Gordon Smith
Natural History of the Berkshires
11/13/09
Field Blog #7: Update and Video
When I visited my site on Monday (the 9th of November) this week, it was about 2:30 pm. The weather was partly cloudy with a slight breeze, and was extremely warm: about 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
For the video that I recorded, I stood in a spot very close to the center of my field site. While standing there, I turned in a circle starting and ending north, turning counter-clockwise. Visible in the panorama that was recorded are several aspects of my field site that may not have been clear in the written field reports. The first is the quite obvious and loud whirring noise that is going on in the background. This noise was coming from construction machinery currently employed on the Lehman building directly to the south of my site. Another important feature of my site is the amount of human traffic within a short proximity. Though only two students were filmed walking on the nearby paths during this video, during peak class changing hours, there are many more. There is also a car visible in the recording, which is another frequent occurrence.
The video also shows the general state of the site. Though I did not focus the camera at the treetops above, they are all completely stripped of leaves, and had been like that since last Thursday (the 5th). For this reason as well, the ground itself seems much less green and vibrant, as most of the plant life that remains on the ground is covered by brown fallen leaves. These leaves have created a very dry and crackly bed under which, at least in the middle of the site, there is very little growing. The plants that still seem to be thriving are the grasses on the west edge of the site, the wild mustard garlic and the small amount of goutweed that has not been grazed by passing deer.
This is not to say that the site seemed dormant already. I counted more than five different squirrels happily enjoying the warm weather to get out and about in the leaves, and I also heard several birdcalls over the machinery, though I could not identify them or even describe their calls over the noise. Unfortunately, these creatures seemed to have disappeared by the time that I began filming.
Furthermore, the video shows (around the 28th second) that the patch of ferns that was first sensitive fern and then was replaced by bracken ferns is now completely dead and brown.
I also found several very interesting plants that seem to have gone into dormancy already. Poking out between the brown leaves was the plant that is pictured below.
The plant consisted of a dry, brittle stem tipped with a small cluster of what used to be red berries. Now, these red bulbs seem to merely be the dried outer casings of where the berries used to be. Though not all of them were burst in a way that would suggest a bird having eaten them, the complete ones still crumpled dryly when I put slight pressure on them. This almost makes me want to believe that the contents of the berries had been reabsorbed through the stem because the berries were not eaten, but this does not seem logical evolutionarily to me. I would think that a better survival strategy would be to sacrifice yourself so that your 7 or 8 seeds could be spread. Of course, it is also possible that some insect ate them from the inside, taking the nutrients and leaving the tough outer casing. This plant did have one half grown green shoot at its base, which unfortunately I did not see until I had plucked the plant out of the ground. I only saw one other example of this plant during my inspection of my site, which I left in the ground.
Another interesting find was on the lone Northern White Cedar tree in the southwest corner of my site. At the bottom, the bark seems to have been peeled off, revealing a zigzag, maze-like pattern on the tree of some insect. The tracks seemed to be reasonably thick and wide, thus I would hazard the guess of some sort of beetle. In any case, it does not live there any longer.