Relative Something

On a walk through the woods yesterday afternoon we came upon evidence of an industrious effort scattered beneath one of our large trees.

Little pieces of the tree had fallen in a wide array around the tree, leaving the snow peppered with holes. The first reaction was to look up to see where this was all coming from.

The gaping hole high up in the trunk of the tree was easy to spot. We didn’t know the project was still ongoing until Cyndie saw new pieces of wood falling near us.

There was so much wood shrapnel scattered on the ground, our assumption immediately leapt to visions of a large woodpecker, but that wasn’t the case.

There was a little chickadee busily hopping around and tossing down pieces of the tree. I have no idea why it would want to have such a large opening. The tree probably wasn’t very happy about the size of the wound. This has me wondering about the longevity of this tree. I’m not very skilled at deducing the well-being of trees when they have no leaves.

I’ll need to keep an eye on it next spring and summer to see if the end is near. It won’t surprise me much if turns out to be in the process of slowly dying as trees tend to do. We already have a rather significant number of old trees with the largest diameter trunks that are showing evidence of decline.

It’s giving me more incentive to nurture as many of the trees as possible with the next-largest trunks to give them the best chances for prolonging their years of continued growth. Ours is definitely not an “old-growth” forest, but it has a decent number of trees that are old enough to be mother trees.

We want to help allow our trees to be able to help one another as much as possible.

I should probably give them more hugs.

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