This week in the woods, as temperatures drop and the first snows mix with cold rain, we think of what the winter may have in store for our forests. As Jen Weimer describes in an Outside Story article from this past winter, another major ice storm may come soon for the Northeast: while many winter storms cause icing, serious storms causing widespread damage to forests and infrastructure tend to happen every 15 to 25 years. The most recent ones took place in 1998 and 2008, but climate change has increased their frequency and intensity and made the necessary atmospheric conditions more probable across a broader and more northerly geographic range. Ice storms occur when rain falls during subfreezing temperatures and the supercooled water freezes upon contact with surfaces. This ice accumulation can cause branches – and even entire trunks – to bend, crack, and break. While conifers’ flexibility and ice-shedding branches help them endure these glazes, hardwoods sustain the most damage. Fast-growing, slender pioneer species with soft wood, white and gray birches have particular susceptibility to bending to the ground under the weight of ice (and, in doing so, of course evoke the Robert Frost poem).
These dead man’s fingers (photographed by Ann Little) emerged from a decaying, half-buried log in West Fairlee. The tough, mushroom-like fungal growths emerge in loose groups that sometimes resemble human digits. Their paler immature stage appears in the spring, but we can find the dark, bumpy mature stage through the fall.
The red-bellied woodpecker – inconveniently named for the slight pink tinge more visible on museum skins than in the field – has prepared for the winter by caching acorns and berries in tree crannies. Its expanding range just about reaches its northern extent in the Upper Valley. Look for it at your feeder, in parks, and on woodland edges, and listen for the nervous laughter of its call: churrr.
Especially as it vocalizes less during the non-breeding, non-migratory months, the well-camouflaged brown creeper might be harder to find. The petite bird blends into bark as it spirals up trees, its long, stiff tail bracing it in a position flush to the trunk. From this vantage point, it can best see hidden insects, spiders, and their eggs and pry them from crevices with its thin, curved bill. You might notice this cryptic bird once it reaches the canopy and flies down to the base of another tree. In winter, find it in mixed flocks with nuthatches; what nuthatches miss in their mostly downward foraging, brown creepers – which only climb upward – might catch in their ascents. In the Upper Valley, we have both migrants from points north and year-round residents; some members of more northern and high-altitude populations move south or downslope in winter.
What have you noticed in the woods this week? Submit a recent photo for possible inclusion in our monthly online Reader Photo Gallery.