Winter in the woods (2/6/2018)

It has been a cold January this year. In the newspaper this week people are complaining about their electricity bills; their heat pumps worked overtime. Our utility bills were not that bad, since we partially heat with wood and have gas heat.

The cold weather provides great opportunities to go walking out back in the woods or as we call it “the outbacks.” We had good snow (especially for our area) and we are still talking about investing in some cross country skis, but we already have so many hobbies.

Jake is ready to go for another walk in the snowy woods behind our home.  I took this picture sometime in mid-January after another snowy day.

From the looks of it, I am sure that almost all but the weakest trees in the woods behind our home will have had no problem surviving the cold spell. They are well prepared for events like this. For one, it is not that this has never happened before, temperatures around 4 degrees Fahrenheit at night. Many of the trees are well over 50 years old, so they have seen this before. Moreover, it has been cold over evolutionary time, and the parents or grandparents of these trees went through cold spells like this, survived it and were able to reproduce. In other word, “been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.” It is what Darwin called “survival of the fittest.” The plants that survived historic cold spells survived, and produced offspring and they just went through this year’s wimpy cold spell.

Another good thing was that the cold snap happened in January, just when you would expect something like this to happen. The plants were in full dormancy. It might be a different story when this happens in November, March or April. Plants prepare themself for this by dropping their leaves and raising the sugar content in the cells. By doing so, the sugar acts like an antifreeze. Water in the space outside the cells does not have any sugar and freezes. When this water freezes it draws water out of the cells lowering the freezing point of the cell content even further. A pretty nifty system. But even if the content of the cells freeze, in preparation for winter, many plants move their DNA to the center of the cell and wrap it in fat, very much like things we wrap in bubble wrap, further insulating and protecting the most important parts from freezing and sharp ice crystals.

Even the small pine saplings seem to tolerate the cold and the weight of the freshly fallen snow.

Plants that keep their leaves, like the pines, cedars and the hollys, fill their leaves with chemicals like anthocyanins and vitamin C. Anthocyanins are also known as flavonoids which act like antioxidants. They turn the leaves dark, sometimes purplelish and as we’ll see that allows plants to do some photosynthesis when it is cold. Other plants that stay green in the winter increase their vitamin C content. Vitamin C also functions as an antioxidant. Antioxidants are important in winter since the chlorophyll in leaves will keep on capturing sunlight to make sugar, but the cold temperatures has slowed the sugar making process down to a crawl. The cells are loaded with electrons (oxidants) and plants need the antioxidants anthocyanins and vitamin C to neutralize them off. If they don’t do that, plants would be in trouble (if we humans get too many oxidants we get inflammation or worse, cancer).  Anthocyanins are important for us as well, they make blueberries purple, and they are also found in grapes, strawberries, red cabbage and other colorful vegetables.  In the plant world, anthocyanins have another function as well, it makes leaves look either unpalatable (purple) to insects or to others insects the leaves look like they are dead (not green). A good way to protect yourself from bugs.

But it has finally warmed up a bit, although it is all relative (night times around freezing and day times in the 40s and 50s). It was a great weekend to go out and explore. We just walked along the trail and decided to get off the trail at one point and bushwack over to the other side. Hoping to find something new and exciting. Somehow we are never disappointed when we do that. It was interesting to start out in an area covered with leaves of beech and swamp chestnut oak trees, going over to an area that was dominated by a mixture of loblolly pine, overcup oak, white oak and some red oak. This last area had a lot of ephemeral ponds in them as well. I never really studied the difference, or why these two areas are so different; I have to put it on my to do list.

Some interesting pictures from trees.  Not sure what happened here.  Maybe a branch that fell off and scarred over, maybe a gall, whatever, it looked like a nose to us with an eye above it.  Never a boring day in the woods. 

I have not the slightest idea what happened here but it is absolutely bizarre.  It looks like there were two branched growing on top of each other which is somewhat unnatural.  the top one was really heavy and seemed to have bent down.  Crazy.    

No, Jake is not marking the tree, just turning and coming to me.  He was fascinated by the smells around this tree.  I want to bet this hole is the home for a critter and that is what he was reacting to.

Finally, this weekend I attended a writing class at my church and we had to write haikus. I had never written one in my life, but felt inspired by my walk in the woods that morning. Moreover, my regular readers know my interest in forest bathing. No it is not a masterwork, but anyway I had fun doing it. So here I go:

I walk in the woods

A spy in the house of deer

Nature bathe over me

-

I breath forest air

Therefore I am a human

Walking in the woods