February Seasonal Essay

Winter offers us a chance to note again that among living organisms, each act of creation has its destructive counterpart. each great tree, rising out of the forest floor, finds many of its building materials among the ruins of former plants and animals. In addition, each forest creature throughout its life, sheds its used and worn-out parts onto the ground to be broken into its chemical constituents and recycled once again. We are fully aware of this in the fall when the great mass of leaves, generated through spring and early summer, having fulfilled their task of food manufacture, are cast free. But we are not so aware that this process of shedding continues in some degree throughout the year. In winter we see this especially clearly.

However pure the white new-fallen snows of February may be, in the woods they quickly lose their virginity. Soon they become littered with myriad dark fragments, some formless, others with clear and recognizable form repeated again and again. The last-remaining portions of birch catkins litter the snow and open cones of hemlocks and pines, shaken by the wind, shed the last of their more tenacious seeds. Strong wind loosens some of the last remaining leaves of oaks and beeches. A pile of wood chips at the base of a tree is readily explained by looking upward at the squared hole made by a Pileated Woodpecker. Masses of tiny black specks in snow hollows are jumping! They are insect-like springtails. And everywhere are fragments of bark, loosened by growth in girth of trees. The whiteness of snow gives the perfect background on which to display the products of the never-ending process of shedding, of life and death.