Thursday, October 15, 2009 – Syndicate Road Woods – 10:00 AM

As I walked down Syndicate Road to my site this morning I noticed the usual signs of autumn, the yellow and bare trees, and the New York aster that had by now almost completely shriveled up.  At the intersection with Baxter Road, however, I was greeted by two deer about 75 yards east of me.  They seemed to be females because of their lack of horns and medium stature.  One had a few white dots near its stomach, and I assumed it was younger than the other.  Instead of lifting their tails and running away, the deer stopped, stared at me for a few seconds and then began to slowly walk closer.  I continued on, not wishing to engage in a standoff with the deer.  I also noticed a large puddle south of Baxter Road that was at least 8 feet in length and width and showed the effects of the recent rain.  Many song birds chirped loudly as I entered the Syndicate Road woods, and even though the sky was quite overcast, the woods were lighter than usual because the taller trees had lost many of their leaves.  The leaves that did remain on the taller trees, however, had turned a medium yellow, aside from one coniferous pine tree and a tall maple, whose leaves remained green for no apparent reason to me.  The smaller trees and shrubs were still a green color, and I imagined this pattern could be attributed to the same reason why trees lose their leaves from the top first.  The ferns have now dried completely and have turned a light brown color.  It is hard to imagine the floor of the wood as it was in September when the foliage was green and in full bloom.  There is a constant crackle of drying branches and falling leaves due to the soft wind as I make my way over closer to the stream.

Because of the recent precipitation, the stream looks more like an actual stream now rather than a series of puddles, as it had appeared in previous weeks.  It is noisy and bustling by the culvert which emerges from the intersection of Syndicate and Baxter Roads, but then gets quieter and much stiller as it weaves northward.  Because of this new movement, I now realized that the water was indeed very clear and clean, but only appeared murky because of the muddy, rocky basin.  The tree with the magenta leaves that I identified last week as sumac has lost some of its vibrant color and many of its leaves.  I see a bush that appears to be honeysuckle, whose leaves have turned a light yellow color but whose berries are still juicy and ripe, and I wonder if this is the natural progression for honeysuckle plants.

I hear a woodpecker poking at a tree trunk with short, quick pecks as I wander southeast towards the large indent of land that I had discovered a few weeks ago.  The foliage here is much greener than in the other sections of the woods and the trees appear much leafier.  Although this area of the woods has a slightly higher elevation than the others, I do not think I can attribute its coloring to this fact.  I wonder if it is because the trees surrounding the indent are smaller and shorter than in the eastern section of the woods.  Here I stumble upon a small weedy plant that is still green.  It has twigs growing in an opposite pattern yet only a few leaves grow from the top.  I will try to identify it before returning to the woods.

This week I wished to focus on the touch and feeling of many of the natural objects around me.  Even by getting closer to trees and leaves in order to touch them I discovered new sights that I had not noticed before.  The bark of a tall beech tree was groovy and had moss growing on its southern side.  A dead vine that seemed to grow from the ground leant up against the beech, and I could tell it had been dead for a few years.  A fungus grew on the vine, brown and leafy on one side but rough and with small black dots that appeared almost like stitches on the other.  The stones in the creek were cold and smooth and only some of the larger ones had moss growing on their top sides.  I wondered if the fact that some of the rocks did not have moss growing on them was due to their rock type, because the quartzite stone did not have any moss, while the rock that appeared to be phyllite was almost completely green.  I spotted another vine which was also covered in hairy green moss.  I further study if different fungus or moss types grow on different types of trees.