Naturally Speaking
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Photo courtesy of Jerry Davis
Black Oak acorns embedded deep inside a Cherry tree trunk appear to be someone's winter food.
There is more than meets the eye when peering at a chunk of potential furnace wood. With a sledge and wedge or a mechanical wood splitter, the inner life of a tree's bole, some parts more than 100 years old, can appear as paging back in history.
Squirrels, chipmunks, woodpeckers and mice find cracks, rots and hollows for storing items as large as black oak acorns. Food for later times, but forgotten or not needed, is revealed. Sometimes the animal itself is there with the evidence.
Ants, usually large, black ants cherished by Pileated Woodpeckers crawl clumsily when their warmer hiding places are thrust with freezing temperatures. Do Woodpeckers ever land on piled wood and pick these ants without having to chip away at the tree?
Various grubs, larvae and other worm-like life seem to have easily gnawed this way and that through years of xylem with nary a visit to the tooth doctor.
Regardless of the object, stored food, organism or imperfection, these items all seem to be the beginnings of turning the tree's trunk back into soil to assist in producing another tree.
