After the fall...

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I guess it is a perfect example of the dichotomy that is your average human being or at least me in particular that while fall is my favorite time of the year, it is for me a time of melancholy and deep sadness. I find a walk thru the fallen leaves brings out regrets, memories of things long past, even fears of things to come. For in the autumn I see signs of our mortality everywhere. Portents that those we love and cherish will age and die. I start dwelling on old sayings like "you can never step in the same river twice" and ponder the possibility of how so much of the best of myself has already been wasted.In part to combat this angst and also out of genuine wonder and enterest I have thrown myself into the study of the nuts and bolts of what actually happens in the fall. The miracle that returns both ourselves and the fallen leaves back into the great circle of life. Of how reduced to our most basic componets, bits of nitrogen, carbon, water and mineral, we are never really gone. We are made up of everything that has gone before and everything that comes later will contain us. I can see how some would find religion in that. The Druids worshiping the Earth under their sacred oaks seem to me sometimes to have been ahead of thier time. Or possibly we have just lost something in ours. A man I worked with had a wonderful brass loupe, a magnifying glass for looking at the individual pixels that make up each letter of a printed word. After expressing my admiration of it, I was shocked at his generosity in giving it to me. The first thing I looked at with my new toy was a freshly fallen leaf. How amazing this tiny feat of natural engineering built to do one of natures true miracles, the work of photosynthesis. And yet there on this leaf that had just fallen today were the signs of its future destruction, or possibly rebirth. For in tiny patches along it's main rib were growing two blotches of fungi. Fungi may be the most important thing on earth that your average person knows practicaly nothing about. I thought I knew somethings, after all I could tell the difference between a puffball and a morel, a chicken of the woods and a boletus mushroom. Well it turns out these are no more fungi than a single dogwood flower is a tree. For the bulk of the fungi, the part that does the real heavy lifting, is the network or matrix of thin strands called hayphae. These hyphae form a network in the topmost layer of soil and leaf litter called a mycelial network. Mycelial networks work their way into dead branches, rotten logs, feces, fallen leaves, animal carcasses, etc. Some networks even seem to link up with the root systems of living trees, sponging off the tree but giving back by passing along some of the nutrients gathered by the network of hyphae. Most of the hyphae strands are too small to see with the naked eye but the larger strands are visable as a white mesh permeating piles of old leaves or seen as you break apart rotting wood on the forest floor. The total amount of fungi in the forest is staggering. There are an estimated one and a half million different kinds and estimates usually come out at somewhere around a thousand pounds of hyphae per acre on the entire land surface of the earth, with higher amounts in areas of heavy vegatation like our woodlands. Or to put it another way over 4000 lbs of fungi per person on the planet!
Although plant eaters from as large as deer to as small as insects eat huge amounts of plant material over 90% goes directly to the decomposers in the form of fallen leaves, branches, logs etc. Add to this things like walnut and acorn shells, flowers in springtime, plants such as nettles or trillium that die back completely every fall and the carcass of everything that dies( think of the millions of cicadas in a breakout year), animal poop...well, the list of garbage on the forest floor is endless. All waiting their turn to be broken down into their most basic parts and recycled back into more oak, more maple, more deer, more chipmunk. A single maple leaf may weigh three hundreths of an ounce but by november over a ton and a half covers the ground on every acre of woodland. How many fallen leaves lie on the big hillside behind my cabin in the woods? Like counting the number of stars in the universe it is a number too large to comprehend. A number too big for my calculater to handle even if I tried to do the math. Yet all returned, recycled, reborn by the the mycelial networks covering the forest floor. Helping the fungi in this work is an even stranger army of creatures that break down the leaves into smaller and ever smaller bits. Sift thru an old pile of rotting leaves and you will find a myriad of tiny creatures. From tiny arthropods such as pillbugs, to comparatively large earthworms to diminuative monsters like pseudo-scorpions and springtails. A look thru a microscope would reveal untold numbers of protazoans and bacteria hard at work also. Some of the wildest creatures are also among the hardest to see. For this purpose I once built a Berlese funnel out of an old paint can. I cut the bottom out of the can and covered this with a cloth secured by rubber bands. Under the cloth I placed a funnel leading down into a jar of water. Into the paint can I dumped a shovel full of rich humus from nearby Halls Creek Wood. On top of the can I then placed a light borrowed from Gary the pet lizards cage. The light dried out the soil from the top down driving the tiny animals deeper and deeper till they finally worked their way thru the cloth and into the jar. My goodness what monsters were revealed when viewed thru a magnifying glass. Springtails, mites, false scorpions and a plethora of tiny creatures I couldn't name. Remember Creepy Crawlers? The soft plastic creatures you made by pouring that goo from bottles into the square metal molds. Remember how you squeezed in the goo and then baked them and out comes a scarey bug like thing with giant pincers and lots of legs with little claws on the ends? Well, thats exactly what alot of these tiny creatures look like. Existing all around us by the billions and trillions. Even comparatively large creatures like millipedes, centipedes, or earthworms are present in numbers that stagger the imagination. Earthworms alone can reach totals of around 900 pounds per acre in rich leaf compost. Just try to picture in your head 900 pounds of earthworms. Slugs and snails can total as much as 400 pounds per acre. If you suddenly had Godlike powers and could miraculously seperate every pillbug, worm, slime mold, fungi, springtail, bacteria etc., (again the list is nearly endless) in an acre of woodland scientists say you would end up with over five tons. All working somehow seamlessly as part of a perfect system. If God exists he's here, in the details.


"Split a piece of wood... and I am there,
lift a stone... and you will find me."



All working to recycle last year into the new. Breaking everything down into basic pieces of nitrogen, phosporus, calcium, etc. and returning these back into the circle of life. Every bit of you has passed thru this cycle countless times already and will do so again. The atoms that made up our ancestors surround us in the trees, in the rivers, inside ourselves. The huge great circle of life is way too complicated for anyone to ever fully understand, anyone who would claim to do so shows how little they really do know. But to understand a tiny bit, to glimpse how everything fits together perfectly, to me that somehow brings solace to the bittersweet experience of fall.
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Trail camera photos

The trip nothing happened...

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The first day was the normal blur that comes from working all night before driving out to hunt the next day. Mostly spent checking the trail cameras and unloading gear before going out to see nothing but a chipmunk. I slept almost as soon as darkness fell. Next morning I started out just right. With light enough to walk without using a flashlight but just barely. My stand choice was a maple hidden right behind a white oak high on the ridge behind the cabin. An oak loaded with acorns. The trail cameras showed this place was used by several deer including at least one pretty good buck. He must feel safe here feeding on these acorns. The sun came up beautiful as it always is when streaming thru the fall woods.
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The maples were just starting to turn bright crimson but the hickories and sassafras were a golden yellow. All morning a chipmunk ran to and fro under my tree making an awful rackett in the dry leaves. About forty yards out a grouse stepped out into a patch of sunlight then slipped back into shadow. Leaves rustled loudy behind me and I tensed up. Part of me almost wished it wasn't the buck as it was just the first trip of a long year, better a fat doe for the freezer. It was neither, simply a grey squirrel out for an acorn breakfast. Soon small birds began to fill the woods, a mixed flock of chickadees, titmice, woodpeckers and kinglets. I spotted both yellow and ruby crowned kinglets, tiny birds barely bigger than a hummingbird. In fall and winter the woods can seem devoid of life one minute then full as these flocks move thru foraging. A rustle and my friend the chipmunk was back. Then quiet again. It was getting warm and I eased Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey out of my pack. A good book allows me to stay on stand a bit longer and I've killed a couple nice bucks after slipping a book inside my coveralls. Sometime later loud raucous calls fill the wood. First one crow then another swoops thru the trees. Alighting for a few moments then moving on till a couple dozen have passed. They carry on this way for an hour their calls ringing thru the trees. It's quiet again and now very warm, time to get down. As I'm climbing down one of the many acorns that have been showering down all day hits me on top of the head and bounces inside my shirt. This gives me an idea and I fill a pocket with them upon reaching the ground. Lunch is two potatoes boiled on the small backpacking stove covered in butter.
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While the pot boils I open up the cabin, propping open the door. Last night I set off a bug bomb inside and slept in the back of the explorer. Hundreds of dead wasps covered the cabin floor. I swept them out using the brush I'd brought to spread tar on the cabin roof and made a mental note to bring a real broom next trip. I also filled a cup with water and the acorns I'd picked up earlier, an experiment to try and rid them of the bitter tannin. After lunch I happily spent an hour up on top of the cabin fixing the roof. But it was no chore in the bright sunlight on such a pretty fall day. Satisfied the old cabin would keep me snug for another winter, I began to think about the evening hunt. That evening except for a brief visit by a grey squirrel and the distant yelp of a turkey, the chipmunk and I were alone again. With about ten minutes of daylight left, after already deciding to hunt elsewhere in the morning, I began to get down not wanting to take apart the stand in the dark. I lowered the bow to the ground on a rope and started to descend. About eight or nine feet off the ground all hell broke loose. A crash and a young doe came running by about thirty yards away. Not wanting to betray the stands placement I froze. More noise and here came another doe straight at the tree. She walked up about ten feet from my bow lying on the ground and ate an acorn. I flattened myself against the tree amazed she hadn't spooked. Stopping she looked back over her shoulder. I immediately heard grunting and here came a buck. The buck. He stopped twenty feet away and grunted. The doe ate another acorn, He grunted again, a long drawn out grunt and she bolted with him right on her tail, passing two or three feet from my bow but going full tilt. Only a month early, the earliest I've ever seen a buck chasing a doe like this. I left the stand where it was. Supper was a sandwich and chips under the stars out on the cabins deck. Out here you can see the band of the Milky Way stretching across the sky. Soon a shooting star streaked across the gloom. Sometime later just before bedtime I heard a deer walking in the bone dry leaves on the hillside across from the cabin. The next morning a few more squirrels and my friend the chipmunk again. Make that my friends the chipmunks, it was becoming clear what I thought was one was really two. A chipmunk who kept mostly to the east side of my tree and one who mostly foraged right under the tree and off to the west. He was soon named the great western chipmunk because he was a bit bigger than the other one, because I liked the name and hey it's the kind of thing you do after sitting in a tree for three days. All else was quiet except for the drumming of a grouse behind me. All the books say grouse drum in spring, but I hear them here all the time in the fall and had one hop up on a log and drum right in front of me for hours a couple years ago. This time I did take the stand apart and bring it back to the truck.
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Pouring the water off the acorns I then toasted them for a few minutes over the small stove. They really weren't all that bad. A longer soaking and maybe some salt and they would be tasty. Loading everything up, I headed out planning to have lunch with some dead Indians. The dead Indians were at at Mound City Group in Chillicothe, Ohio. One of the best places I know if you have an extra hour to spare. Or a week, it's that kind of place, I recommend it highly.
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After that on to the Little Miami for a bit of fishing and to check on my old friends, the eagles.
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Knowing that now was the only good time of year to examine the eagles nest site, I made that my destination for the evening. Any earlier in the year and I might disturb the fledglings, any later and everything would be covered in fallen leaves. Under the giant sycamore that held the nest I found the remains of some of their meals, A few turtle shells, alot of small bones, and (jackpot!) a few eagle feathers.
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Clutching my prize I headed for home and a new work week. Later talking on the phone about something else a friend who doesn't hunt or spend any time outdoors asked if I got a deer on my trip. I said no. They said "I'm sorry you had a bad trip" and changed the subject.

Night wind

I've always been strangely fascinated by the wind at night. The outline of trees blowing to and fro against the night sky. The sound and feel of it out there in the dark. What mysteries are whispered in the wind? The forbidden I love yous, the vows of revenge, the sighs of contentment. All blowing by on the night's wind. The clouds racing over the moon, all that's familiar suddenly strange, swept up in the magic of the night. The decision to change, all real changes in our lives are made alone and at night. Lives are built up and picked apart at night. Only here away from the mess of our lives can we find the room to think. The night wind hears both the tender sounds of young love and the despair of long lost dreams. When you have a secret, a secret too terrible to bear, whisper it to the wind, to the sky, to the moonlit wood. I've sat out in the night in November, the winter night sky to clear to imagine overhead and let the wind flow over me. Carry over me and twist and turn thru the trees and down the gravel lane. Sleep not even a possibility, less likely than just floating up and being swept away myself.