Wednesday, February 15,
8:30-9:35 a.m.
After a recent freeze and new
snow and before the next thaw, the weather pauses. The sky is featureless, not
much different in tone from the snow-covered ground. A slight breeze puffs
rhythmically, setting hanging curls and spirals of bark in motion.
No one ever plants a popple
grove.
Popples, or quaking aspen,
are the pioneer species in our region. At the edge of a woodlot, or sometimes
in the middle of a field, they establish a seemingly ingenuous foothold and
from there, wherever mowers or traffic fail to check their forward movement,
advance into field or lane. What looks like a collection of individual trees is
more like a colony, united underground, and the colony’s will to go forth and
multiply knows no bounds.
Our popple grove, as
unintentional as any, has spread out to the north from the empty chicken house.
(It begins to spread south, as well.) At one back corner, the northeast, an old
silver maple, age-mate to the one in the front yard, claims a wide area, and in
the midst of the popples a few young ash trees and at least one mulberry have
managed to compete for space. Popples, however, are the predominant species.
The ground is littered with fallen trunks and cut-off branches, and with new
snow on the ground and half-covering the jumbled tree litter, footing is
treacherous.
Where the grove ends at the edge of the yard is a brush pile, larger each year. Sometimes rabbits nest in the brush
pile or, more simply, tucked into grass and weeds, hidden away at the base of a
popple tree. There are no tracks around the brush pile today.
Popples may be weed trees, but
no of them look alike. Some are fresh green-barked, straight, and tall. A few
are old enough that their bark is dark brown and furrowed, almost black.
Others—and not all of them old—have died standing. On these the bark has
sloughed off in places and been peeled back in others. Where it has sloughed
off, narrow winding trails appear in the wood.
The more obviously present
feeders on these trees, though, are woodpeckers. Each deep woodpeckers hole is
surrounded by a large area of freshly worked wood, light and clean, and the
ground at the base of trees where woodpeckers have fed is thick with sawdust. One woodpecker popple in the
grove is also host to a quartet of shelf fungi. Each fungus, old enough to have
taken on the mossy green of an old, abandoned Florida boat, today bears a
cone-shaped serving of clean snow.
South of the popple grove and
chicken house the view opens out to softly rounded hills—Claudia’s Woods to the
southwest, then rows of orchard trees stretching to the East Woods, with dark
pine trees on the horizon beyond. The open spaces ring with crow calls this
morning. That sound is incessant today, the raucous cries of crows.
