It was exactly 32 degrees out on the day that I returned to Centennial Woods. I was seriously bundled up, with Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees powering me through the walk up to the entrance. I entered and again descended the icy backs. Psycho by Post Malone was playing at this point. It’s poppy and overplayed but without a doubt a timeless classic. Unsurprisingly, not much had changed since my last visit. There had been a consistent layer of at least snow if not ice on the forest floor since last I came. The trees lacked their leaves, even some of the beeches. The stream at the base of the hill was rushing due to the warmer temperatures that we had been experiencing in the days prior. Last time it was much slower. I noticed many shrubs and small plants poking up from the accumulated snow. I walked off trail for a bit and could feel the layers of past precipitation in my staggered and crunchy steps. It had just snowed about a centimeter that morning, leaving a fresh dusting to cover up any easily visible tracks. I did my best to push past this limitation despite the great extent that it skewed with my plans to find easily visible squirrel, deer, and rabbit tracks whose interactions I could explain in a basic manner. I’ll do my best to piece together what I observed, but it will not be easy. I saw many strange tracks and a couple other findings related only by the area that they were discovered in. I didn’t see or hear any winged creatures other than the endless flock of local crows. I looked for songbirds little footprints around the bases of trees with seeds and nuts, but the added effects of the new snowfall and the melted slush of yesterday quickly rendered any small imprints on the surface invisible.
As the pictures from my trip depict, I found a strange gruesome strip of what I assume to be deer hair. I recognized the hair from my brief stint in fly tying, although I could be wrong. It had tissue at its base and some blood matted in towards its ends. There were other smaller pieces of hair and miscellaneous deer bits scattered around the area. I don’t know what the heck happened there or how that piece of whatever it was came to end up on the ground. There were no noticeable signs of animal conflict and no signs of the animals themselves. The species that I’ll be focusing on here is the white tail deer (not because it’s a common species, but because I found pieces of one). These deer live in temperate forests but prefer transitional areas where they can spend time in fields and farms but duck into the forest when needed. According to ecosystems.edu, white tailed deer travel many more miles during the night than they do the day. I predict that they move slowly during the day because they know they could be easily spotted. In truth, they will lay down at their bedding area and remain in that general vicinity until dusk. Once nighttime provides them with the cover they need, they can forage and browse the shrub layer of the forest. Gray wolves and mountain lions are the natural predators that keep deer populations in check, but they have been hunted and have been out of the area for decades. Now we are the deer’s predators.
The forest has a healthy population of white pines, whose buds and twigs deer will eat willingly above other pine species. There is also a considerable amount of sugar maple the deer enjoy feasting on. This is a direct interaction between the deer and its food source, where the deer positively benefit from the relationship while the trees are adversely affected. They get their twigs chomped off, meaning there is no new growth on that shoot for the next season. We’ll just call the white pines and sugar maples one organism so that I can write about something more interesting.
This next indirect relationship is a concept that I just learned about today (February 26, 2020) from guest lecturer Michael McDonald in my WFB095 class. I had to look far and wide to find squirrel tracks in Centennial. I didn’t anticipate it being that hard, but at long last I found a faint trail leading into a dense brush where the squirrel presumably found its cache. The relationship that I’m about to describe is between the deer and the squirrel. Deer browse the shrub layer, wandering until they find a patch to focus on and eat with intent. This benefits the shrubs, as their loose spaced out branches get trimmed at the tips of their shoots. This promotes dense re-growth during the next season. If I were a squirrel, I would want my nut cache in a place that is not easily noticeable nor accessible. The squirrel tracks that I found were going right under a dense bush. This bush was an invasive rose bush. Google informed me that deer will eat rose leaves, twigs, and even their thorns. This (could) mean that because the deer fed on the rose, the squirrel was inclined to hide its food there.
I found quite a few tracks that I could not identify. One actually resembled Kevin the snipe’s footprint from up, funnily enough (recall last month’s episode). It had three large toes and resembled a dinosaur or large bird. There were boot prints nearby, so I surmised that it was other people just having fun and making a dino print. I also found tracks of something that made three large imprints. I think it might’ve been a rabbit. It also could have not been a rabbit. It could have been a ground hog too, or maybe not. It could have been a skinwalker creeping out of the shadows to prey on unsuspecting hikers. It also could have not been that. I will never know.
I hope you enjoyed this month’s installment in the Centennial Woods Saga. Be sure to tune in next month, as the plot really thickens once we finish the rising action and explore how the protagonist awakens and discovers their true potential. This realization provides them with the ability to take on the antagonist, who will be introduced at a later date. Stay tuned for Episode 3: Awakening.
When do they sleep? (Deer-Forest Study). (2016, November 24). Retrieved from https://ecosystems.psu.edu/research/projects/deer/news/2016/when-do-they-sleep
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