Trees

So unfortunately I dropped my camera in the snow while taking pictures at my spot this week. While you wouldn't think being in the snow for ten seconds would damage a camera, apparently it does since mine stopped working. It's currently sitting in a bag of rice in my room in hopes that the rice will draw the moisture out, and my camera will be resurrected. If the hoped for miracle does occur, I'll come back and add in some of the pictures I took this week, but for now I'll have to describe the trees at my site without any sort of visual. (EDIT: My camera works! The rice saved it!)

The most prolific tree at my spot is the Northern White Cedar (Thuja occidentalis). This is a very hardy tree that can grow with minimal nutrients, in fact it is growing straight out of the rock in some places at my site. Cedar trees are used for many things - their needles are a good source of vitamin C. In fact the tree is often called Arbor Vitae, the Tree of Life, since sailors with scurvy could eat the needles and be cured. Cedar wood is also used for fire starting, some of Teage's equipment was made of cedar, and was used in the canoes of American Indians. Northern White Cedars usually don't grow very large, but can live for very long periods of time. The oldest living specimen is over 1,000 years old.

Northern White Cedar

 Another common tree at my site was the Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum). None of the specimens at my site were very large, really just the size of small saplings. This is probably due to the scant amount of top soil at my site. As Sugar Maples are very shade tolerant, it isn't a problem that they're in the understory. Since the Sugar Maple is the state tree of Vermont, I'm sure everyone is already familiar with it's uses as a source of maple syrup and the high value it's wood has so I don't need to repeat it all here.

Beech trees (Fagus grandifolia) were also present at my site. The Beech trees, like the Sugar Maples, weren't very large. This may be a result of the susceptibility of Beech trees to Beech Bark disease, which occurs when a type of fungi invades holes made in the tree by the beech scale insect. This disease may be responsible for the lack of larger Beech trees at my spot. This disease is widespread, all throughout the Northeast and parts of the Midwest. There are even signs back home in Ohio that prohibit Beech wood from crossing county lines in hope of containing the disease.

There was another common tree that I couldn't identify. It had very rough bark and little black berries hanging off the twigs. Perhaps it is some kind of cherry?

Unknown tree. Any ideas?

Since I went out Saturday morning, the snow was still fresh from the storm on Friday. I was the first human to walk on the trail up to my spot, though there were plenty of animals that had already been out and about. I saw tracks of (I think) mice, squirrels, and rabbits. I'm sure we'll have to do a blog post on tracking so I'll save most of the pictures until then :) There were lots of birds around too, including a whole flock of some sort of waterfowl on the lake. It gives me hope that spring must be getting a little closer if more animals are appearing!

Fresh Jenny tracks!

Birds taking off on the lake

Mapping

Since I was away for the long weekend I found myself up at the crack of dawn today to go map my spot. The temperature gauge on my car measured a balmy 6 degrees as I drove up North Avenue. However I do have to say taking a walk on the beach sure beats sitting in class as a way to wake up in the morning. My efforts resulted in this following map:

Due to the heavy prevalence of Northern White Cedar at my spot, I labeled all those trees as a separate symbol, while the rest of the trees fell under the category of "other trees." An additional note is that I didn't mark any trees/shrubs that were shorter than my waist on the map; there were too many of them.

The parts of the map marked "cliff" are where the land falls away abruptly down into the water. There are trees there as you can see, but I didn't want to climb down to count them and risk sliding off into the water.

Steep incline 

There were some Northern White Cedars that appeared to be multiple trees but were all growing out of one trunk. To designate those trees, I drew multiple connected squares on my map. For example, in the case of the symbol on the map where two pink squares are adjacent, the tree looks like this: 

Two trees for the price of one!

In an additional, totally unrelated note to the mapping, the ice in the lake has changed again. Some parts of it aren't frozen anymore, probably due to the warm weather we had last week. In this picture from my spot you can see the unfrozen patches where the wind has created ripples in the lake, and the frozen patches were the lake appears smooth. 

That's all for now!

Patterns

My spot has already changed since I first found it last week. The lake which was only frozen for about thirty yards from shore is now frozen almost as far as I can see.

Ice on February 5th

Ice on February 12th

The extent of the ice even reached to my spot which is on the edge of the land you can see on the right side of the pictures. Interestingly the ice wasn't a solid mass at it's furthest reach, it was a PATTERN of roughly circular pieces all floating next to each other, almost quilt-like. 

Another pattern I observed at my site included the fact that the majority of trees at the edge of the point consisted of the same species, some sort of Cedar I believe. These Cedar trees composed pretty much the entire top layer of trees, though there were some smaller, different deciduous species in the understory. In addition most of the animal tracks I saw on my walk to my spot followed natural hollows in the land. 

It will be interesting to see whether the floating patches of ice have solidified into a sheet or changed in any other way the next time I visit my site.