This past Thursday I finally conjured the courage to bundle up, face the cold, and return to the silver maple grove. When I arrived, I was struck immediately by the lack of green. No leaves remain on any of the trees, save perhaps a couple of stubborn silver maple leaves which are clinging, shriveled and brown, to their parent branches. In fact, the only green which remains in the grove is that of the mosses growing on some of the tree trunks.
The area has grown bleaker in the time since I was last here, and there’s hardly a trace of wildlife activity in the area. While a few months ago I was able to spot frogs at the edge of the river and watch as squirrels scurried across the trail, now the grove has grown quiet save for the persistent calls of crows and some scattered american tree sparrows and white-throated sparrows as well.
Now that the vegetation has died away, it is easier to see into the forest from the trail and I noticed some abandoned scrap-metals lying on top of the leaf-litter. I’m not entirely sure what this metal was from but the Intervale is known to be littered with scrap-metals as the area used to be a junkyard before it was restored into a floodplain forest.
The fungal life in the grove seems to be thriving even in this harsh cold weather and I wonder if it will persist into the snow as well. Underneath a leaning tree branch, I found a very cool fungus which I was unable to identify. It was growing into what appeared to be a hollow portion of this branch and I’m not sure if the fungus had actually been what hollowed out this branch?
I don’t think that I’ll be able to return to the grove until mid January and I’m looking forward to seeing what changes the snow brings to the area.