Bob's tree in November

Bob's tree has no leaves at this time of year, but it has plenty of fruits.

Colors of late November

It's the end of November, and campus is still colorful.

The Peebles Island forest in late November

This is what the forest at Peebles Island looks like at this time of year.

Because the leaves have fallen, you can see farther through the forest. You can see the water. You can see where the paths leads. In many of the treetops, you can see clusters of leaves or twigs. These must be nests created by animals such as birds or squirrels.

Back in July, I usually saw deer when I went to Peebles Island.  Now I have not seen any deer for some time.

The forest floor is covered with oak leaves.

There are oak trees in this forest, but there are also other trees. Why do the leaves on the forest floor seem so predominantly oak? I looked closer, and I saw that there are also other leaves that are all shriveled up. I think the oak leaves are more noticeable than the leaves of other trees, because the oak leaves are not shriveled up.

There's an area in the forest where there's a lot of grass beside the trail.  Why is it grassy? Usually places don't stay grassy unless they are mowed regularly.  Do they come out to the middle of the woods and mow this place? Was there grass planted here in the past, when the island was more cultivated, and now it just stays grassy without any intervention?

Green grass

When spring comes, I notice the grass turning greener.  When does it lose its green?  It is still green now.

A stump at Peebles Island

Today at Peebles Island, I observed a stump. It had some fungi growing on it.

And also another kind of fungi.

They say you can tell the age of a tree by the rings, but I did not see rings. I saw cracks perpendicular to the way rings are supposed to go.

There was a chunk of wood that stuck out from the rest.

Mystery tree from November 9

On November 9, my attention was caught by trees near the parking garage entrance that were still bright with autumn color, when many other trees were past their peak.

They had distinctive buds

and distinctive fruit.

The leaves were pinnately veined.

How to identify this intriguing tree? The books that I got to help me identify unkown trees (What Tree is This and The Tree Identification Book) usually leave me frustrated.  What usually works is flipping through Trees of New York.  However, I could see that this was a cultivated tree, so I did not expect it to be in Trees of New York.  I expected it to be in The Sibley Guide to Trees, but that's a 400 page book.  How could I look through every page of that book until I found it?

Once I became aware of this type of tree, I realized that it was in other places I frequented (the Union, the quad between Lally and Sage, and downtown by the Atrium).

This is the one near Sage, photographed November 14:

I had four days off for Thanksgiving, so finally I looked through The Sibley Guide to Trees. I found it was not nearly as hard as I had feared.  There were some sections that were clearly not right, so I could skip those sections.  The tree that seemed to match was the Callery Pear.  It matches in this ways:

• Leaf shape.
• Leaf autumn color.
• Tree shape.
• Commonly cultivated.
• Late fall foliage.
• Fruit.  Actually, the fruit I saw on the trees was a little different from how it looked in the book, but it was the closest match compared to the fruits of other trees in the book.

Floodplains

I was just reading in Reading the Forested Landscape about floodplains.  It says the species found there are silver maple, sycamore, cottonwood, American elm, hackberry, box elder, and ostrich fern.  I often spend time at a floodplain, and those are indeed the species I see there.  The exceptions are 1) I don't particularly recall seeing elm, but it may have been there.  Elm is a tree I recognize, but not a tree that I focus on when I see it.  2) I have been focused on trees, and have not paid attention to ferns, so I don't know if ostrich fern is there. A lot of the area is cultivated, with grass, but I think there is another part that has ferns. 3) There is also a large weeping willow tree in that area.  Perhaps it was not mentioned in the book because it is not naturally occurring in such locations.  It seems plausible that it was planted there, since it is a nice-looking tree.