A UVM blog Patrick Finnegan’s Wonder Journal NR09

So for my final Wonder Blog post I chose to make a little tree field guide for if someone wanted to look at all the overstory trees in the general vicinity of my friend’s backyard in Burlington. Now I chose trees specifically because I am a forestry major and trees are kind of my thing even if my dendrology isn’t that great yet. I also love to share my knowledge of trees with people I’m close to and this will come in handy for that. I also have a close connection to field guides as my grandmother loved to use them to identify birds and non woody plants. She would always show me pictures of the bright birds that were apparently very rare or the bright flower that I would see driving around my town. This is connected to my site in particular because these are the trees that make up the overstory in that particular area. They provide the shade during the summer months and an easy way for the local wildlife to avoid humans at all cost. This project really expanded my comfort zone by forcing me to really narrow down the information I thought was the most relevant in terms of how to identify a certain tree because those sections or pages are only so big. For it to be for people that aren’t into tree id I had to make sure the information was general enough while still being able to help them identify the right tree.

Today is Tuesday, July 5th at 11:30 in the morning. It is currently cloudy out at the moment but is sun on forecast for later today. In my first 15 at my spot there was something definitely new there. A piece of the rotten log had been removed by the rain last week to reveal a whole bunch of insect wholes that had been eating away at the inside of this tree. The holes look familiar to the kind EAB make when they first find ash trees to nest in. The stump however belonged to a box elder tree, which is common in Burlington, which mean EAB wouldn’t touch it. Thats when I pulled a little carpenter ant out of the whole. Luckily the tree had been removed a while ago but the little ants were still going to town on the leftover stump. My natural history mystery this week is when do squirrels start storing food for the winter? I’ve noticed over my spot that there are lots of little holes that are filled with old acorns or beach nuts and I wondered if squirrels use the same spots to store food and when do they start/stop foraging. The answer is that squirrels use the length of daytimes and the general temperature to decide when its time to store food or time to bulk. They also don’t generally use the same store sights for more than one year as most get raided by other squirrels anyway.

This was my first real time going out into the woods with the intention of taking photos. I’ve always had other reasons to be in the woods and would just photograph anything I though was cool or interesting. It also definitely changed how I viewed and looked at the sight. I was forced to get two perspectives on my surroundings, one through my eyes and the other through the camera which is hard to position sometimes to get the right shot. It was similar to sketching in the sense that you really had to focus but different in that you were way more flexible on what the finished product could be. In closing I definitely need to do some more just sitting in the woods and just observing. Every time I go to my site I am just amazed at how much can happen is such a small area.

The day is Friday July 2 at 12:00 and the weather is not good, its raining slightly so I hope I can get all these sketches down without any of them getting ruined. For the first 15 minutes of this trip I began looking at the features of the spot I had chosen and discovered a very nice looking while still somewhat intact. As I picked up the log and began to move it I observed in to be in decay class 3-4 with a diameter of 7-12 inches. It looked to be a hard wood as well as part of a blow down. There were also various insects living within and underneath. There was also an unknown fungus growing near the larger end. It was partially hollow and made an excellent winter hiding spot for squirrels and chipmunks. One species of plant that I was unfamiliar with was wild sassafras also known as sassafras Albidum. I used an app called seek which uses picture of leaves to identify them. One interesting fact about this plant is that it is banned by the FDA for being in food or drink due to a chemical called safrole which is also a carcinogen.

The process of sketching was definitely something that was new to me. I had never really dabbled in drawing or even art really since elementary school and art class. Sketching in the woods was also a new experience for me due to the fact that as a hunter I am constantly looking around and observing everything without much detail and sketching really forces you to focus on one thing for a longer period of time. It was challenging for because I was very easily distracted when drawing by either a noise or a movement. For next time I do want to work on focus more on one thing at a time, as well as that hemlock cluster growing in my friends backyard. I also didn’t have solid white paper so I sketched on the backs of notecards if thats okay.

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