March Lion?

by Sharry L. Whitney

Available exclusively from our sponsors. The birds are singing this morning. Wait... it’s February! The birds seem to be sensing what everyone else has, that January and February weren’t the winter months we are used to. If there is to be snow at all this year, it will be a March miracle. The March forecast so far looks to be cold, but relatively snowless.

As much as I (and I assume most people) love hearing songbirds in the morning, it doesn’t feel like we “deserve” it this year. I don’t know about you, but at the end of the work week, my weekend is more satisfying and enjoyable when I feel I earned it. If we don’t get the harsh winter weather this year, will spring be the same season of celebration?

I always wonder how people in temperate climates feel about spring without the four seasons. Around here, the first sight of snowdrops and crocuses can instill a feeling of pure joy. Spring is associated with rebirth, and you can surely see that all around us in the Mohawk Valley in springtime.

The birds aren’t the only ones celebrating spring prematurely (though if you read Matt Perry’s article this month, you will learn the pros and cons when birds do so). We also have much to sing about. This month we introduce two new writers to our amazing MVL writing team. Cassandra Miller will profile local artists, and Maryann Vanderpool-Imundo will explore local restaurants. We are thrilled to welcome them. Our March issue also includes our 10th Annual Guide to Local Maple Producers—truly, our region’s first sweet sign of spring! •

Our young neighbor across the street has actually set up a lemonade stand as I write this.

Riggie is roaming around and hiding in the advertising areas of the magazine. Next to him you’ll find a letter. Find all the Riggies and rearrange the letters to answer this riddle. Enter by the 15th of the month to be entered in a $100 shopping spree at one of our advertisers!

(Excluding media and banks) One entry per household per month. Mail to: Riggie’s Riddle, 30 Kellogg St., Clinton, NY 13323 or email: mohawkvalleyliving@hotmail.com

NOTE: Please enter Riggie’s Riddle and crossword puzzle in separate emails.

April we celebrate

2 words 9 letters

See the answer and winner to last month’s riddle on page 46!

The ecology of the Mohawk Valley has undergone tremendous transformations over the past 250 years. For over ten thousand years, following a long period of glaciation, the land we now call home had been part of an expansive forest ecosystem that spread almost unbroken from the Atlantic Coast to the Great Plains and from the Arctic tree line to the Deep South. Not only are there few remaining vestiges of this original forest, but there are also relatively few descriptions of it. In the Mohawk Valley, accounts from early European settlement focus on their industriousness and their battles with nature, but not on the character or the ecology of the land. The nature his- torian is left to piece together what it was like using forensics and accounts of the industry of the settlers. Much is made of the lack of a written language of the Native Americans that were the first occupants of the land, but the Europeans, at least the ones that settled this land, were illiterate when it came to ecology. We are only made privy to what was here based on what the settlers made use of. We know what wildlife was here primarily based on what animals were exploited (hunted and trapped) or what were deemed pariahs and exterminated. Likewise, we know what trees and plants were here based on those that were utilized in some way.

I’ve written before in these pages about deciphering the history of the land based on clues provided by the land itself and by the nature that exists there now. Plows had worked overtime to erase most of those clues, but some remain, and those that do are still legible. The contours of the land in the lost ancient forest were not flat and smooth but bumpy and rolling, like ocean waves. This kind of topography is known as “pit and mound”. To this day, in areas that never saw cultivation, pit and mound topography is still quite apparent. Each pit and its associated mound represent a large live tree that pulled out of the ground. The pit is where a tree heaved out of the soil, and the mound is where its root mass and lower trunk fell and subsequently rotted away. In areas that were kept as woodlots or pasture, where plowing and crop planting never occurred, we can know the precise places where ancient trees once stood and even in what direction they fell when uprooted by windstorms. Depending on the character of the soil, pits and mounds may last for a thousand years, thereby giving us insight into the severity of storms which hit the region centuries ago. Pit and mounds that align with each other, and appear to be the same age, are indications of a specific storm that section of our sanctuary’s woods, I found an area where multiple pits and mounds aligned in the same direction. It spoke of a windstorm event that came from the southeast and uprooted dozens of old trees. The damage from the single storm wasn’t widespread enough to have been caused by a hurricane but was more likely the result of a microburst or straight-line winds. Based on the age of trees that subsequently grew on top of the mounds, I estimated that the storm occurred approximately 120 years ago. This roughly corresponds with a severe storm that took place in 1899 (according to a contemporary newspaper article) and was responsible for widespread damage in the area – including toppling one thousand hop poles at Spring Farm. It is fascinating to think that trees which no longer exist can corroborate an event that happened more than a century before.

A forest growing on land that is flat and not dominated by pits and mounds, tells us that the land experienced cultivation by the plow. By determining the age of the oldest trees growing there, it is possible to establish approximately when the field was abandoned. The presence of stone dumps on the edges of fields and former fields informs us that the land was once used for cultivating crops. If it had been used for growing hay or pasturing livestock, there would be no corresponding stone piles. In unbroken soil, stones remain below the surface, held in place by plant roots. By contrast, in plowed soil, lose stones continually percolate to the surface and require removal. Another indicator of a formerly cultivated field is the presence of terracing. If the land at the edge of a field appears slightly higher than the ground in an adjacent hedge row or woodlot, that land has a history of being plowed. The presence of fences indicates that livestock was kept on the land. Typically, a fence is erected to keep animals in their pastures and out of crop fields. In the Mohawk Valley, there are still some old stone fences, albeit nowhere near the number found in New England. Most of these stone fences date back to the first decades of the 19th century. The stones were used, not so much for their aesthetic beauty, but more out of practical necessity, since prior intensive forest clearing left little available timber to construct wood rail fences, which were far less labor intensive to build. In most of our region, wooden rail fences prevailed. That being said, I’ve found scant evidence of them. However, the barbwire fences that replaced them after the mid19th century are ubiquitous. Finding old trees with barbed wire going through their centers can help you age approximately when the wire was strung. If the wire is embedded in the center of a tree that is over one hundred years old, you can assume the wire fence is at least a century old.

I used to wonder how some of the oldest trees in our woods managed to avoid getting

Beech tree stump sprouts from its rim

cut down. I later learned that some of them had been cut down and, like a phoenix from the ashes, they managed to regenerate themselves. I first noticed this regarding our oldest Yellow Birch tree. This birch stands on the side of a wooded gorge with its trunk leaning at an eighty-degree angle and its roots firmly gripping the sloping terrain. The tree is about seventy feet tall and has a healthy crown which spreads out widely. Its upper branches mingle in the canopy with neighboring trees on either side of the ravine. Going by the tree’s girth and the appearance of the bark on the lower portion of the trunk, I originally aged the tree at around 140 years. However, I then noticed the existence of a small cavity located near the base of the trunk. Peering into it, I could clearly make out what looked like an old, bleached tree stump – one nearly entirely concealed inside the tree. This discovery led me to reevaluate the tree’s age and come up with an alternative explanation for what I was seeing. Presumably, in an attempt to fell the tree, a large wedge had been cut out of the old trunk. But then for some unknown reason, perhaps because of its location on the side of a gorge, the tree wasn’t felled, but was left standing. Interestingly, judging by the pattern of the cut marks on the wood, the wedge was cut out with a chainsaw. This confused me. Since chainsaws were not widely used for logging in the country until the 1950s and 60s, how could the birch be as old as it appeared? As it happens, birch trees have a remarkable ability to regenerate themselves from their stumps and roots. If one gets cut down, often the stump will re-sprout, or the nearby roots will put up a new trunk. I concluded that the tree’s trunk survived being notched; the living part of the wood and bark on the opposite side of the trunk survived and eventually grew over the old wound.

Birch trees are not the only species capable of regeneration. American Chestnuts and American Beech trees are famous for it. Although American Chestnuts trees are rare in the Mohawk Valley (even before the Chestnut Blight), beech trees are common, and we have several at the nature preserve that are more than a century old. Some mature beech trees in our woods had been cut down 30 years earlier, but their stumps remain alive, and a few continue to put up new growth from their rims. Back in the spring, I discovered that one of our oldest living beech trees had, in fact, been cut down as far back as 150 years ago. Subsequently, the tree sprouted from its stump and lived to dominate the tree canopy once more. As was the case with the Yellow Birch, there was a small hole near the base of the tree which served as a window into the tree’s past. There, hidden deep inside were the rotten remains of the original tree’s stump. Long parallel creases in the tree’s bark that extended twenty feet up the trunk told me that several new trunks had sprouted from the stump’s edges. Ulti-

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Open 10am – 5pm daily mately, they fused together, thus creating the single trunk that stands today. It was a remarkable resurrection story. The only blemish on the tale is that the tree is now suffering from Beech Bark Disease, which will effectively put a limit on its existence. It’s conceivable that the below ground portion of the tree, the roots, will live on and continue to sprout, but it’s unlikely it will ever produce a tree that is free from the disease.

American Basswood trees also can regenerate themselves from their stumps and roots. At one tree border at the nature preserve, a number of basswoods stand along an old barbed wire fence line. A few of the trees are very large and have multiple trunks emanating from the same place on the fence line. Since a basswood tree often responds to being cut down by putting up three or more new trunks from its stump, we can assume the trees were cut down around the time that the fence was strung. That year can be approximated by estimating the age of the multi-trunked trees, which is one hundred years. This age is corroborated by trees along the same fence line that have grown around the wire. Fifty feet to the south of the largest multi-trunk basswood, and along the same fence line stands one of the most remarkable trees on the property – our oldest Sugar Maple. Barbed wire going through it on more than one side indicates that it once stood on the corner of a fenced-in pasture. Terracing on its west side, as well as the presence of a stone dump, informs us that the field to the west was cultivated for crops. The purpose of the fence was to stop cows from entering the field.

Based on its impressive girth and the appearance of its bark, the Sugar Maple that we refer to as the “King Maple” is well over 200 years old. Its growth pattern informs us that, from its earliest years, it grew alongside a cleared field. If it had grown in forest conditions, with trees on all sides, it would have developed a long, straight trunk. Instead, the King began branching out low on its trunk. The low branches have become especially massive and do much to contribute to the tree’s elephantine appearance. The King Maple is the last survivor of what was once a line of immensely old Sugar Maples that grew along the old fence line. These trees were likely tolerated for their ability to provide shade to pastured animals and as sources of sap for maple syrup production. In 2021, I thought the King was also dying. It had lost all its leaves prematurely during the summer and looked very sick. However, the following spring, it leafed out normally and managed to retain its leaves right through to fall. Most probably, in 2021, it was a victim of foliage eating Spongy Moth caterpillars and was not actually ill. The King Maple has some impressive cavities which are leased each year by a changing cast of birds and small mammals. There is one particularly large cavity located low on its trunk. This one is easily big enough to accommodate a family of opossums or raccoons. Research has shown that old and massive forest trees like the King Maple host a disproportionately large assemblage of organisms when compared to their younger, less massive counterparts. It is easy to understand why, given all the cavities, all the surface area, and the many facets of their craggy bark. There are plenty of places to cling onto and make your home if you’re an insect, a species of moss, or a lichen. Certainly, the insects living in the bark and inside the wood are a draw for insect-eating birds.

Another highly-interesting tree specimen grows along an adjacent old fence line. This is an approximately 80-year-old American Basswood. Like the King Maple, this tree suffers from heart rot near its base. In other words, the wood on the inside of the tree has been hollowed out by a fungus. Several years ago, a windstorm snapped the tree’s trunk about five feet up from the ground. The tree fell to the west but was caught in the crown of a neighboring tree and did not come down to the ground. The break left the trunk of the tree bent at a 70-degree angle. Since the bark was completely intact on the east side of the tree, it was able to survive. In fact, it more than survived; it continued to grow and even attempted to “fix” its grievous injury. Basswood bark is extremely thick and strong. Given the fact that its wood is the softest of our common hardwood trees, the tough bark serves almost like an exoskeleton, providing support from the outside. Bridging over the broken part of the tree’s trunk, new wood and bark is serving to splint the trunk. It’s a fascinating survival strategy for a tree and one I have not encountered before. Would the “splints” be able to hold the broken trunk in place if the neighboring tree wasn’t still holding onto it? I doubt it, but it certainly must be taking some of the pressure off the neighbor. The trunk and the upper branches of the tree will survive as long as it stays standing or leaning as it does. However, if it does fall and the trunk breaks completely, we might expect its stump to sprout and the tree to regenerate. Indeed, it’s hard to keep a good Basswood tree down.

Many of the tree stumps in our older woods are beginning to disappear as fungi work to consume them. Although determining how long ago a logging event occurred in a woodland can be roughly established based on the degradation of stumps, a surer way of fixing a date is to look for evidence on living trees. Since trees adjacent to cut trees are typically scarred by equipment and by logs being hauled out, the wounds, often partially healed, can be used to date the event. Of our common forest trees, the Eastern Hemlock is the most fastidious about recording the year it was scarred. As the bark of a hemlock heals over a wound it leaves a visible ring for each year of growth. Like the annual rings in the heartwood of a tree, all you need to do is count them to get a highly accurate reading. In the case of several of our hemlocks that have healed wounds, the count of 32 rings confirms a date of a selective logging event that took place 32 years before.

Logging with heavy equipment like skid steers can rut and gouge the forest floor. Evidence of these ruts, not unlike the pits and mounds created by uprooted trees, can last a thousand years. It is possible to date a logging event by estimating the age of the oldest trees growing on or in the ruts. That date can then be checked against healed wounds on hemlock trees growing adjacent to the ruts. However, if selective logging is done with more care and skid steers are operated on frozen soils, the roads and paths will not be as evident.

The forest and the land is constantly recording what happens in the environment. In this article I’ve laid out a few of the techniques I use to determine what happened in the past based on how things appear in the present, but there are other methods that can be employed to tease out the history of a given place. The tree makeup of a forest – the mix of species growing within it and their respective ages – can assist us in understanding when and in what conditions they got their start. Indeed, there is much to be gleaned from tree diversity or the lack of it. I will touch on this subject again in a future article. The next time you find yourself in a forest or field, see if you can learn anything about the past from a myriad of clues left on the land and in the trees. •