I tend to think of winter as a time of withdrawing. But this
year my schedule will be opening up after banding ends,
making winter a time of opportunity.

In some ways winter is the simplest season. Cold. White. The
bountiful busyness of summer has faded. Many species take
advantage of this leveling of the playing field by getting a
quick start when the sun returns. Trout lilies and other
spring flowers sprout from bulbs long before leaves shade the
forest floor. Deer breed in the late fall to give birth in
spring.

The other evening I heard great horned owls in the back woods
as the light faded. These owls are raptors seen in a mirror,
darkly. They rouse at dusk and hoot to attract a mate in the
late autumn when other bird song has quieted. The breeding
season takes off in winter after which pairs may lay eggs as
early as February. The eggs are very cold hardy and the female
helps by creating a warm environment through metabolism
and insulation.

We tend to only think of mammals and birds moderating their own
temperatures, but the talent is more widespread than once
suspected. The wet areas of our forest are littered with skunk
cabbage leaves emerging in tight rolls which will unfurl in
spring. Skunk cabbage are known not only for emitting an
unpleasant odor when bruised but also for creating their own
warmth. Their prehistoric-seeming flowers can melt their way
through snow to bloom in late winter and early spring.

Until then, it's nice to see green coming instead of going.

The other day a cold wind thrashed about in the trees, blowing some of the remaining leaves high into the air. I'd been planning a walk for lunch, but the fury of crashing branches under heavy gray clouds convinced me to stay inside and do yoga.

That night, a constant roar surrounded our little house. There is a chaos to the weather that is oblivious to our supposed mastery of the universe. The wind pressed in upon the warm glow of light and the faint echoing roar of the wood stove.

Our society is "civilized," so for many of us poverty is a matter of numbers and autumn is about leaves and cornstalks. But outside there is an edge to the flurry of activity. Little birds like chickadees, nuthatches, and brown creepers flock together for protection and the benefit of extra eyes looking for scarce food. The forest is full of calls instead of songs as fair weather birds are drained away by migration. If there's a reason that the veil between the worlds is thin on All Hallow's Eve, I imagine it is this: fall is a time of reckoning. In the forest, most of the food that will keep scatter-hoarders like chickadees and squirrels alive throughout the winter has already been grown.

We're lucky we don't have to count on the sack of potatoes I grew this year lasting us through the winter. Many wild plants have their own version of storage tubers. Mayapple dies back to the root which winters in its own version of a root cellar, the soil. Even flowers that haven't been seen since spring such as trillium and trout lily are lying in a stasis of roots or bulbs, a latent understory just below the surface. Before European agriculture, logging, and housing development, northeastern woodlands were much more stable environments, while grasslands dealt with fire as well as transitions to woodland and wetlands. Spreading one's progeny was a more sure strategy than trying to stay in one place. Many grassland flowers such as goldenrod and asters have a great many flowers which turn to seeds attached to a white fluff that catches the wind. Mayapples, trilliums, and trout lilies have one flower per plant or less and even woodland asters have less flowers per size than grassland asters.

However many seeds they produce (or spores, in the case of the sensitive ferns pictured below), their effort is over for the season. Some will be eaten, some will land in inhospitable territory, but all that's left is hope and waiting.

I decided against lighting a fire yesterday. Sometime during the night, the temperature inside dropped below 60 degrees Fahrenheit. When I wake up at 6:30 to a dark and cold house, I start thinking seriously of hibernating.

At the approach of winter, migratory birds "get the urge for going" while those of us who are stuck here settle in for the long haul. At my house we've got our flannel blankets out and cords of firewood stacked beside the house. Our gray squirrel population is busy rustling through the leaves. Shagbark hickories are one of the tree nuts they stock in their larders. The green casings are much smaller than black walnuts and enclose a shell hiding a nut with a delicate taste reminiscent of maple syrup. When not foraging, squirrels can be seen gathering twigs and leaves to build shelters in tree cavities and bare canopies. The big balls of dry leaves visible in the tree tops all winter are actually squirrel nests, known as dreys. Not all dreys are occupied. Unlike in the summer, when leaves provide a screen, winter nests are exposed to predators. It's helpful for a squirrel to add a few red herrings to her territory.

The striped skunk is another mammal which becomes very active in fall. Young skunks are venturing out on their own, encountering such dangers as roads and predators. Skunks of all ages are out fattening up and searching for cozy dens. Neither squirrels nor skunks actually hibernate, but they need fat reserves and shelter to hide from the worst of winter. Normally skunks are crepuscular, which means they move about in the twilight of dawn and dusk. During the fall and mating season in the early spring, skunks may be active during the day. Unfortunately, other than one skunk on the side of the road, the skunks I’ve seen lately have all been black and white rags on the road. Our dog Bear was luckier.

Or so he probably thought at first. I’m sorry to say that I have a close relationship with someone who thinks “lunch,” or at least “toy,” when he hears a small furry creature in distress. Here was an entertaining mammal about cat-sized but not part of the family, not up a tree, and not down a hole. It even did some fascinating stomping while it held its ground. Skunks actually have to physically produce their version of mace, so they would rather warn predators away than deplete their supply. But a warning, like any communication, only works if both sides understand the signals.

Poor optimistic Bear. The smell lingered around our house and clung to his boisterous yet wet figure. Mephitis, the genus and species of the striped skunk, means foul odor in Latin. We all agreed that the sulfurous musk did not necessarily smell bad, just incredibly strong. I very much doubt that happy-go-lucky Bear learned his lesson, since his only trauma during the whole episode happened when we had to give him two baths and a rub down with Nature’s Miracle Skunk Remover. He wasn’t hit in the eyes, which would have caused temporary blindness. According to the NYS DEC website, it also produces pain, paranoia, and a “hidden fear that can be triggered years later by the musk odor.” I’m glad our puppy didn’t get hit in the eyes. Mostly.

Fall morning

In the early hours, there's a different world outside. I've been helping out some local bird banders and we usually open the nets before dawn. It's been hard sometimes, because I'm jealous of my free time (I help band up to four days a week then work in an office the other three) but often it's worth it.

Yesterday I woke to frost sparkling under a bright moon and the outstretched arms of Orion. We couldn't open nets until after dawn, so I was there to watch as a shaft of light hit a frozen net which breathed vapor into the cold air. Fall mornings when the sun rises after a frozen night, the trees release clouds of leaves to float down and coat the ground like snow.

In the office we're surrounded by the hum of machines. We navigate environments made for and by humans. Outside the world breathes.

Leaves of change

I think Wednesday was the most glorious day of fall foliage this year. The woodlands abutting cornfields seemed unchanged from summer, except for being painted in the golds and ruby reds of an autumnal palette. But that night the temperature dropped and wind moved in with the rain to litter our yard with leaves. We started to notice many bare trees in the morning, a reminder of the approaching winter.

The fall finery of deciduous forests in the northeastern US is as aesthetically pleasing as bird song or summer flowers. However, in those two examples, there's purpose to the beauty. Bird song must attract mates as well as fend off rivals, and showy flowers attract pollinators. Autumn leaf colors have no such purpose and if they inspire any humans to conserve temperate deciduous forests it's incidental. The trees have another form of conservation driving them: nutrient conservation.

This was also on my mind Thursday morning as I raked up leaves to store by the compost pile. The full bin represents my last big harvest of the growing season. Soon winter will shut down my gardening completely.

Our winters are cold and often gray. Us human residents suffer from the lack of sunlight, but so too does the forest around our house. The broad leaves of hardwood trees have a much greater exposure to the elements than the tight spruce needles that will stay green all winter. Conifers are also resinous, which conserves water and acts like antifreeze, not to mention creating creosote when you unwisely burn conifer logs in your woodstove. Shagbark hickory, beech, and other deciduous trees protect themselves by going dormant and losing those broad leaves, their most vulnerable parts.

But leaves are a big investment in terms of material, and trees absorb as many nutrients as they can before dropping them. Chlorophyll, the famous green pigment that facilitates most photosynthesis in plants, is broken down. This exposes yellow and orange pigments which were always present in small amounts, aiding chlorophyll by absorbing light energy in different spectrums. In contrast, the bright reds and purples of particularly good foliage years are produced in the fall when the leaves manufacture sugar during warm, sunny days, but that sugar is trapped and broken down during cold nights. Browns are another result of decomposition, not as striking by themselves though an important shade to round out the fall palette. Eventually the nutrients that are left will be mostly locked in to the leaf physically or chemically, and the tree will cut its losses. The leaf is released to the forest's version of a compost pile, the forest floor.

Oak leaves can take up to three years to decompose in the forest, but I'm hoping to speed up the process in my compost. By now, my reserve pile from last fall looks pretty much unchanged, while the compost pile, a mix of leaves, green yard clippings, and vegetable waste, is dense and dark brown. Leaves are high in carbon, but the other compost ingredients are high in nitrogen, making the mixture much more palatable to all the bacteria, fungi, mites, nematodes and insects which carry out decomposition.

In our region, glaciers dug down to the bedrock and prevented the reformation of top soil until they retreated around 11,000 years ago. One result of this scouring was the extirpation (that is, local extinction) of native earthworms. Without earthworms, decomposition of the leaf litter proceeds slowly. Eventually the leaves will return their nutrients to the soil and the trees which dropped them, but until then the leaf litter has an important job to do. The layer buffers shallow roots in cold temperatures, but also retains moisture throughout the year. It guards against erosion that threatens to drain away nutrients. It also shelters mice and other small creatures, something I will have to be careful about when I cover my garden beds with leaves to ready them for the long winter. Many native seedlings and wildflowers need this protective layer. Their populations can steeply decline when introduced worms eat through the leaf layer too quickly. Not only do natives decline, but invasive plants thrive in the exposed soil where worms have freed up nitrogen that weeds need to, well, be weedy.

The importance of leaf litter is why I only rake up leaves from our yard, not our forest. I also have to be careful not to introduce more worms, because although I know we already have at least one species, I don't want to add a new one. Last year, before I knew enough about how dangerous they were, I almost started a worm compost. I even ordered a batch of worms. We were too busy to pick them up from the post office in time, so they all perished in a traumatic incident still legendary to the small town postal workers (rotting worms smell like essence of death, in case you ever wondered). Now, though, I feel very fortunate not to have made a mistake which could have completely altered our surrounding ecosystem. No one has yet found an easy way to search out and destroy all the worms in a forest. We can't undo the introductions that have already happened here.