Two hours in the woods

Green is bottom of bowl and is flat.  Charcoal gray is sloped (sides).  Blue pattern is flat-ridge-rim.  Red arrow is the direction of the prevailing wind.  Black lines are property boundaries.

I spent a couple of hours in the "woods" today.  I chainsaw until either I or the chainsaw run out of gas.  Today (Saturday) we ran out of gas at the same time.

I was doing "release" cutting at the south end of my property in a bowl shaped depression.  The entire bowl from edge-of-rim to edge-of-rim is about two acres.  Today I was cutting on the west side of the bowl.

Unfortunately, my property line gives me very little of the bottom of the bowl and of the sides or rim that on the windward side.  The property south of me is grazed.  In spite of its small size, deer like to bed down in the tiny sliver of bowl-bottom that is on my property.

Reposted for convenience.  Green triangles are spruce.  Acorns are oak.  Orange ellipses are persimmons.  Brown ellipses are Black Walnuts.

I have White Spruce planted along the west side of the rim that is on my property.

This photo is after release cutting.  You can see the spruce trees.  Young oak trees in the foreground.

I have oak on the sloping sides.  They are growing on subsoil due to erosion when the land was tilled for row crops...maybe 60-to-100 years ago.

Here is a "before" picture.

The oak planting consists of three different types of oak.

Swamp White Oak (Q. bicolor).  These photos showing the distinctive flaking bark.

Bur Oak (Q. macrocarpa).  These photos showing the distinctive 'corky' bark that makes this species highly resistant to fire damage.  Bur Oak and Swamp White Oak are closely related.

The third kind of oak came from English Oak (Q. robur), the oak of Robin Hood.  The acorns may have been pollinated by White Oak (Q. alba) or robur.  It is hard to tell.  The tree with leaves in the background of the last picture is one of these Q. robur seedlings.

NM-6 hybrid poplar.

Most of what I was cutting was hybrid poplar.  The red discoloration shown in the photo is spalting, or fungi infection.  It is kind of pretty, though.

Gratuitous photo of Mahonia aquafolium

I have some clones of Oregon Grape growing beneath the oaks.  It is one of the few broadleaf evergreens that grow in Michigan that doesn't have a hissy-fit if the soil is a bit on the alkaline side.  Some Mahonia are alternate hosts for Wheat Rust but Mahonia aquafolium is not one of those.

Kubota and Big D delivered the trimmings to The Wildside Wildlife Rehabilitation Center for the two beaver they are rehabilitating.  I may have mentioned (cough, cough) that the volunteers at the Wildside were mostly young and beautiful and girls.