One Week Later

 

Bitternut Hickory

This Bitternut Hickory seedling has been growing at this spot for 13 years.  Each year it had struggled, appearing from its pit (it had been poorly planted) only in early summer.  I had given up on it about 6 years ago and planted a black locust twig close to it.  The black locust has grown by leaps and bounds and is now a proper little tree.  The hickory had its first good year in 2022, perhaps due to the extra shade the locust provided, and if it survives the winter looks set to reach for the sky.

I have hesitated to positively identify this fellow until now as there are multiple species of tree that have pinnately compound alternate leaves and often a seedling's first leaves are not typical of the species. One identifying feature the tree books point out for bitternut hickory is the yellow naked buds.  Below is a close-up of one of its buds that definitely has a yellowish tinge.     

Activity this year:

• I planted 3 apple trees on the edge of the north side of the berm.  The larger one did very well this year and grew about three feet.  If it survives the winter it will have a good start.  It doesn't have a lot of sun being on the north side but I wanted a location away from the road.  The two smaller seedlings had a harder time against the grass.  Hopefully next year will be their year. 
• I also planted 10 yellow birch  in the 2010 area and within the forest to the west of it. I  planted them in the fall.  Rabbits seem to like the taste of them as most of them got damaged by browsing before I put plastic protectors around them.
• I delimbed several large cottonwood poplar trees that fell from the derecho. The trees would have been over 80 feet high. it was good exercise but I mainly did it so that the city wouldn't feel the need to send in people to clean it up.  When they go in with their chainsaws they often leave a large swath of destruction.   
• I spent a fair bit of time in the fall clearing dead standing trunks and branches from the 1995 forest around the 2009 and 2010 area.  I hadn't gone into the area to the west of the 2010 plantings much in the past few years and it was a bit of a mess.
• The bush west of the 2010 planting area has been taken over by buckthorn and honeysuckle to a significant extent.  While cleaning the place of standing dead wood I got more and more aggressive against the buckthorn that has come to dominate the understory in the area.  I recently read of their allelopathic nature of  chemically suppressing competitors.   

Derecho

The May Derecho windstorm did a lot of damage in Manordale and the surrounding areas. Many large trees came down. Pinhey forest to the south-west will not be the same in my lifetime. Acres of trees came down where the loose sandy soil did not give enough purchase for the trees to withstand the winds. Some parts of the 60+ year-old pine plantations toppled like dominoes one after another. One blow-down just off Woodroffe south of Slack Rd. must be about 20 acres.

The roadside area this blog follows was relatively fortunate; a couple of the large cottonwood poplars came down but otherwise it got off quite lightly. The picture above was a large 100foot high popular that fell length wise along the berm. It damaged several smaller trees as it toppled. I cleaned up the limbs that were hung-up against other trees leaving this long trunk. It will be a barrier and landmark for many years, I imagine, as it is still a few feet off the ground. I also spent several hours going around with a handsaw clearing other smaller standing deadwood in the 1995 woods. The forest really needed a clearing out as the ash trees that fell victim to the emerald ash borers were left standing and only now have finally rotted away enough to be easily pushed over.

Fall 2021

The trees in the 2009 and 2010 planting areas have grown up and together this summer and it is starting to feel like a part of the forest now. There are a few open areas where the grass is holding on but under the thicker canopy and the evergreens the grass is pretty sparse. The 2011 and 2013 planting areas are still very open. Many of the seedlings planted by the cub scouts had a good year and are getting to be able to hold their own against the grasses and vetch.

I haven't made any posts to this blog this summer as I was unhappy with the camera on my old phone, so the following are some notes about the summer that never made it into a post:

• The patch of trilliums is hanging on, but not getting larger.
• I saw bats and fireflies one evening
• I saw a few monarchs fluttering along the Avenue.
• I attacked the dog strangling vine patch again. It is just as big a patch as it ever was.
• The path that the mower had cut through the sumac last year filled in as predicted with a thick covering of young sumac.
• A squirrel was hanging out in the old birdhouse. It had stuffed the hole in the back wall of the house with grass to make a more comfy home.
• I took off the lowest branch from the big oak tree this year. It is now quite a handsome tree.
• I also limbed up some of the poplars to try to get some light down to the slower growing maples in the 2009 and 2010 areas.
• I planted a maple and a spruce seedling on the north side of the berm with a couple of stakes to protect them from the mower.

Red in Beak and Claw?

Last weekend I planted a couple of baby trees I rescued from the garden. The trees are very small, the stakes are very large. Good thing I put the stakes in right away as the next day the mower came by. This part of the north side of the berm was originally planted by the school children 12 years ago but the mower accidentally cut down about a dozen trees a couple of years later before they realized what they were doing. Some trees and bushes started to regrow from the stumps so I planted one six foot high stake at the edge of the tree planting area to indicate where the trees were regrowing. The north side of the berm only gets mowed a couple of times a year so it has to be a pretty substantial stake for the mowers to see it. Unfortunately over the years sometimes the mower would consider it a challenge and squeeze between the stake and the trees, again cutting down the saplings that were valiantly trying to recover. There is still one hazel bush that I recognize as from the original planting as well as a few other volunteers that are growing from seed.

The other day as I was coming back from watering the trees I started to pull away in my car when I noticed a crow was fighting in mid-air with some sort of bird in front of me. I stopped and decided to intervene to save the poor bird that was by then on the ground with the crow on top of it. Before I even got out of the car a red wing black bird dove down onto the crow distracting him. I then got there and the crow flew up into the bushes where one of his mates was looking on. I could then see that its victim was a small baltimore oriole that was sitting in a depression in the grass, clearly injured from the attack. He didn't move when I approached and I didn't know what to do. I thought of taking him to the Wild Bird Center that is off Moodie but I was afraid that he would injure himself further if I attempted to pick him up and I didn't have anything to carry him in. I could tell he was quite alert even though he wasn't moving, but those crows were right above watching us and I was in a bit of a quandary about what to do. Eventually those two crows flew off while I was scratching my head. Then the oriole took the dilemma out of my hands and ran off into the bushes when I briefly turned my back. I guess in his eyes I wasn't anymore a friend than those mean crows.

I sure hope the little guy wasn't too badly injured and is able to recover. The brief episode from start to finish probably wasn't more than a couple of minutes, but I think it will stick with me for quite some time. What strikes me as remarkable is how both the red-wing blackbird and I reacted in essentially the same way to the suffering of an individual from a different species. Who is to say the red-wing blackbird didn't also feel empathy for the poor oriole?

Early Spring in 2021

It was a pretty mild winter this year without any particularly severe cold snaps and without any thaws either. After a green Christmas we had a good blanket of snow shielding the ground all through January and February. Now soneone has flipped the switch and spring is running at full speed.

Below are three photos of the north side of the berm from March 20 to March 30. Ten days ago it was still winter on the north side of the berm. Now the snow has practically disappeared and the crocuses are out.

Downy Woodpecker

The other evening I was walking by this birdhouse and saw a downy woodpecker poking its head out of the hole. It is the second time I've seen a downy woodpecker around this birdhouse in the evening so I guess it is one of their regular roosting holes. I always think of birdhouses as places for nesting in the summer and forget some birds also need places to shelter at other times of the year. This is a daytime picture from earlier in the year of course, as it was too dark to get a good picture.

A few weeks ago the mower took a swath out of the 2010 bush are. I don't know what the mower was thinking, perhaps he remembered an old path that went aproximately that way but that path hasn't been mowed in five years and was thoroughly filled in by the sumac. There were a few elderberry and nannyberry bushes planted there that were struggling amongst the sumac, perhaps they will come back stronger.