David Battit
Phenology Blog
Don’t get me wrong, the Salmon Hole is great. I took a walk there to go fishing on my birthday back in September and caught a decent smallmouth bass. The ecosystem is wonderful, and I saw loads of fish. The mammals and other wildlife on the land are scarce though, and the spot is littered with, well, litter. It’s a small parcel of land in the midst of a major roadway, and it’s simply depressing how dirty and inhospitable that those poor couple of acres are. It is for this reason that I am OFFICIALLY RELOCATING my phenology site to one much quieter, cleaner, and frankly more interesting. Centennial Woods Natural Area, you better be ready because here I come.
I live in McAuley Hall on Trinity campus. The walk to the Salmon Hole was an easy one, right down the hill into Winooski. (The walk back wasn’t quite as easy). Fortunately, East Ave serves as the highway to my new phenology site where my spirit can experience nature and positive energy surrounded by beauty, man. It is located only a couple hundred feet from McAuley Hall, and after a ten minute walk up the street you bank a hard left and find yourself at the pearly leaf-shrouded gates of Centennial woods, the home of the first natural resources lab.
It was about 15 degrees out upon my visit to the woods. I air-drummed to Neil Peart’s solo after the bridge in Rush’s Tom Sawyer as I descended the icy banks into the forest. My headphones died from the cold before I could slip and fall, which was probably fortunate considering the treacherous terrain ahead. There were deer tracks all over the place, melted and disfigured from the fluctuating temperatures of recent days. I scoured the trees for twigs to get the identification points required for full credit. The species I came across were sugar maple, white oak, basswood, white birch, and then white pine, which had no twigs because of its coniferous superiority to winter. I cannot compare the phenological changes in Centennial Woods to those of the Salmon Hole because they are two different locations with different features. This is okay though, because I try to go for a hike in Centennial every once and awhile. The seclusion, silence, and connectivity offered by being surrounded by trees is an excellent incentive to escape the noisy characteristics of the city. Regardless, I have seen much change in the forest in the past couple months. The deer trails that were once hidden in barberry are now open and windswept. The sound of the wind itself changed as there were no leaves to hinder it from passing through. I didn’t see any squirrels, and I thought that maybe their nut caches had frozen shut. I followed a set of deer tracks down a trail, and they led me to a brook with running water. This led me to believe that the deer had been foraging and decided to take a drink from the stream. I got to the bank and saw another set of tracks. These were left by what I believe to be a turkey, but it could also have been a snipe due to its three-toed anatomy (recall Kevin the snipe from Pixar’s UP). The tracks exited the stream bed and then quickly turned back down into it, leaving me with only about 10 feet of tracks. They were interesting nonetheless. The pictures from this trip can be found by scrolling up. Enjoy,
David Battit
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