November's forest light

The first few days of November have been atypically warm, more like mid-October than the blustery weather that is more expected.  I find it hard to complain much about 70 degree weather and gorgeous late fall light.  The fall colors that remain have faded from brilliant yellows and reds into shades of bronze, but the mountains are still beautiful.

The leaves of summer now litter the forest floor, and it is impossible to walk quietly.  The leaves, as yet undampened, are as crunchy as crumpled paper and as light and airy as snowflakes.  The Shelties are belly-deep in leaves, and they are above ankle deep for me.  So it is difficult on this rare November day to grouse about temperatures so far above normal.  Instead, I simply enjoy the afternoon, marveling in the golden shades of light.

So many leaves are off the trees now that for the first time, I can see the mountain to the west of me, though it is not yet as clear a view as I will have when all the leaves are down.  I can see partway down the mountain, now, and the porchlight from across the valley bobs in and out of view at night with every slight breeze.

The sweet little fawns of summer have no clue about the winter ahead or the fall hunting seasons.  They stand still as I drive by, Baby Dog hanging out a rear window staring at them.  But she doesn’t bark and the now spotless fawns don’t flee.  A few birds of summer remain or perhaps they are birds that nested much further north than here that have now reached this area in their flight south.  A palm warbler, about the same color as its surroundings, pops up among a host of goldfinch, juncos and song sparrows.  We stare at each other for a second or two and then it is off.  I hope the warm weather is an aid to its southbound journey and that its travels are safe. 

Not out of the wet woods yet

The wet woods

The woods are wet and dripping.  The lane is rutted, with fist-sized stones washed up and sitting in the middle.  I can’t decide if these are late spring rains or just the usual summer pattern of frequent, torrential evening storms.

Certainly the landscape is lush, even tropical, this week.  I am not a fan of getting soaked by foliage as I walk around the forest.  Oddly, I don’t mind walking in the rain nearly as much.  Perhaps it’s because I just don’t want to wear a rain jacket when it’s not raining.

The mountain residents are all in evidence, even the yellow-billed cuckoo, which I hear frequently but am lucky to see once a year.  The fox still barks in the dark hours, and the chickens still roam free, so far safely, during daylight.  At the moment I can say not much is going on except the usual things—and the dripping rain.

In another week it will be time for another season of adventure camp to begin.  I was briefly tempted to make a foray down to the creek this past weekend, just to check the area again.  But mud and seasonal streams deterred me.  I hope both will be drier next week.  Actually, I hope everything will be drier by next week.    

What's coming next?

Though the temperature doesn’t show much improvement over mid-winter, the increasing minutes of daylight and the stronger sun angle tell me spring is approaching.  And it’s not just me:  rabbit tracks are suddenly appearing around my forest, the bluebirds are active again, and though I haven’t seen one up on the mountain, down off the hill I saw a very large groundhog yesterday.  Finally, after taking the winter off, the hens are beginning, just beginning, to lay again.

Sooner or later the temperature will catch up.

Later on in the spring it will be fun to observe what, if any, differences this cold and extended winter produces in the forest.  Will the trees leaf out later than they have over the past several years? Will it be a good warbler year because the warbler/insect cycle will be in sync again for the first time in a while? Will the winter weather alter when the bloodroot makes its one-day blooming appearance? There will be lots to keep an eye on this year, and I’m going to enjoy it all!

More than a little rain

The forest is greener than green and the cabin’s surrounds are muddy. Torrents of rain fell yesterday evening, a real gullywasher. This morning I carefully pick my way around the cabin and Roundtop, trying to avoid the worst of the mud. It’s the kind of morning where being squeamish isn’t going to do you any good. You will get muddy. It will get on your shoes and your pants. Even with boots. April showers in June indeed.

Baby Dog and I don’t wander far off a trail or a road, and still we come home muddy. Baby Dog does not like baths any better than she likes mud, so that makes for a struggle. The rain doesn’t seem to have slowed down the more feral residents of my mountain. I heard one of the red foxes barking not long before the deluge last night. The raccoon was still out and about, though as a nursing mother raccoon, she has mp choice. She has to be.

A rain-soaked deer sprang up in front of me by one of the snowmaking ponds, dashed across the road, paralleled my walking route, and then circled around, still at a full run, to get to the opposite side of the pond and head up the slopes. I see what I think is this same doe every morning, either by the pond or down on one of the dirt roads. I’m pretty sure she’s hiding a fawn somewhere nearby, so her big circle was designed to take her back towards wherever the little one was hidden. I have a rough idea where that is, down to within perhaps a hundred yards. I don’t feel the need to disturb the fawn just to see if I’m right.

More rain is in the forecast. We need it, as the area is still below where it should be for rainfall. But I’m not looking forward to more mud.

Forest life

That’s the last of them! This morning the eastern pewee’s plaintive call echoed through the forest around my cabin. The pewee is the very last of the summer residents to arrive. So now everyone who normally should be here is here. Oh, I could have another one or so. Some years I have a yellow-billed cuckoo somewhere on the mountain. I suspect that poor bird has yet to find a mate, at least here on Roundtop. The calls echo throughout the summer, moving from spot to spot as though hoping for someone to answer. Maybe someone did answer, eventually, but I don’t think it was here on Roundtop.


So now, instead of trying to find new summer residents, I can relax, pull up a chair and...No, that’s not going to happen. I have a list of outside work that’s longer than my arm, starting with trimming back the various tree branches and bushes that scrape the sides of the car as I travel my driveway. Just because I don’t have a yard doesn’t mean that there’s no work to be done. It can be a near-constant fight against multi-flower rose, poison and assorted saplings determined to take hold and cover the cabin.

It can be tough work, particularly when it’s hot outside, so now is the time to get at it. Some years it gets hot so early in the season that I don’t really get it done to the point that I’m relatively happy with it. This year so far, it’s been fairly cool, so at least I don’t yet have that to deal with. Still, it’s something of a race to get done, because I know summer’s heat is only a few weeks away.

I use hedge clippers and a longer handled clipper rather than a weed whacker. I used to have a weed whacker. Several, in fact. None of them lasted very long. I couldn’t handle the heavy weed whackers and the lighter weight ones didn’t hold up. I’ve had the clippers for years. I don’t mind that this is a battle I will lose. My only goal is to keep the tendrils of new growth from scraping the car along the driveway or me as I walk around the cabin. The forest will win, eventually. So be it. In fact, I hope the forest does win, eventually. If not now then at some point, even if that time is far into a future I will never see. I have faith in the strength of the forest to survive even mankind’s mindless destruction. Though I also believe that mankind would survive longer than I expect they will if there were more of us who believed in the importance of forests.

Early spring forest

Rue Anemone

This must be flower week for Roundtop. The spring ephemerals are popping up all over the forest. Today’s flower is rue anemone, which has gone from just a few blooms to dozens, if not hundreds of them, all around the mountain. These are small plants, no more than 4-5 inches tall, and if you are not careful, you can easily step on them. This was a nice little bunch of them. Often, only a single flower is seen or perhaps two. Sometimes I come across a small patch of them, where I will find 6-8 blooms scattered in an area of perhaps 5 ft. x 3 ft. Even then they are not always easy to spot.

Other than the small flowers on the forest floor, the overall view around the forest as a whole does not look particularly spring-like. Some trees have buds that look suspiciously large, but many are still as bare as winter. The other evening I walked deep into the forest and sat for a while, enjoying the warm weather. Wind through the trees made the most sound. A few crows called in the distance and one pileated woodpecker, but that was all.

The chorus of woodland birds was silent, so I listened to the wind and enjoyed the view from my perch on a conveniently-located boulder. In a few short weeks, the forest will be so lush that I won’t be able to see very far. But last evening, from my boulder along the edge of the mountain’s side, I could see both above the forest canopy and the forest floor below me, the ground rolling away to bottom out along Beaver Creek. That expansive view won’t last much longer, so I wanted to enjoy it one last time or perhaps the next to last time before the vegetation hides it until late fall.

For the moment, the forest spring is best seen in the small and up-close plants that are pushing through the detritus of last fall’s leaves. The large plants of the forest still have a ways to go before they reflect much of the new season.

My little patch

 For some time now, I’ve had the feeling that I am not coming to know the forest around me on a very deep level. Sometimes it’s as though I’m in a car speeding down the freeway while trying to take in the sights of a new area. I see a pileated woodpecker here, find a patch of brown-eyed susans there, notice the interesting color of a sunrise through clouds, but what does that mean, really? The forest is far more than just what catches my eye when I’m in it.

To get to more of what a forest is, how it works and what’s there, I decided I need to focus more narrowly on a chunk of it that's small enough for me to keep tabs on, rather than trying to see what goes on everywhere around me. The only way to see more is not to try and see everything as though I’m on some nine-day whirlwind tour of 12 European countries. Better to pick one spot and learn as much about that spot as I can, so at least I can say I know some piece of the forest on an intimate level.

But which spot? For a while I thought I could use my front forest, which is about the size of an average front yard. The front forest has a variety of trees, of varying sizes and health. It’s got a busy forest floor, the edges of which bloom with wildflowers in the spring. Birds flit through it, and sometimes deer and the smaller forest animals as well. There must be 50 trees there, of probably a half a dozen or more species. It’s got some rocks and a couple of downed trees that are slowly fading into the forest soil. The smaller plants and seedlings are numerous.

Eventually I decided that was too large, too.

So for the past several weeks I’ve been focusing in on a smaller patch in my front forest. I haven’t measured it, but it’s about 5 feet by 5 feet. My little patch is nothing special. It’s got a bit of moss, one rock with lichen, a couple of branches with fungus and that’s about it, at least on the surface.

The advantage of trying to learn as much as I can about this little piece of forest is that it’s close to the cabin, and I can visit it every day. I can sit there and examine it in all kinds of weather. I hope it’s small enough that I can learn a lot about this little spot, about how the forest works, about how even a patch this small changes over the course of a year.

In the course of three weeks I’ve noticed a lot already. It’s amazing how much a small piece of forest can change in just that short amount of time, even during a time when the forest is sort of closing up shop for the winter’s sleep ahead.

I have a few rules that I follow when studying my little patch. One is that I can’t move anything. I allow myself to touch things but not to move them. This means there could be a lot going on underneath the fallen leaves that are currently sitting atop much of the patch, but so be it. I expect to use a magnifying glass at some point, but I’m still getting used to the patch itself, so I haven’t done that yet.

I have been keeping a journal of my observations, which aren’t always done daily, but are done several times a week. I plan to continue this for at least a year. I’ve always felt that while a year is a nice chunk of time, it’s more interesting to examine how things are the same or different on the same day over multiple years. I don’t know if I can commit to that, though, so for now my goal is to examine this same spot as often as I can for one year.

My photos today were taken in my little patch. The spot is nothing special, and in a way that’s part of the attraction. There’s no stream teeming with life or rare plants (that I know of) or anything unusual. It’s just an ordinary patch of forest floor. But I think that’s a pretty special thing in and of itself.