Felling Trees

Weather: Rain twice this week while Douglas weakened off the western coast of México.

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, Dr Huey and hybrid roses, yellow potentilla, silver lace vine, lilies, daylily, hollyhock, datura, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, alfalfa, sweet pea, yellow yarrow.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, tumble mustard, velvetweed, purple mat flower, pink and white bindweed, showy milkweed, Hopi tea, goat’s beard, plains paper flowers.

In my yard, looking east: Maltese cross, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, Jupiter’s beard, baby’s breath, winecup mallow, sidalcea, coral bell.

Looking south: Betty Prior, Fairy and rugosa roses.

Looking west: Johnson’s Blue geranium, catmint, blue flax, white mullein, Shasta daisy.

Looking north: Coral beard tongue, butterfly milkweed, golden spur columbine, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis.

In the open, along the drive: California poppy, larkspur, white yarrow.

Bedding plants: Pansies, snapdragon, sweet alyssum, blue salvia, moss rose, French marigold.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, geckos, small birds, grasshoppers, small black ants, wasps.

Weekly update: Removing dead cottonwoods is difficult and necessary. The roots are shallow, and the trees prone to blow over, crushing whatever is in their path.

It’s also expensive. When I called a local tree cutting firm several years ago about removing a six-inch diameter black locust, the person answering the phone said the minimum cost was $500. Imagine the multiplier for a six-foot bole.

It was easier a hundred years ago.

Techniques haven’t changed much. When I was a child, I learned the basics, probably from a camp craft book. You made a notch on the side you wanted it to fall. You made another cut on the opposite side, and got out of the way.

It sounded easy. How-to videos tell you the same today. Chain saw advertisements reinforce the belief anyone can do it.

And, in the past, anyone could.

What has changed isn’t the tools or techniques, it’s the intimacy that comes from dependence. In the eons when people depended on wood for heat and cooking fuel, children learned the ways of trees. Picking the path and making the notch required some knowledge of the way trees behaved. It wasn’t simple geometry.

Then, people removed trees near their homes, then went farther afield for fire wood. There was little danger in felling trees, if one stayed out of their path.

Today, many large cottonwoods live in captivity. With changing land values, large tracts have been subdivided and newer houses built close to old trees. When you pass a commercial tree cutter, it has a man lift so men can remove branches from the top, then cut the trunk in small segments.

Recently, someone in the village has been cutting down a cottonwood. The road is narrow and the work hidden behind a fence. From what little I could see, I believe they hired a lift and tried to follow the same procedure.

I think a piece fell on a branch of an apple tree. It may only have been a branch, not a limb. The apple limb broke and rolled the cottonwood down its slope onto a coyote fence.

I don’t know if it reached into the road. By the time I saw it it had been cut back. Cascading objects follow the laws of physics.

The second problem when you fell a cottonwood is what do you do with it. The uses for wood are limited. Local builders use logs for vigas and decorative posts, small wood for latillas. They buy everything else.

A hundred years ago saw mills existed to convert stumps to boards. Commercial operations in Michigan, where I grew up, had three stages. In lumber camps, trees were cut and branches removed. Stripped logs were moved by small carts with high axils, big wheels, which were pulled by animals.

The processed logs were hauled to rail sidings where they were loaded onto cars that took them to a mill. Roy Dodge says one operation sent 20 loads an hour. The rail lines were temporary narrow gauge with engines built especially for the work in Lima, Ohio.

Sawmills were located near transportation. In Michigan, they were on one of the Great Lakes where ships would take boards to market cheaply. Elsewhere, rivers were used for the first journey, railroads for the second.

People who burn wood today are choosey. Even my neighbors, who depend of wood stoves, know, if worse comes to worse, they can use an electric space heater. Both men are in their late 70s, too old to go into the forest to fell trees on their own. They have wood delivered. One has it delivered to size, and his son and grandson stack it. The other buys small logs which he splits with an axe as he needs them.

A hundred years ago, men followed a multi-year cycle. They cut wood, then let it dry for several years before they burned it. Each year they created a new pile, and used the oldest.

Now, the labor involved in converting a large cottonwood into fire wood is greater than the price one can charge. Many have heard the wood burns hot and fast, and, if it’s not cured properly, smells. Santa Fé buyers are snobs who skim the surface of local folk life. They want the image without the inconvenience. They only want the best.

Commercial tree cutters simply shred whatever they cut. When I had a cherry taken down, I asked if they were able to sell the wood. The answer was no. A few years ago they could sell some to a woodworker who made spoons, but it hadn’t heard from him in a while. The cherry went the way of all other trees, turned into mulch.

I assume there is a limit to the capacity of portable chippers. Men tend to leave the large boles. Without the top wood, they’re no longer as likely to blow over. If they do, they’re shorter. I have no idea why anyone would want the standing remains, unless the price was prohibitive or the tree cutter simply refused to remove it because it was too large to chip.

One stumbles on the remains everywhere.

Things were different a hundred years ago. Logging has always been dangerous, but then there was the respect that arises from a worthy challenger. Men had themselves photographed with their largest trees. The pictures are a bit like those of fishermen. At one level, they show humans conquering nature. However, the fish or tree, not the humans is in the foreground. Man is always dwarfed.

Notes:
Dodge, R. L. Michigan Ghost Towns, 3 volumes (1970, 1971, 1973).

US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2012, 65 died in the logging industry; the injury rate was 4.3 per hundred employees. The rates were much higher a hundred years ago, especially in the mills. Fire was also a more serious hazard then.

Photographs: Historic photographs from The Disston Crucible, February 1917; Disston manufactured the band saw blades used in mills.

1. Dead cottonwood in a stand by the Rio Grande; everything useful has been stripped, and the large bole left to decay. 13 February 2012.

2. Cottonwood branch fell across a wire fence near the road last fall. The original house is set far back from the road where large cottonwoods grow. The road frontage was platted and houses built. The land in back was kept for possible farm use. This looks like the remains of a dead tree left uncut. 2 November 2013.

3. Damaged apple tree. You can see the branch in front that’s been cut and the one farther back that’s been ripped from the trunk. 5 July 2014.

4. Cottonwood branch on the coyote fence at the edge of the village road. 15 June 2014.

5. The cottonwood log was 10' long and 6' across at the small end. The Baker Lumber Company of Turrell, Arkansas, cut 3,300 board feet.

6. Cottonwood trunk left along an acequia, 26 March 2014.

7. Cottonwood trunk left near the river, 22 May 2012.

8. One reason people climbed onto big trees for photographs was to show the scale.

9. Cottonwood base left along the river, Cundiyo, 14 February 1912. Anything useful has been removed.

Thunderation

Weather: Morning temperatures down to middle 20s Friday, two day after the sun angle code changed in The Old Farmer's Almanac; last rain 11/5/2013; 9:29 hours of daylight today.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other evergreens, garlic, yucca, cholla and other cacti; leaves on Apache plume, roses, fern bushes, Oregon holly, hollyhocks, winecup mallow, dog violets, Saint John’s wort, vinca, coral bells, bindweed, oriental poppies, scarlet and blue flaxes, Dutch clover, sweet pea, bouncing Bess, moss phlox, snakeweed, anthemis, grasses.

What’s red or turning red: Raspberry, coral beardtongue leaves.

What’s grey or blue: Four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, pink salvia, catmints, baby’s breath, chocolate flower, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s yellow or turning yellow: Cottonwood, weeping and globe willows, German iris, golden spur columbine leaves.

What’s blooming: Jupiter’s beard, broom senecio, chrysanthemums, tansy.

Bedding plants: Snapdragons, sweet alyssum.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Small brown birds, probably goldfinches.

Weekly update: About the time the first fire started last spring, I began looking at the humidity levels every morning on the government’s weather website. I’ve learned two things.

Humidity levels just tell you how much water is in the air, which is interesting when the percentage falls below 10%. You don’t need it tell anything to tell you when the level is above 80%.

I discovered what’s important is not how much water, but where the water is coming from. The only moisture that matters is water moving in from some other area. Otherwise, it is coming from the ground and leaves. That’s not something they tell you.

The other thing I learned is that weathermen have standard ways of forecasting, so whenever they use unusual words or phrases they mean more than they are saying.

A week ago Saturday, 2 November, they said:

"A moist weather disturbance rolling east from the southern California coast to New Mexico will combine with a southbound plunge of Canadian cold air Monday to produce another round of wintry weather for northern and western New Mexico through Wednesday morning."

That all sounds a bit prosaic, although words like disturbance always sound so bureaucratically neutral. Then, they added:

"With some uncertainty remaining in the exact time and place of the collision between southern California moisture and cold Canadian air"

When the language gets dramatic - a la the clash of titans - beware.

Monday came, and so did the weather. Around 8:30 pm, there was thunder and lightening. It already had rained in Los Alamos, and thunderstorms were around Santa Fé. Nothing odd. I went to bed.

Sometime, and I didn’t look at a clock, thunder woke me. Not just thunder. A deep rumble that went on and on and on. So deep, it penetrated my body.

Half awake, I thought, but there’s no lightening. With that much noise, the room should be lit up. I fell back asleep.

In the morning, I looked up thunder in Wikipedia. Obviously there was something I didn’t know.

After the usual commonplace about lightening causing thunder - which it did not in the night - it went on to explain some mechanics:

"thunder must begin with a shock wave in the air due to the sudden thermal expansion of the plasma in the lightning channel. This heating causes it to expand outward, plowing into the surrounding cooler air at a speed faster than sound would travel in that cooler air. The outward-moving pulse that results is a shock wave."

More techy than I wanted, but I gather what happened, is that collision between warm and cool air forecast a week ago wasn’t some vertical confrontation. It was horizontal. That is, the warm air must have been riding over the cold air, rather like a bronco riding holding on. The differences in temperature must have caused the prolonged rumble as they passed overhead.

The next day’s forecast was equally obscure. NOAA predicted "patchy bands of rain," which is a good a description as there is for what passes for rain in this part of the country.

Then, they added, "ice pellets may fall out of some of the lower elevation bands." Not sleet, not hail, just bits of ice falling out of the atmosphere after that great collision. And they did.

Notes: Hazardous weather warnings for 2 November and 5 November issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service.

Photographs: Cottonwood growing near a lateral ditch in town, 8 November. It must once have been farm land, but everything was cleared for some business. Then, that building was razed, leaving a smooth, concrete slab. Now the tree stands alone, dropping its leaves to protect itself. They must have fallen after the storms of Monday and Tuesday to lie so densely and undisturbed.

Levee Cottonwood

Weather: It’s felt like we’ve been trapped under great masses of clouds headed somewhere else, leaving winds and warm afternoons, but only spits of snow or rain; last major precipitation 2/15/12; 11:36 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Biological crust, moss, mushroom.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens; stems on young chamisa; leaves on native yucca, grape hyacinth, Japanese honeysuckle, sweet pea, tansy and black mustard, alfilerillo, gypsum phacelia, snakeweed, chrysanthemum, strap leaf aster; cheat grass.

New leaf/stem buds on roses are emerging.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on Russian olive, tamarix, apricots, spirea, wild roses and raspberry; leaves on pinks, soapworts.

Color fading on sandbar willow, getting darker on apple trees.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf, beardtongues, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae; weeping and globe willows.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geranium, asparagus fern, pomegranate.

Animal sightings: Small birds.


Weekly update: The day was warmer than usual. In Michigan, where I was a child, it would have been a false hope, signifying tornadoes more than spring. The winds arrived here that evening, and have been dislodging tumbleweeds ever since.

But before I received that grim reminder of what was to come, I walked the wide arroyo to its mouth.

Let me clarify my geography a bit. I live between two arroyos, the ones I call the far and the near. To get to the main road where those Russian thistles are prowling, I cross three arroyos: the near, the deep, and the wide. They have names on maps, but I’ve never heard anyone use them.

I began at one of my favorite cottonwoods, one that’s forced the runoff from a ditch to track around it.


I followed its ditch back to a point where it entered the arroyo. To the right I saw the beginnings of a levee.

I’d been told, before the bridge was built, the arroyo ran so hard it flipped a car and killed the driver. Perhaps when the built they bridge, they built the levee to direct the flow or protect the adjoining land now owned by complaining taxpayers or maybe the bridge itself.

When I walked along the bank, its wild side could still be seen in a wide wash where little grew but snakeweed.


As I got away from the bridge, salt bushes and chamisa took over with an occasional narrow leaved yucca. Then came the trees everyone hates, the tamarixes and Russian olives.


And finally the bosque began.


This bosque spread wide on the horizon. The levee disappeared behind a fence, and forced me into the arroyo. The bosque enclosed the path, blocked my view. It made clear I had left the world of alien species and entered an older world.


One even blocked access to the river.


I followed the left bank back, which took me into the river forest. The trees were tall with unbranched trunks, competing with each other to reach the sky. Nothing grew through their mulch of dried leaves except a few straggly junipers. It was strictly a world of cottonwoods.


When I left the enchanted wood, as everyone eventually must, the levee on the right bank was higher and wider than on the left, the gap between it and the residential land narrower.


I saw something I’d never seen before. Instead of single, thick trunks with multiple, low branches, I saw what looked like clusters of trees from a single base. Perhaps strands of cotton had landed in particularly propitiating spaces and more than one seed had sprouted. Instead of one dominating and smothering out the others, each spread in a different direction.


The levee, with its trapped moisture on both sides of the divide, had created its own brand of cottonwood.

Photographs: Except for the one of the oxbow cottonwood taken 23 December 2010, the rest were taken in the wide arroyo 23 February 2012.

Ditch Cottonwood

Weather: Some afternoon warmer than usual, some mornings much cooler, some afternoons windier; last precipitation 2/15/12; 11:12 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Biological crust, moss, mushroom.

Tansy mustard and black mustard are coming up, with the one appearing in dryer locations than the other. A few plants are blooming in front of a south facing dark lava stone wall near the village.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens; stems on young chamisa; leaves on grape hyacinth, sweet pea, alfilerillo, gypsum phacelia, snakeweed, chrysanthemum, strap leaf aster; cheat grass.

Stems of hybrid roses getting greener as are leaves on native yuccas and Japanese honeysuckle.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on Russian olive, tamarix, sandbar willow, apples, apricots, spirea, wild roses and raspberry; leaves on coral bells, pinks, soapworts.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf, beardtongues, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae; weeping and globe willows.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geranium, bud on pomegranate.

Animal sightings: Small birds.


Weekly update: In Zia Summer, Rudolfo Anaya’s Albuquerque North Valley detective, Sonny Baca, wakes to the sound of a cottonwood being cut down, one that was more than a hundred year’s old and ten foot in diameter. It had simply died of old age.

“‘Trees get cancer, just like people,’ don Elisero said.”

That tree is the nostalgic image most have of the time before. Most assume that means the time before man when cottonwoods grew dense in the bosques along the Rio Grande


and acquired great girth.


By the time I moved here, the rivers were the wards of the Army Corps of Engineers. The trees growing by the Rio Grande were respectable, good sized trees that had come back from various water management projects, but not the behemoths described by Anaya.


To find those, I have to go to the village. There they grow above the beds of old or buried irrigation ditches. In the village itself, an open ditch stops or is buried before it reaches the church.


On the other side there’s a line of large cottonwoods.


On the orchard road, an open ditch that comes from our local acequia is still used, though it’s currently filled with the remains of late summer áñil de muerto, sunflowers and grass. It disappears when it reaches a crossroad, but you know the water hasn’t all been used, that the surplus has to find it’s way to the Rio Grande.


Toward the river, there’s a line of large cottonwoods.


The pattern repeats itself on the farm road behind the village. There, the ditch today is buried on the west side of the road, but you can tell it exists from the manicured field with the banked, burned edges and flattened bottom of irrigated land.


Here there’s a bit of an anomaly. The line of cottonwoods is on the upside of the road. However, behind those trees is one of the older houses in the area, and behind that our local acequia madre. I’m guessing, sometime in the past, there was a ditch there that’s since been filled when the land was subdivided and sold for small houses.


I rather suspect trees like the one Anaya eulogizes for shading “don Eliseo’s family for many generations” are more the product of the rural life that dug and maintained the ditches, than the turbulent rivers and restless bosques. Like Anaya’s, the ones around the village grew fat and old when they abandoned the chancy life of flood plains for the sure water of village ditches.

Unfortunately, like many old folks, the young regard them as nuisances. The utilities are constantly hacking their limbs. Drivers grow frustrated when they can’t see or have to take turns passing through a road they’ve narrowed. Some cut them down, but others with the spirit of Anaya find ways to accommodate them.


Notes: Anaya, Rudolfo. Zia Summer, 1995.

Photographs:
1. Cottonwood on farm road, 18 January 2012.

2. Cottonwood that fell in the spring of 2008; it took up a great deal of territory, but didn’t leave a very big hole in the ground; 3 May 2008.

3. San Juan bosque, 13 February 2012; the lower level of the woods is filled with shrubs including some sandbar willow.

4. Close up of central tree in above picture, 13 February 2012.

5. Bosque near Española, 23 February 2012; the trees are younger than San Juan and only grass and a few junipers are growing under the canopy.

6. Village road ditch bank lined with Siberian elms and trees of heaven, 19 January 2012.

7. Line of cottonwood downstream from the above ditch, 19 January 2012.


8. Orchard road ditch is the dark area near the fence filled with last year’s grasses, 23 February 2012.

9. Line of cottonwood downstream from the above ditch, 19 January 2012; Siberian elms have taken over the other side; this alley is so narrow, two pick-up trucks cannot pass and various protective posts and warning signs have been installed.

10. Irrigated field on farm road, 13 February 2012.

11. Line of cottonwoods up stream from the above ditch, 18 January 2012; the fallen tree was part of this line.

12. Fence on farm road built around a cottonwood, 17 January 2012.

13. Wall on farm road built around a cottonwood, 11 September 2010.

Cottonwood Copse

Weather: Morning temperatures settled into low 20's, last rain 11/05/11; 10:20 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Pansies, sweet alyssum, other plants in sheltered positions may have one or two flowers left.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other evergreens, prickly pear, yuccas, grape hyacinth, red hot pokers, privet, Japanese honeysuckle, oriental poppy, golden-spur columbine, purple and coral beards tongue, sea pinks, coral bells, Saint Johns wort, oxalis, hollyhocks, winecup, sweet pea, alfalfa, clovers, bindweed, yellow evening primrose, vinca, gypsum phacelia, tansy, Hopi teas, anthemis, blanket flowers, coreopsis, strapleaf and purple asters, June, cheat and other grasses.

Pepper plant dropped its drying red pod when the stem holding it was killed by the cold.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, leaves on purple leaved plum and sand cherry, leathery Bradford pear, raspberry, privet, Japanese barberry, Husker’s beard tongue.

What’s blue or grey: Piñon, leaves on four-winged saltbush, California poppy, loco, catmints, snow-in-summer, pinks, baby’s breath, blue flax, stickleaf, winterfat, chocolate flower, creamtips, hairy golden and heath asters.

What’s yellow-green/turning yellow: Leaves on weeping willow, Siberian elm, Apache plume, rugosa rose, snakeweed, perky Sue.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Berries have disappeared from my Russian olive along with the leaves that covered them. Berries are also gone from the pyracantha near the village. With the drought leaving less food for local animals, those passing through seem to have taken more that I can see than usual.

Weekly update: Cottonwoods have become endangered in this area because their habitat has been altered, partly from draining malaria incubating wetlands, party by dams that have stopped tributaries from flooding the banks of the Rio Grande, and partly by generally drying weather the past decades.


A few weeks ago I walked out in the far arroyo and discovered a cottonwood copse in the process of forming. There were mature trees near the point where the arroyo and the county road intersect. Trees about three feet tall were growing back by a high sand and clay bank. Much younger seedlings were growing in raised areas in the arroyo bottom itself.

Cottonwoods don’t easily reproduce themselves. The seeds are only viable for a couple weeks after they mature, which is in the spring, but they germinate within 24 hours if they land on bare, moist soil.

They then need to stay moist at the level of the young roots, but the leaves need full sunlight to feed the roots, a difficult balance in this environment. During the time the roots are reaching down to the water table, seedlings can tolerate very wet conditions. However, young plants don’t always survive heavy water flows.


In the wild, good conditions for developing new trees occur periodically, maybe every five to ten years. The existence of three generations of trees so close to each other means these ideal conditions have been met at least twice in the past decade.

The mature trees are growing where water would have collected or washed from the river ford.

The dirt road through the arroyo has been there for more than 60 years; it shows on the USGS map from the early 1950's. It dropped from relatively high, maybe 15' high, banks. Work must have been done by the county to keep the banks stable and provide a slightly sloped route in and out. I saw the remains of one protecting drain pipe that had emptied water upstream.

The upstream trees lie in the path of water that flows along the arroyo bank from the point where local acequia water enters the arroyo. That area gets lots of water during the summer, but the rate is probably slow and constant so the water supply is fairly reliable. Still it has cut a channel around an island which also supports a tamarix and some chamisa.

Trees could have germinated there any time. The fact they have not is probably indicative of the difficult balance of water and sun young trees require.

One set of young trees are growing between these saplings and the ford, very close to the island bank. I’ve noticed in other parts of the arroyo, those short banks seem to retain water later than the bottom itself.


The other set is in the wide bottom itself on the other side of the island, still closer to the ford. They look about the same age, but were battered by the scouring water that poured through earlier this fall.

I’m guessing these may all have germinated in the spring of 2010 when we had a cold, wet winter followed by a wet spring that lasted long enough for the seedlings to get established. The drought began that summer and lasted until this fall.

Their survival may be helped by changes made to the road this summer. They finally built a bridge over the arroyo. This narrows the water channels and creates a need for a larger area for water to back into while it waits to flow through. Those areas may become pools if the surface is rough enough to prevent the lowest level of water from moving when the flow drops and islands may develop around the area where the young trees are growing.

Notes:
Braatne, Jeffrey H., Stewart B. Rood and Paul E. Heilman. “Life History, Ecology and Conservation of Riparian Cottonwoods in North America” in R. F. Stettler, H. D. Bradshaw, P. E. Heilman, and T. M. Hinckley, Biology of Populus.

Photograph: Cottonwoods taken in the far arroyo, 25 October 2011.