Week #10

I'm continually amazed each week by the new signs of spring I see walking to my spot. As I entered the woods black and white morning cloak butterfly fluttered across my path and disappeared in the tangle of new leaves. Burdocks were are starting to grow up along the sides of the trail and dandelions are flowering in the grass just outside the entrance. The raspberry bushes have new green leaves where last week there were only purple stalks. As well as the butterfly I saw a lot of other insects including a bumble bee that flew clumsily through the low grass looking for flowers that can't be far away. As I got deeper into the forest the new growth still stood out and there are leaves emerging everywhere now, not just in the sunniest open areas. At my spot the stream is still trickling along and small plant are pushing out of the damp sediment that was underwater during the peak of snowmelt. I hear a few birds but the forest seems quite, perhaps because my visit fell in the heat of early afternoon. As I sat beneath the large white pine I chewed a fresh blade of grass and thought about our assignment for the week. I have counted the whirls on the pines near my spot and many of them are around 50 years old so 50 years ago my spot must have looked very different. The larger white pines would still be there and many of the smaller ones would be very young but I don't know what the rest would look like. It may be that at that point the forest on this plot was still in the process of reclaiming an open field. If this was the case there would have been much lower scrubbier vegetation interrupted by the larger open grown white pines. The beech and red maple probably would not have been here yet and certainly not the shade seeding hemlock that is now beginning to develop in the understory waiting for an opportunity. It's also hard to know what the forest will look like 50 years in the future because so much depends on human interference, both directly from decisions on how to manage the park and whether it will continue to be preserved and indirectly through the influence of climate change which has the potential to profoundly alter the natural communities here. If the forest is allowed to continue successionally unimpeded by human activity in 50 years it will most likely be a more diverse mixed forest with the hardwoods that are currently in the understory growing up to take the place of the older white pines.