Category Archives: Natural history

Big cedar

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Cedar trees are not common on the mountain, but they once were. They exist today mostly, but not entirely, as fallen, dead trees. I have scavenged a few downed cedars in the past for firewood. My miscalculation on how much firewood I would need this winter sent me out in the yard on Tuesday to cut up another one.

This tree is about 30 feet from our driveway in the most overgrown part of our property. A small part of the property on the north end has fairly mature hardwoods. The eastern and southern parts of the yard were apparently clear cut, or almost clear cut, and have grown back in a thicket of densely-packed, small pines with a few larger pines and maples.

I have not seen one live cedar on the property, but this dead one must have been a giant among cedars. Here is my chainsaw for scale.

It’s hard to see the size of the trunk at its base. I counted about 50 rings in the branched trunk next to the saw. The main part of the trunk is a minimum of a yard in diameter. Here it is from a different angle.

My chainsaw is just visible on the left. Note that the bar on my chainsaw is 20 inches.

This tree was a monster of a cedar, or, more properly, a juniper. This is from the Wikipedia entry on the eastern red cedar:

Juniperus virginiana is a dense slow-growing coniferous evergreen tree that may never become more than a bush on poor soil, but is ordinarily from 5–20 m or 16–66 ft tall, with a short trunk 30–100 cm or 12–39 inches in diameter (rarely to 27 m or 89 ft in height, and 170 cm or 67 inches in diameter.

 This tree is certainly at the upper end of the usual trunk diameters.

Another web site calls the eastern red cedar a “moderate to long-lived evergreen,” and says that some specimens have been known to live more than 500 years.

Our specimen fell to the ground a long, long time ago. This type of cedar is resistant to rot and insects, so they can lie on the ground for years without rotting into mulch like most trees in our area. This tree has certainly been on the ground for longer than the almost 14 years we have lived on the mountain. It probably fell a good bit before I started building our first house, and that was 20 years ago. Given the rot-resistance and the condition of some of the tree, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it fell 30 or 40, or even 50 years ago. And, given its size, it might well have been growing on the mountain during the civil war.

There has been some rot. Some of the ends of the branches have dried out and have begun to simply disintegrate. But some of the wood is still firm, and it still produces that characteristic cedar smell when it is cut. Once the moisture from the recent rain has dried, I expect it will produce a decent, aromatic fire.

 

Some sun, lots of rain

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We’ve had a fairly long period of wet weather, interrupted occasionally by a sunny day. I don’t really mind a rainy day. There’s something nice about being warm and dry while it’s cold and wet outside.

One day this week it was foggy — cloudy to those down at the bottom of the mountain — and it had been raining, so I took the dogs on a short walk up to the top of the mountain where power lines cross the ridge. The towers looked like half-hidden alien structures. And there was a crackle in the air. Turn your volume up for this video.

The buzzing sound is caused by what is essentially leaking electrical power. It’s audible only during wet conditions, at least if the power company is doing its job on the transmission lines. It’s called a corona discharge.

I had walked the dogs up a few days earlier when the view was more open. There were still a few clouds scudding about down in the valley.

What might look like a particularly bright cloud near the center of the image is actually a lake.

The maples have turned. It was hard to get a nice, bright image, but here’s one where I tried.

With all the rain, the wet-weather streams are running all over the mountain. I can hear the rushing water everywhere on our walk, even when I can’t see the streams.

This is where one stream crosses Fouche Gap Road near the bottom of the mountain in Texas Valley.

Sam always wants to drink from the ditches beside the road when we start back up the mountain. I usually let him. He didn’t notice this little fellow,

I suspect this is a red salamander, rather than a mud salamander. According to Caudata Culture (“The information resource for newt and salamander enthusiasts”), the two are hard to differentiate. The red salamander is “often associated with the environs of clear, rocky, streams” while the mud salamander frequents muddy areas. Unfortunately, I see their squashed little bodies in the road fairly often.

The rain ended Thursday, although the clouds stuck around for a while. Thursday night is supposed to be the coldest since last spring. Leah feels sorry for Dusty and Chloe, who stay on our front porch, which is soaked with the blowing rain. They do have cat houses with heating pads, and a foam insulation surround. Leah drapes a bed spread over the beds to try to keep the wind from blowing directly on them.

Snake fatalities

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Snakes of any sort don’t survive long around here if they venture onto a road. Some people make a special effort to run over them. That was the case for this relatively young copperhead the dogs and I found a few days ago right at the bottom of our driveway.

It was recently deceased.

A few days later the dogs started acting a little strange on our walk down Fouche Gap Road. Zeke had crossed the shallow ditch and was meandering along when he stopped. At first I couldn’t figure out why, but then I noticed this rattlesnake in the ditch.

The head is at the lower, central part of the image, next to a leaf. Immediately below the head you can see the rattles. I count around 12, which does not, however, indicate its age in years, only that it has shed its skin 12 times. As far as I can tell, this is a timber or canebrake rattler. I didn’t see any obvious wounds, but it was almost certainly hit by a car.

The dogs were curious about the copperhead, but they gave it a wide berth. They didn’t want to get anywhere near the rattler. I don’t know whether they have any instinctive fear of snakes. I do know that they are usually wary of anything out of the ordinary, so that alone might account for their apparent fear.

As we walked back up the driveway after seeing the copperhead, I passed right over a green snake about a foot and a half long. I must have assumed it was one of the many weed seed fronds I pull up and throw onto the driveway. I don’t think the dogs noticed it, either. Then Zeke nosed it and it began to twist and writhe its way off the driveway into the tall grass, where it promptly disappeared.

I have seen a fair number of snakes on the mountain, from nice, long black snakes to garter snakes, but never a live venomous snake. Our little community is isolated among miles of forest. Except for the immediate community up here on the mountain, our nearest neighbor is around a mile away on one side and two or three miles away on the other side. I am certain that there are many, many rattlers and copperheads in our woods, but they must be shy, because they do not show themselves.

On the other hand, I might simply have missed them in my rambles in the woods. I snagged the dead copperhead with a stick to toss it into the woods for a proper resting place. The first try put it at the side of the road, among the leaf litter, sparse grass, pinestraw, bare dirt and vines. It disappeared. I knew it had to be there, but I couldn’t see it. I eventually found it. It was not covered, it simply blended so well with the background that it was very difficult to see.

So maybe I have stepped right next to a rattlesnake or a copperhead and never knew it.

Red surprise

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When I walked the dogs on Thursday, this caught my eye.

And no wonder. As you can see, the leaves and twigs at the side of the road were almost monochromatic. This red fungus was a surprise.

I’m almost completely ignorant about fungus, so I don’t know what this is. The closest I could find online is Sarcoscypha dudleyi, which, this Web site tells us, is microscopically different from Sarcoscypha coccinea, a similar cup fungus found on the West Coast.

Maybe someone who knows their fungi can say for sure.

Cannas couldn’t

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We planted canna lilies early in the spring in a flower bed next to the top of our driveway. They surprised us by growing much bigger than we expected from the packaging. They kept blooming for a long time. This is a shot from December 4, a few days before we got our surprise snow.

And then the following Friday we got snow. This is what they looked like then.

I wouldn’t say they liked it, but they looked OK. At least for a while. This is what they look like now.

Apparently wikipedia is correct when they say that canna lilies are a tropical or subtropical plant. They apparently are (or can be) native to this area, but obviously do not like to be frozen, which is what a coating of snow will do for you.

I assume (hope) that the cannas will come back next spring.

The green foliage to the right is some other type of lily, or, more correctly, an actual lily, since cannas are not true lilies. The bulbs for these lilies were given to us by a neighbor. They grew well but didn’t produce any flowers. In the background you can see some of the seed fronds of the ornamental grasses we planted on the slope at this side of our house. They were almost flattened by the snow but sprang back up well enough that I don’t plan to cut them until maybe early spring, just before the grass begins to turn green.