Update on Phenology Site 11/1/19
This visit to my spot by the golf course came after a torrential downpour the night before. The wind speed was incredibly high and had broken a few branches. The foliage is no longer hues of red-orange and yellow, but mainly brown and the leaves that cling to the branches, do so feebly. In this little spot of vegetation, the ground is now completely covered in a thick muffling layer of leaf litter. These leaves will decompose over the winter and slowly add to the soil layered beneath. The mushroom season is past peak and on dead logs and stumps, there are dead blackened specimens of mushrooms scattered among the rotting trees. On these, I found a slug and saw a chipmunk (Tamias striatus) scamper across. A squirrel was drying out in a tree, and the squirrel nests were now visible in the trees without the leaves. The small hemlock near my spot had a moth taking shelter on its trunk. There were a few crows perched in the bare branches aswell and a wooly bear (Isabella Tiger Moth). I saw some rabbit scat and there is likely a burrow somewhere in the area for a rabbit as it prepares for the winter. The land in this spot it relatively flat and the edge between the sidewalk and the vegetation had standing water, likely due to the immense amount of impervious asphalt and concrete around the plot. The main impact that this area has on me is the inevitability of forest reclamation. That even when we deforest an area and surround it with non-ideal conditions plants always will invade again and begin life anew. This reforestation took place in the span of under 150 years and some hand-planted trees paired with not maintaining the area allows for life to sprout and transform the landscape within a century. Also by observing animal life, all animals are making their final desperate preparations to stock as much food and nutrients before hibernation and the winter sets in. I think that I only saw crows in the area since they have best adapted to living in the city along with pigeons and seagulls. I didn’t see any blue-jays, chickadees or a variety of birds. This could also have to do with the different stages in migration that birds are currently in.
