By Staff
To us here in the northlands the fall leaf colors is what autumn is all about. There's a price to pay for this color show, though. All those pretty leaves eventually end up in a thick blanket on the yard and must be dealt with. Many people delight in raking leaves on a crisp fall day. I don't. I procrastinate until the quantity is nearing unmanageable and the crisp days have turned to down right cold. Several weeks ago most of the leaves were down so I mustered up and attacked the issue. With each swipe of the rake the piles grew enormously. It was a discouragingly long ways to get them across the yard and driveway and into the field where I could burn them. My eyes kept wandering to the creek running along the lawn just a few yards away. My conscience and my laziness were engaged in battle. "You shouldn't just rake them into the creek. Why not? All the trees of the forest are dumping leaves into the creek. What harm is a few more?" Laziness won and soon piles of leaves were bobbing off downstream like a flotilla of boats.
Have you ever thought about how many leaves fall into a creek and how they somehow get digested and completely disappear with no ill effects to the waterway? My seemingly enormous mass of leaves came from just five small maple trees and a sycamore. Looking along the wooded creek banks it's obvious those half dozen trees are nothing. In just a 100-foot stretch I count roughly 50 trees directly on the creek banks. Checking some Internet sites it appears that a typical tree has from 80,000 to 150,000 leaves, the number varying enormously depending on size and species. Punching the calculator to times 50 that comes out to anywhere from four million to seven and a half million leaves falling in that 100-foot stretch. Even if only half of those fall into the creek that's still a whole lot of leaves. It boggles the mind to think of the amount of leaves a creek running through miles of forest is called upon to digest. The weight of those leaves would be measured in thousands of tons. Yet all those leaves just simply disappear.
Now I make a complete switch to another thought provoking event. We know that some birds such as crows and parrots are very intelligent but few of us give common chippy birds much credit in the smarts department. All four of our bird feeders are mounted on a single commercial stand. Add in the fruit holding arms for orioles that I leave up year around as perches and it's a congested cluster of stuff. That's for my convenience but a side benefit is it's too congested for hawks to dive in and pick birds off the feeders. A while ago the feeders were devoid of birds, a sure bet that a hawk is perched nearby trying to figure out how to deal with this maze. The suet basket is mounted on a branch, part of which sticks down below the basket making a handy vertical woodpecker perch. Pasted tight up against this perch was a little downy woodpecker. I scanned the nearby trees and, sure enough, there sat a cooper's hawk. The woodpecker knew that to panic and flee would be sure death. The hawk swooped over the feeders and landed in a tree on the other side. The downy quickly shifted around the branch, keeping it between himself and the hawk. I had to chuckle as the hawk went back and forth from tree to tree while the downy kept playing a life and death game of Ring Around The Rosy on the branch. The hawk finally gave up and flew off. The downy's unwavering commitment to use the branch as a shield saved his life. And some say birds don't have reasoning abilities! Just a few days ago a little sharp-shinned hawk became so frustrated with the feeder maze he perched most of the morning on the feeder pole. If he couldn't get a meal off the feeders then, by golly, the other birds wouldn't either. Carpe diem.