If a tree doesn’t quite fall in the forest…

Timber!

You’re looking at the handiwork of bugs and birds or some very tall beavers.

How’s this for a lucky shot?  I happen to be standing right there with my camera up and aimed just as this rotted old tree snaps and begins to topple?

Ok.  You got me.  It’s snagged on another tree outside the frame.   Who knows how long it’s been hung up in mid-fall?  The still healthily brown exposed heartwood looks to me as though it hasn’t been exposed to the weather all that long, but I’m no judge.  I can’t even tell you what kind of tree it is.  An oak of some kind or a pine.  On the Cape, scrub oaks and pitch pines are the predominant trees in woods like this, a town conservation area seven or eight miles north of here in Orleans.

I can tell you what kind of tree it probably isn’t.

An American chestnut.

I know this because the odds are against it.  The newspaper article that inspired me to visit the woods says there are only five or so adult chestnuts growing here.

There aren’t a lot of adult American chestnuts anywhere.  That’s because for over a hundred years there’s been a blight loose in the land that kills American chestnuts before they can grow tall enough to reproduce.

Somewhere out here there are chestnut trees that blossom and drop nuts.

I didn’t see them.  They must be off the paths with the poison ivy and deer ticks.

I went to the woods to blog deliberately about chestnuts.  I got tired of letting newspaper reporters do all my journalism for me.  I’d hoped to interview a chestnut for myself.  I failed.  There were a couple of beech trees that were willing to talk to me, but not on the record.  I’ll have to leave it to the professionals once again.

Read all of Susan Milton’s story in the Cape Cod Times.

Comments

[Victoria]

Did you have any sense of fewer trees on the Cape this summer? A friend told me that there was some serious infestation - sorry, I've forgotten the critter - last winter than kept workers busy cutting down weakened trees all spring, including the two biggest ones in front of his house.

[actor212]

Based on the number of branch-stumps, pine.

[Zach]

Lance if you havent stumbled across Barbara Kingsolver's superlative Prodigal Summer, run don't walk to the local used bookstore and pick up a copy. Aside from an exquisite balance and sweetness that makes for just about perfect summer beach reading, the American Chestnut, the Chestnut Blight and the interesting biology of coyote reproduction all appear as main characters in the story.

Along with as a half-palestinian widow entomologist, a lot of goats, and a tiny town called Egg Fork, Kentucky. But it all comes back around to the American Chestnut.

[Lance]

actor, I think you're right.

Zach, I haven't read Prodigal Summer. Thanks for the recommendation.

Victoria, no, I didn't see any sign of that. Just the opposite. The trees seemed lusher this year. And in the little woods where I took this picture there were other dead trees. (You can see some in the background.) But woods of scrub oaks and pitch pines are pioneers and I think this one has started to give way to other trees, so what we're looking at is a return of a forest. We rarely roam north of Orleans or west of Brewster. (Yarmouth Port was a big trip for us.) So I don't know what's going on with the trees on other parts of the Cape. What part of the Cape does your friend live on?