A crow cries out across the forest, the only bird call I hear. It’s a stark difference from when I had first stopped to marvel at its beauty in the fall, with the songs of birds ringing throughout the forest. The trees from the understory are barren, as well as the ground which has lost all its woody species. The branches of the pines are also noticeably dryer than they were before winter. The inaccessible water from the snow with the lack of humidity has caused the trees to become brittle to the touch. The precipitation levels are still the same just in a different state of matter. The substrate has thus changed from the fertile soft forest floor it once was to a cold hard dirt with no decomposition in progress, limiting the amount of humus at this time.
