When my husband David came in for lunch after working in the woods all morning the day after Christmas, he said that it was getting "raw" outside. And while I'm not sure raw is an official weather term, I'm pretty sure everyone reading this knows how it feels. Sometimes the cold just seems to penetrate your pores.
David's latest estimate of the number of trees brought down by Superstorm Sandy is at least 100, some of which were the biggest oaks and ashes in the woods. A few tulip poplars also came down and the root ball of one of them measures 20 feet across.
Seeing the part of a tree that's normally underground is both interesting and odd because that part is, or rather was, its major life source. Those ripped up roots will no longer feed the tree water and oxygen or snake through buried rocks in search of sustenance. It's different, of course, if the tree's already dead but for some odd reason almost all the trees that came down in our woods during the storm were still alive.
During the summer when it's easy to tell the dead trees from the live ones by their lack of leaves and overall appearance, David marks the dead ones. But at most spots where living trees went down in the storm a dead one in their midst stayed upright, even in the wettest part of the woods.
Obviously, part of the reason this happened lies with the depth of each tree's root system. However, this is a very gray area because trees traditionally thought of as deep rooted can also be shallow rooted depending on where they're growing. Most oaks, with the exception of pin oak, are thought to be deep rooted but that's not always true. Ashes, on the other hand, are generally considered to be shallow rooted but why then would the live ones already devoid of leaves for the winter come down while an adjacent dead one didn't?
The enormous number of downed trees has given the woods a much different appearance than it has had for a long time. 80-90 years ago it was still grassy pasture but we've always known it as woods. And now the routes that the animals have used for decades have changed and there places overrun with deer and other tracks where they were seldom present before.
Come spring, this change in the makeup of the woods will also affect the breeding behavior of both the four-footed animals and the birds. Animals know where they can successfully breed from the top of the tree canopy down to the forest floor and when the habitat changes so do their lives.
In newly created open areas, especially in wet spots, there will be many more insects and spiders because there won't be as many birds around to eat them. In nature the demise of one species always has an impact on many others, sometimes for a short while and sometimes forever.