretch of the imagination to suppose that within our lifetimes, my cousins’ development — by then, if they’re lucky, a true town — may be ringed by farmers’ fields once again.

During the painful, forced transition to sustainability, most of the trees in these pictures will probably disappear, cut down for firewood. The lawns will be dug up for vegetable gardens. People will probably spend a lot more time outdoors, whether they want to or not, and will come together in ways we haven’t seen since at least the Second World War. The summers will be hotter and longer than anyone can remember. And because people will need plenty of shade in the absence of air conditioning, I predict they will lose no time in planting more trees.
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Don’t forget to send in tree-related blog posts for the next edition of the Festival of the Trees by April 29. See here for more details.

April 12, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Trees in the concrete

On the About page for the Festival of Trees, we note that “We are interested in trees in the concrete rather than in the abstract.” Xris of Flatbush Gardener thought it would be fun to take that literally and have “Trees in the Concrete” as a theme for the next edition of the blog carnival. In his own words:

Yes, I am also interested in trees in the concrete […]. Urban trees and forestry. Street trees, park trees, weed trees. So, for the next Festival of the Trees, I’m especially looking for submissions on this theme. This is not a restrictive theme, so anything which fits the FotT submission guidelines is welcome. If you have a doubt, send it. You can submit entries via the Festival of the Trees Submission Form on BlogCarnival. You can also send an email to festival (dot) trees (at) gmail (dot) com with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line.

The publication date will be May 1st, 2007. The deadline for submissions is April 29. It’s my first time hosting a Blog Carnival, so be gentle.