Dec. 13 10:40AM 46F
This morning's visit to the mandala offers a reprieve from finals week's exams and grading. The building is much noisier than usual this morning. The mandala offers a stark contrast. There's little obvious activity here now. I saw a squirrel from a distance, heard/saw two birds nearby including a woodpecker bouncing on a small branch just below the tulip's canopy above the mandala, also heard crows farther away, and spooked two deer on my walk to the mandala. On the log below, I found the remnants of somethings dinner spread. Critters are certainly around but probably hiding in plain sight.
Since my visit ~3 weeks ago, nearly all leaves have fallen, just a few stubborn oak trees holding on to brown leaves. Old tulip flowers are the most pronounced thing in the forest canopy now. On the ground, there are fresh white and red oak leaves, less fresh tulip leaves, very fresh tulip seeds, plus others of course. There's still some green on the forest floor, the easiest recognized belongs to multiflora rose. I don't appreciate its thorns or invasive status but I have to respect its heartiness. I discovered a boxelder hanging over the stream, a species that I haven't encountered too often.
Around the mandala, deer appear to be some of the most abundant, visible animals. Certainly there are many more invertebrates that escape casual observation, perhaps small vertebrates too. Maybe a better descriptor would be impactful. Again, there might be other animals that have greater ecological influence over the mandala but that's difficult to imagine. The effects of deer are born of their abundance and activity, both of which are strongly evidenced here. First, I originally chose this mandala location because of the apparent wildlife highway passing through here. There are always fresh deer tracks and the trail cameras offer ample pictorial evidence too. Their pattern over the year has been interesting, as the fawns appeared in early summer and then the bucks appeared in numbers and the does disappeared during the rut. However, I cannot find piles of deer scat in the mandala. So, they pass through, eat some snacks here but don't poop? Perhaps it's hidden under fresh leaf fall but that doesn't seem likely. Maybe our deer follow the Leave No Trace ethic and don't go near the stream, but that's equally doubtful. A group of students in my intro biology" ecology lab this semester systematically counted deer poop in habitats nearby and estimated 50-500 deer per square mile. Those are incredible numbers, though based on some big assumptions regarding the number of times deer poop in a day and how long that poop persists in the environment. Regardless, certainly there's an abundance of deer here. Second, the deer here have a big impact on the mandala through their activity. There's a distinct browse line with very little green between 1-6 feet aboveground. Presumably, deer are heavily browsing in this range, effectively erasing most of the green, though some persists and much of this looks to belong to unpalatable non-native species. Looking through the mandala, its easy to find browsed seedlings and shrubs. From a colleague that's studied deer, I learned that the deer browse is fairly easy to distinguish for the lack of clean break. They leave a rough break due to tearing, rather than cleanly cutting twigs. In sum, it doesn't seem like the forest stands much of a chance, at least with respect of regeneration. We've built an environment that benefit deer, from the eradication of natural predators to creating ideal edge habitat. The rough density numbers above are way above the 10-15 deer per square mile that forests need in order to be able to regenerate. What will happen to this forest as the big trees die and fall, will there be saplings to take their place and fill the canopy gaps? The likelihood of that seems slim considering current patterns of deer.
