Late April still feels empty here in the Dorothy Goodwin Reserve. We are poised on the cusp of spring, tree buds just beginning to pop. No migrant birds have yet arrived to fill the woods with warbler song. (I like these colorful yearly migrants: keep the border open.) Just one Red-bellied Woodpecker follows me, bagpiping dire threats, as I begin the loop trail. This quiet little stroll might turn out better for thoughtfulness than avid birdwatching and my usual amateur naturalist pursuits.
We now know much about a forest: it is a community that supports its members, not merely an arena of competition for space, sun, rain, and nutrients. This diverse woodland is made of broken trees and whole, diseased ones and strong, ones who got a raw deal and ones who sprouted on third base. An unseen mycorrhizal network connects every trunk. Not to mention the understory of shrubs, vines, and ground covers, and in another way, the fauna that both depend on and create it daily and seasonally. Ecology is the relationship of life forms to one another and to their habitats, a science of diversity within a community. Yes, this is a commonwealth; you could say a culture, if you were inclined to be anthropomorphic, or a beautiful biological composition in harmony with itself.
Goodwin’s trail begins with a modest but striking ledge and some jagged erratic boulders. I soon pass through an open area of big oaks and hickories. Four old beeches, shallow-rooted, I can imagine holding hands just below the forest floor. There’s a hemlock grove and a perennial stream, and some of the mid-canopy black birch – without oak saplings underneath – as explained by Emery Gluck at our annual meeting. Considerable variety for a small place. Look, here’s a beech that a proud buck found perfect to scratch his antlers on. OK, I can’t quite stop noticing.
Competition is vital, among species and within, for evolution and survival strength. Bernd Heinrich: “With life depending on other life, the distinctions between exploitation, parasitism, and predation are often thin.” Yet there are an equally robust number of treaties. A lichen is an alga, a fungus, and a yeast united in marriage (yes, even more anthropomorphism on my part). Inside our gut too is a world of species acting as an ecosystem. In none of these arrangements is everything always working at 100%, fine-tuned and purring like a 1965 Mustang. If you’re like me, you are an example of that inefficiency too, aren’t you?
Unlike an oak would fare, this hemlock managed a full life despite having little sun and elbow room, and still had something to share with a pileated woodpecker. There isn’t a single tree uninfluenced by its neighbors, that had room to spread out freely. There isn’t a single tree that wasn’t banged by another’s branch, blocked by bullies, bent and broken by brutal winds, snow, and ice. Or preyed on by pests.
I’m always reassured by witnessing this interaction in the forest. If I was a tree, I’d always have a fighting chance to survive, grow, even thrive. I’d receive and bestow nutrition. Despite my own weaknesses, I’d have opportunities to give something back to the whole. As I do now in our even more imperfect human ecology. Walking in the woods I am nourished, I am healed, patched up like a broken instrument. Restrung and ready to play on until darkness, until they take away my guitar.
George Jacobi
Well said, as always, George.