Death of a Giant Senior Citizen

It is true....one of the giants of Chatham-Kent, indeed of all Ontario, has come crashing down and is now dead.

I'm talking about a tree, an American Beech tree to be precise. The last time I measured it, it was about 95 cm in diameter at the official measuring height of 4.5 feet above the ground. Here it is as of April 2016.

It is located in one of the newest provincial parks in Ontario, Clear Creek Forest Provincial Nature Reserve, at Clearville in southeastern Chatham-Kent. It is one of the least known and visited natural areas of Chatham-Kent. I devoted a blog post about it in my series of Natural Areas of Chatham-Kent a little less than a year ago. You can read that post at this link.

As I was winding down my career with OMNR in 2011, I took some of the colleagues out to a few sites to pass along various aspects of their significance and management. Here is one of my colleagues being impressed by this huge tree......

.....and here is what it looked like this past week. The staff of Rondeau Provincial Park are in charge of administering Clear Creek Forest, and maintenance staff had been here recently to clear the trail from the huge trunk that had fallen across it.

You can see from the first two photos above that there was a lean to the tree, which is typical of many older growth trees as they age. The right hand side of the base of the tree had deteriorated with age, so it was only a matter of time. One of the fierce westerly winds we had over the past couple of months was the deciding moment, and down it came. Although I doubt that anyone was there at the time to verify it, I am quite sure it made quite a bit of sound when it fell! It took another medium-sized beech tree down with it.

 As mentioned, its diameter was almost a metre. According to one source on trees of the Carolinian Zone, where this species is abundant and grows the best, the largest one known a few years ago was 92 cm in diameter. The tree here was several cm in diameter larger, but the other specimen had not been measured for awhile and if it was still alive, may have surpassed this one. Regardless, the one at Clear Creek Forest is/was one of the largest of its kind in Ontario.

This next photo shows how fragile this tree was in its old age. The outer shell looked fairly sound, but the inside at the bottom was quite hollow, again, not unusual for a tree of this age.

 And speaking of age, I did a count of the rings as best as I could although parts of the cut surface were hard to see due to the chainsaw cuts. You can see from this next photo that some of the rings were quite close together, and others were relatively far apart, reflecting the varying ability to grow over the decades. Certainly a lack of moisture at a critical period of seasonal growth would be one limiting factor.

 Close to the centre, it was impossible to count any rings due to deterioration, as you can see in the next photo. However since American Beech is a tree of a closed canopy type forest, typically the growth is very slow in the first few decades of its life. Unless there is a larger over storey tree that dies or falls down providing a significant amount of sunlight to the forest floor allowing young trees like beech and maple to grow vigorously, the growth rings would be so close together it would be difficult to count them. So with that in mind, I estimated that this tree was at least 250 years old, and could very well have been 300 or more years. Large mature trees are known to live up to 400 years.

Now that this tree is dead, it will no longer be providing beech nuts for critters such as the Eastern Grey Squirrel, Blue Jay, various woodpecker species or Wild Turkey.

However its remains will be quite useful for many other creatures over the next few decades until it completely decomposes. In fact it is well known that a dead tree provides life for far more species than a live tree, so all is not lost. Whether it be beetles or other invertebrates, various species of fungi or other creatures, this fallen log will be of enormous benefit to many forms of wildlife. Salamanders will be one of the larger types of wildlife that will eventually call this rotting trunk home.

Blue-spotted Salamander

Red-backed Salamander

While I was checking out Clear Creek Forest, I wandered the trail to see what else there was to see. Obviously this provincial park is about more than just one tree, although the older growth character along the main trail is certainly an important one, and a reminder of what large parts of Chatham-Kent once looked like.

Spring wildflowers are finally appearing. I saw several species, including:

Dutchman's Breeches

Hepatica

Bloodroot

Skunk Cabbage

Silver Maple

Birds were not plentiful on this brief woodland visit, just things like chickadees and robins.

I did spend a bit of time on the north side of the road where a very different character of the provincial park occurs. There were geese and ducks in some of the ponds; swallows and kingfishers were searching for food, and a couple of Yellow-rumped Warblers were busy in their search as well. On occasion one of the swallows would take a break and rest on a branch over the water.

Northern Rough-winged Swallow

A few Ruby-crowned Kinglets were busily foraging along the shrubby edges of the ponds.

May this forest giant 'Rest in Pieces'