A summer storm took out a lot trees, and this red oak was one of them.
It is amazing what one comes across while winter squirrel hunting.
This ancient hardwood will now decompose, as its elements return to feed the soil from whence it came.
In the meantime, its wood will be home to termites and beetle grubs, which will feed the woodpeckers.
This is not the Forest Primeval. It is forest returned in land gone feral. It appears truly wild, but just decades ago it was pasture for sheep and dairy cattle or fields for oats, wheat, and corn.
Now it is home to the white-tailed deer, the hybrid coyote, shuffling black bear, and the slinking bobcat.
There are better lands to farm and settle and till and cultivate and domesticate.
So the red oaks will grow here, reaching high from the ridgetops into the summer sun, their acorns feeding the deer, wild turkeys, black bears, and squirrels. Then some summer tempest comes and knocks them to the forest floor.
The acorn mast drives the patterns of the deer, the density of the squirrel population, and the survival of just about everything else.
Because they do not move and reach such massive sizes, one can be tempted to think that tree is like a boulder. It will be there forever.
But a simple summer storm breaks that illusion of invincibility.
From the ridgetop crown to the forest floor to be eaten by the termites and grubs, it’s an ignoble end to such a noble thing.
.
“To every thing there is a season. . . “
Lets hope that the Noble American chestnut (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) also returns as part of this milieu.
When I used to cut firewood (before I tore out my shoulders), I really hated cutting big, dead trees that were obviously supporting a vast community of living creatures. There was once a massive oak den tree on my mother’s property that was used by raccoons so much that they’d actually worn areas on it as smooth and polished as finished furniture by coming and going in and out of its various big holes. That massive tree and the wide opening in the forest around it was a sacred place to me, and even when I hunted raccoon I never took anything from that tree ((actually, I never hunted on my mother’s land, leaving it as a refuge for the animals that lived there, and in the oak and hemlock forest highlands and lower swamp owned by the state around it. The state land wasn’t posted, but not long after I moved onto my property with my dogs, the local boys stopped letting their hounds hunt around there.)
One day as I was pulling into the driveway that I shared with my mother (mine split off by her house and went another thousand feet down into the woods), I saw a guy coming out of her forest with a truck full of firewood. I stopped him and asked what was going on, and he told me my step-father had allowed him to go on their property to cut firewood. I glanced into the back of the truck and recognized chunks of wood that came from the den tree. I went out into the woods and sure enough, they had cut that massive tree right to the ground, destroying a vital part of that forest. I can’t describe how pissed I was, could never cut a tree like that, no matter where I found it.
Some of the century old oaks on our lot have died, the stumps make great places to plant a new tree once they’ve decayed. I’ve never seen so much rich organic matter as what’s under the remaining wood.
How old? Would it be one of the first pioneers from decades ago when the land first went fallow?
I don’t think that old. I know where one of those is though.