Cottonwood Pond: The Scree

The Scree

October 4, 2017

Do you see it? Something different has happened …

Dry, dry, dry, dry, dry as a bone.

There had been only one rain since my last Cottonwood Pond visit, and it was insignificant. There had been very little rain for a long time before that, too. We were approaching near-drought conditions.

Everything was bone dry.

The woods floor on the slope facing Cottonwood Pond

Dried Turkey Tail fungi on a tree

The Creek bed upstream from Cottonwood Pond

The Creek bed near Cottonwood Pond, near the bottom end of the Barkless Log

Creek bed

Where the Seep meets the Creek (Very Rotten Log)

The bed of Temporary Creek #1, which connects with the Swampy Spot

The Swampy Spot

Trees were squeaking in the breeze, along with the loud chorus of crickets singing all around. During the dry spell, birds had been eerily quiet, probably conserving energy due to the lack of readily available water. Some Blue Jays called in the distance.

Wooded slope to the southeast, and bottom land with dry Creek bed hardly visible

Wooded slope to the northwest, and bottom land

There were other signs of life hanging on, and some that could not.

Some recent Crawdad sculptures - as if they've just come out of the kiln

Where mammals have been clawing at decaying wood, looking for food - is it easier for them when it's very wet or very dry?

The Very Rotten Log over the Creek bed - exceedingly dry and brittle

Dehydrated mushroom on the Very Rotten Log - looking more like a porous rock

Shell of a ... Stink Bug? ... on the woods floor

I am guessing that this is part of the dried, bleached remains of a caterpillar on the Trunk

The contrast in wetness and dryness, darkness and light, between the “little pond”/Root Ball Top side and the Root Ball Bottom side was sharper than ever. But, there were still signs of the lengthy dry period on the damp side.

The "little pond" area by the topside of the Root Ball, the Trunk at the back

Mud cracks below the base of the Trunk

Where one of the saplings has been growing out of the Root Ball Top, then curving up toward the light

"Sawdust" trailing down the Root Ball Top - something has been drilling into one of the exposed roots, though I could not see the source

Three Crawdad chimneys tucked way in at the base of the Root Ball Top - still damp

Critters are still digging into the larger exposed roots on the Root Ball Top - this seemed to have been started by woodpeckers, and perhaps some other birds, exposing the inner wood to more boring and disintegration by smaller beings

Blue Beech sapling growing along the Trunk from the Root Ball Top - those upward-reaching branches are getting rapidly larger and will make for a rather interesting tree someday

Looking upwards along one of those limbs - how large it has become! (it seems like just yesterday that it was a baby ...)

White Snakeroot was still blooming. Tiny white Aster blossoms had exploded on the scene. Other flowers were fading and giving way to fruit and seed …

White Snakeroot

The tiny white asters (I've not determined the species yet)

Tiny white asters arching over the Creek bed

Honeybee at a tiny white aster - probably one of my neighbors' bees - there were also other kinds of bees and insects among the asters

A Wood Nettle plant with minute black seeds still clinging, and one very neat, lime green midge gall

Though there were a few fresh Orange Jewelweed blossoms, most of them were fading and withering ...

... and many of the plants had progressed to swollen green seed pods, as well.

Great Blue Lobelia blossoms were faded, also, giving way to papery seed pods - one sports a tiny hole near the base, possibly made by a short-tongued bee that could not reach the nectar through the long-throated blossom, so instead cheated by drilling into the nectary base

… and a new generation of plants was coming forth.

Young Clearweed and Honewort at the edge of the Creek

Debris caught in the crevice between bark bits and wood of the Trunk provides a lodging place for seeds, and later some spots of soil for new plants to sprout and grow ...

... and one of those seedlings, looking a bit like a dragonfly, or a tiny bird - take flight, new plant!

This White Ash seed, which advantageously floated down to a bit of new soil on the bark of the Trunk, may sprout someday into a White Ash seedling and flourish as a new young tree, feeding from the decaying Cottonwood

But, there was one huge change that happened at Cottonwood Pond while I wasn't down there, and that startled me when I saw it.

The “Goblin's” nose was gone!

How did this happen?

Approaching the main (dry) pond area, I noticed a new, light gray cascade tumbling down the middle of the Mud Pile below the Root Ball Bottom, and partly across the main pond bottom.

It was … a scree!!

And it seemed to have re-exposed more of the Cove, which had previously become blocked-up.

The definitions I found for “scree” (also called a “talus”) included the words “stones,” or “rocky debris,” and sometimes “mountain,” “hill,” or “cliff.” But, often the word “slope” was included, which the Mud Pile was, albeit a small one.

Bottom part of Scree, on main pond bottom

These were not stones. They were hard mud clods. But, being silty clay that was pulled up from the bottom of the woods by the great Cottonwood Root Ball, they had dried to a hardness close to that of some stones. So, I settled with using “scree” to describe this new development.

There was something I had not considered before. Whenever I have written about mud falling from the Root Ball, changing the look and dynamics of life at Cottonwood Pond, I mentioned rain, freezing, and thawing as factors contributing to the loosening of dirt from the roots. I had not considered drying, but things had never been so dry before at Cottonwood Pond. On October 4, I was seeing the affects of strong drying on the Root Ball. In fact, such drying caused more dirt to fall in a shorter time than any other factor had in the past.

This was producing different kinds of changes, also.

Another pile, smaller, nearby

The seemingly compacted soil of the Mud Pile top, starting to break down

Some of the clods probably fell from the Root Ball's top edge, where they toppled and broke this Clearweed plant

Bottom of Scree, on the main pond bottom - how will this additional soil change the pond after it fills with water again?

A broken exposed root - fallen piece on top of Scree, top piece jutting out of the Root Ball Bottom

In a sense, too, what I saw was almost like an extraction from a fossil bed. “Rocky” debris, broken from the mass of mud on the Root Ball, had tumbled down with evidence of animal burrows from deeper inside the Root Ball, or encasing large and small sections of old Cottonwood roots from further in. Given millions of years, if left intact within the Root Ball and buried by those years of other layering that might occur in the area, both fine-sediment mud and the root pieces could have been preserved in fossil form (possibly also with remains of small animals.) Here they were, resembling what could be.