40 Foot Falls

I had some time off for the Thanksgiving holiday so I thought I’d go and see 40 foot falls in Surry. It’s relatively quick and easy to get to and I like to visit it when the leaves are off the trees. The falls are in a heavily wooded area and before the leaves fall it’s dark enough in the forest that photography with my camera just doesn’t work there. Even at this time the pines and hemlocks cast a lot of shade but it was a bright sunny day so I thought I’d give it a try. The above photo shows what you can see of the falls from the road.

Before you get to the falls on Merriam Brook you have to cross a small stream that flows into it. You have to walk the banks to find a good place to cross. In some places it was narrow enough to step across on this day, but more often than not you have to cross on slippery stones.

Many of the stones along the stream are moss covered but not this one; I believe that’s a liverwort called greater featherwort (Plagiochila asplenioides) on that stone.

Greater featherwort likes lots of water and grows on rocks in streams and rivers, and on wet soil in the open or in shade. This was the first time I had seen this pretty little liverwort which, as liverworts go, is considered one of the largest. I think that’s because it forms large colonies, not because each plant is large. The plants themselves seem quite small to me compared to other liverworts I know.

A two inch hole through a boulder told the story of the blasting that must have gone on here, probably when the road was built.  Holes were drilled into the offending ledge, filled with black powder or dynamite, and away went the ledge. I can tell that the drilling was done by machine because if the holes had been made by hand with star drills and sledge hammers they’d be five sided, not round. They might have been made with a compressed air powered drill, which was also what railroads used after the invention of the wind hammer in 1844.

Once you cross the stream it’s easy to get to the base of the falls because the Merriam brook takes a hard 90 degree left turn at this spot. 40 foot falls has a lower, middle and upper falls along this stretch of stream. Here we see the lower falls and a hint of the middle. The climb to the upper falls is steep in places but doesn’t take long.

Two things make the climb to the upper falls a little hazardous; slippery oak leaves and old bridge cables like this one that a hemlock tree has grown around. I’ve tripped over that cable and slipped on the oak leaves and have taken a couple of spills up here, but luckily nothing serious has come of it. I watched my step and picked my way up the hill this time and had no problems, but those oak leaves sure were slippery.

I’ve read that a snowmobile bridge made out of steel cables and wooden planks  was washed away in severe flooding in August of 2003.  Apparently this cable and a plank or two that I’ve seen is all that’s left of it. Merriam brook raged and also washed away large parts of the road and flooded houses. Several other towns had similar problems at the time.

A look back downstream reveals how strong the forces at play are, with grown trees torn up and tossed around like first year saplings. I can say for sure that I don’t want to be here when this brook floods.

Many of the scattered boulders had lichens on them so of course I had to have a look. This one was covered with rock disk lichens (Lecidella stigmatea.) These common lichens like sunshine so they’ll point you to the sunniest spots in a forest like this. They are tan or dirty gray crustose lichens that form a crust like body (thallus) that clings to the stone substrate so strongly that it becomes impossible to remove them without damaging what they grow on.

Rock disk lichens look a lot like tile lichens (Lecidea tessellate,) but tile lichens have black fruiting bodies (apothecia) that are sunken or concave and rock disk lichens have black fruiting bodies that are raised or flat. This extreme close-up of the rock disk apothecia shows how they stand proud of the body of the lichen. This is an important identifying feature so it’s a good idea to carry a loupe or a macro lens when looking at lichens.

I was surprised to see a moth fly by and hang from a twig on such a cold day; it must have been at or below freezing. I thought it must be an owlet moth, which is a winter moth that creates its own heat by shivering. Owlet moths are what pollinate late flowering witch hazel shrubs.

I was right about one thing;  it is a winter moth but not an owlet moth. It is called the “winter moth” (Operophtera brumata) because it doesn’t mind the cold. The fringes on its wing edges help identify it. It was imported from Europe and is considered an invasive pest that can defoliate trees and shrubs. Adults emerge from the ground in November and December to mate, and the flightless female lays about 150 eggs under tree bark. The eggs hatch in March or April and the larvae begin to feed.

Before you know it you’ve reached the middle falls. You don’t have to work too hard photographically to blur the water here because the light is often dim enough to blur it anyway. I had to boost the light gathering ability of my camera to ISO 1600 for a few of these shots, and that’s something I rarely have to do.  I was glad I had a monopod.

The deep gorge that the brook has cut through the hillside above the middle falls is a very rugged and beautiful place. I think it would be a great place to visit on a hot summer day because it’s probably always a good 10 degrees cooler here. It was certainly cool on this day.

Icicles formed wherever the water splashed.

This is where you get your first glimpse of the upper falls, tucked way back into the gorge. I don’t know if the falls actually fall 40 feet, but that wall over on the left would crush a house if it fell on one. It is easily  more than 40 feet high.

I doubt you could get to the upper falls this way without getting your feet wet but even if you could you would have to climb through things like this to get there. The falls is over on the right, unseen in this photo. It looks like that tree will be one of the next to fall and be washed downstream.

You can get an okay shot of the upper falls without getting your feet wet or crawling over boulders, so that’s what I settle for. What I’d really like to do someday is get up above the falls to see what’s up there. It would be a steep slippery climb but worthwhile, I think.

A look back at some of what we came through to get here. Raging waters have stripped the stream bed right down to bedrock in places and tossed car size boulders around in others, bowling over trees. It’s amazing what water can do.

This unlucky tree had its bark stripped completely off and will most likely be carried downstream in a future flood.

Fall oyster mushrooms grew on a fallen oak. Scientists have discovered that oyster mushrooms exude “extracellular toxins” that stun fungi eating nematodes. Once the nematode has been stunned mycelium invades its body through its orifices. The mushrooms also consume bacteria in order to get nitrogen and protein, and all of this means that oyster mushrooms are a truly carnivorous mushroom.

I love it when I find things like this. This painted stone sat on top of a boulder near the upper falls. Seeing that a child loved a place enough to leave a gift behind is good for the soul, and gives me hope for the future.

There’s no better place to find yourself than sitting by a waterfall and listening to its music.
~Roland R. Kemler

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Beaver Brook

After the last snowstorm, which lasted all day Friday and Saturday, I decided to visit Beaver Brook in Keene. The storm was long in duration but it was warm enough so much of the snow that fell melted, and there wasn’t much more than 3 or 4 slushy inches on the old abandoned road on Sunday.

Though I’ve done several posts about Beaver Brook I’ve never shown this old box culvert. Upstream a ways is a channel that diverts part of the brook along a large stone wall and through this culvert. It’s very well built; I’ve seen water roaring over the top of it a few times when the brook was high and it never moved.

This is where the diversion channel leaves the brook. I wonder if the farmer who first owned this land diverted the brook purposely to water his stock or his gardens.

The water is relatively shallow here; probably about knee deep, but with the rain and snow melt that happened yesterday it’s probably quite a lot deeper right now.

The snow hung on in shaded areas along the brook, which was starting to run at a fairly good clip. I’m sure it must really be raging by now, after a 50 degree day and a day of rain. There have been flood watches posted in parts of the state but I haven’t seen any flooding here.

This is a favorite spot of dog walkers but I didn’t see any on this day.

Frost cracks happen when the sun warms the tree during the day and the temperature drops quickly at night. If you’re in or near the woods on a cold night in winter you can often hear the trees splitting and cracking, and sometimes it’s as loud as a rifle shot. Frost cracks can heal in the summer when the tree produces a new layer of inner bark to heal the wound but then can crack again in winter.

When repeated healing and cracking happens in the same place on the tree over the course of a few years the buildup of new tissue can create a frost rib like that seen on the yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis) in the above photo.

I like to look at the undersides of fern leaves to see what’s happening under there. Luckily we have several evergreen ferns that let me do this in winter. The spore cases seen here were on the underside of a polypody fern leaf (Polypodium virginianum.)

Polypody fern spores grow on the undersides of the leaves in tiny mounds called sori, which are made up of clusters of sporangia (receptacles in which spores are formed) and are naked, meaning they lack the protective cap (indusium) that is found on many ferns. Once they ripen they are very pretty and look like tiny baskets of flowers; in this case yellow and orange flowers.

Norway maple (Acer platanoides) is supposed to be a very invasive species but I see very few of them, so I was surprised to find a sapling growing here. The Norway Maple’s terminal bud and stem are larger than the Sugar Maple’s, and its bud scales are fewer and colored a pleasing maroon. Sugar maples have twice as many bud scales and they are brown. Norway maple terminal buds are also rounded while those of sugar maple are sharply pointed. According to Wikipedia Norway maple is native to eastern and central Europe and western Asia, from France east to Russia, north to southern Scandinavia and southeast to northern Iran.

Beaver brook flows at the bottom of a kind of natural canyon with sides that are very steep in places, as this photo shows.

In places the hillside comes right down to the water’s edge. This makes following the brook on the far side difficult.

The bottom of the canyon is wide enough for the brook and the road, and not much else. The road was hacked out of the hillside in the 1700s and goes steadily but gently uphill. Normally it isn’t a difficult walk but the wet slushy snow on this day made it feel as if I was sliding back a step for every two I took. I stopped and took this photo at this spot because I was getting winded and this is where I was going to turn around, but after catching my breath I decided to go on instead.

The road was covered in enough snow so somebody new to the place might not realize they were walking on a road at all if it wasn’t for the old guard rails along the side nearest the brook.

A seep is a moist or wet place where groundwater reaches the surface from an underground source such as an aquifer, and there are many along this old road. Springs usually come from a single point while seeps don’t usually have a definite point of origin. Seeps don’t flow. They are more like a puddle that never dries up and, in the case of the example shown, rarely freezes. Seeps support a lot of small wildlife, birds, butterflies, and unusual plants and fungi. I’ve found swamp beacons and eyelash fungi in seeps in the past so I always look them over carefully when I see one. Orchids grow near this one.

There are ledges along this old road and they have many lichens growing on them. Crustose rock disk lichens (Lecidella stigmatea) are very common on rocks of all kinds and usually grow in full sun. Crustose lichens form a crust that clings to the substrate so strongly that it becomes impossible to remove them without destroying what they grow on.

Rock disk look a lot like tile lichens (Lecidea tessellate,) but tile lichens have black fruiting bodies that are sunken, or concave, and rock disk lichens have black fruiting bodies that are raised or flat. This photo shows how the black apothecia stand slightly proud of the body (Thallus) of the lichen. This is an important identifying characteristic when looking at gray or tan lichens with black apothecia, so you need to get in close with a good loupe or macro lens.

It isn’t the rarity of the smoky eye boulder lichens (Porpidia albocaerulescens) that make me take photos of them each time I come here, it is the way the light falls on them. In the right light their spore producing fruiting bodies (Apothecia) turn a beautiful blue, and it’s all because of a light reflecting, thin coating of wax that covers each one. In different light they can appear black, gray or whitish but in this light they glow different shades of blue and are very beautiful. I hope readers will look for them. It’s always worth the small amount of effort it takes to find them.

I made it all the way to  Beaver Brook Fall but there is a steep embankment you have to climb down and if you get top heavy and get going too fast you could end up in the brook. Having that threat added to climbing back up in the slippery slush meant that I decided not to do the climb.

Here is the shot of the falls from the road that I should have gotten, but on this day my camera decided it wanted to focus on the brush instead of the falls so I’ve substituted a photo from last year. To get an unobstructed view you have to climb down the treacherous path to the water’s edge because for some reason the town won’t cut the brush that blocks the view. The falls are about 30 to 40 feet high.

I’ve done many posts about this place but I keep coming here because I always see something I’ve never seen before and I get to see old friends like the hobblebush (Viburnum lantanoides,) which is one of our most beautiful native viburnums. At this time of year its naked, furry buds are growing bigger and its leaf buds look like praying hands. Later on it will have large, beautiful white flower heads followed by bright red berries which will ripen to purple black. I’m guessing this one was praying for spring like the rest of us.

The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it. ~Chinese philosopher

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Lichens

When the flowers fade and the leaves have all fallen many think that there’s nothing with any color left to see, but that isn’t true. There’s still a lot of color out there even in winter, but it comes in smaller packages and you have to look a little closer to find it. Some of the best colors can be found on lichens like the beautiful poplar sunburst lichen (Xanthomendoza hasseana) in the above photo. This lichen is found on tree bark and is almost always fruiting, which the sucker like, disc shaped fruiting bodies (apothecia) show.

Chances are good that if you go looking for lichens you’ll see many gray crustose lichens that don’t appear to be very exciting at first glance…

…but when you give them a closer look you’ll find that even lichens that seem drab and boring will often have some color and might be very interesting. I think the one with the tan fruiting bodies in the above photo might be the crab’s eye lichen (Ochrolechia tartarea.) One of the best identifying characteristics of this lichen is the notched rims around its apothecia. I’ve never seen another lichen with them.

Lichens like the common goldspeck lichen (Candelariella vitellina) in the above photo are here year round for us to enjoy, and once the leaves fall many lichens become even easier to see. Look for this crustose lichen on stone. Crustose lichens form crusts that tightly adhere to the substrate that they grow on and usually can’t be removed without damaging it.

Pink earth lichen (Dibaeis baeomyces) looks a lot like bubble gum lichen (Icmadophila ericetorum.) One of the differences between the two is the length of the stalks that the pink apothecia sit on. They are longer on pink earth lichen than they are on bubble gum lichen. Other than that they look much the same.

Pink earth lichen is an interesting crustose lichen that I find growing in large patches on acid, sandy soil in full sun along with blueberries and sweet fern.  It is uncommon and I know of only one or two places where it grows.

This beautiful little scattered rock posy lichen (Rhizoplaca subdiscrepans) taught me how fast lichens can grow. A few years ago it could have sat on a penny with room to spare, but now it is more than quarter size. The orange pad like parts are its fruiting bodies (apothecia) and the grayish, brain like part is the body (thallus) of this foliose lichen.

Crustose rock disk lichens (Lecidella stigmatea) look a lot like tile lichens (Lecidea tessellate,) but tile lichens have black fruiting bodies that are sunken, or concave, and rock disk lichens have black fruiting bodies that are raised or flat. These lichens are very common on rocks of all kinds and grow in full sun.

This photo shows how the black apothecia stand slightly proud of the body (Thallus) of the lichen. This is an important identifying characteristic when looking at gray lichens with black apothecia, so you need to get in close with a good loupe or macro lens.

Noting whether or not the lichen’s fruiting bodies (apothecia) have rims is important when trying to identify lichens. I think this gray crustose lichen with rimmed black apothecia might be a crater lichen (Diploschistes scruposus.) It grew on stone. A similar lichen is the cowpie lichen (Diploschistes muscorum,) but it grows on soil.

One of the things I like about lichens is how they grow virtually everywhere, so you don’t have to search for them. This post and rail fence had them all over it.

This lichen garden was on the top of one of the posts. It had common powder horn lichens and red British soldiers growing in it.

This is a closer look at a British soldier lichen (Cladonia cristatella). It’s about the size of a wooden matchstick. I wish I had seen the white lichen with black apothecia to the left but I didn’t see it until I looked at this photo. British soldier lichen gets its common name from the British redcoats who fought in the revolutionary war.

There were many examples of beard lichens on the fence. This one is a fishbone beard lichen (Usnea filipendula,) named for the way its branches resemble the backbone of a fish.

I’ve tried for several years to identify this green beard lichen but I still don’t know its name. I’m fairly sure that it’s in the Usnea family of lichens but I’m not sure which one. It grew on the fence right alongside other gray Usnea lichens.

There is a low mist in the woods—it is a good day to study lichens. ~Henry David Thoreau

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Lichens

 

If you visit a place or places day after day, year after year, you get to know what grows in those places, and that is how I have come to know so many lichens-because I visit them regularly. At this time of year people often think that once the leaves fall there isn’t anything colorful left to see, but that simply isn’t true.  Lichens like the common goldspeck lichen (Candelariella vitellina) in the above photo are here year round for us to enjoy, and once the leaves fall many lichens become even easier to see. Look for this crustose lichen on stone. Crustose lichens form crusts that tightly adhere to the substrate that they grow on and can’t be removed without damaging it.

Bubblegum lichen (Icmadophila ericetorum) gets its name from its bright, bubblegum pink fruiting bodies (apothecia.) I find this crustose lichen growing in large patches on acid, sandy soil in full sun along with blueberries and sweet fern.  It is uncommon and I knew of only two places where it grew. One of those places has been destroyed by logging however, so now there is only one place I know of to find it.

Note: Bob Klips has identified this lichen as Dibaeis baeomyces rather than Icmadophila ericetorum. One of the differences between the two is the length of the stalks that the apothecia sit on. They are longer on Icmadophila ericetorum than they are on Dibaeis baeomyces. Thank you Bob, for the help! If you haven’t visited Bob blog, “Bob’s Brain on Botany,” you should. It’s a real treat and you can find it at bobklips.com

Script lichen looks just like its name suggests but it is a very ancient script, like long forgotten runes. This is another crustose lichen but I find it growing on tree bark rather than stone or soil. The dark “script” characters are its fruiting bodies. There are many script lichen species and each seems to prefer a certain species of tree. I think this example is the common script lichen (Graphis scripta) which prefers smooth barked trees like maple.

One of my favorite lichens is the poplar sunburst lichen ((Xanthoria hasseana). Its fruiting bodies are disc like structures that remind me of orange octopus suckers. This seems to be a perpetually fruiting lichen which hasn’t stopped since I found it about two years ago. It has grown though, and now a little bigger than a quarter.  I think it is one of our more beautiful lichens found in this area. This is a foliose lichen that grows on tree bark, but I’ve never found it on a poplar. Foliose lichens are lobed and leaf like.

Pixie cup lichens (Cladonia pyxidata) look like tiny golf tees or trumpets, and they are also called trumpet lichens. They are common and I almost always find them growing on the sides of rotting tree stumps, often with British soldier and common powder horn lichens (Cladonia coniocraea.) Common powder horn is, curiously, not horn shaped. They are the taller structures in this photo. Pixie cups are squamulose lichens, which means they are scaly, but they are also foliose, or leafy.

When I first found this beautiful little scattered rock posy lichen (Rhizoplaca subdiscrepans) a few years ago it could have sat on a penny with room to spare, but now it has reached quarter size. The orange pad shaped parts are its fruiting bodies (Apothecia,) and the grayish, brain like part is the body (thallus) of this relatively uncommon foliose lichen. By measuring the rate of growth of lichens scientists can get a fairly accurate estimate of how old the rocks are that the lichens grow on. This is known as lichenometry.

Smokey eye boulder lichen is another favorite of mine. The blue color seen in the above photo is caused by the way light reflects off a waxy coating on the fruiting bodies, which is very similar to the “bloom” found on plums, blueberries, and grapes. In addition to blue it can also appear black or gray depending on which direction the light happens to be coming from.  The greenish-gold background color is the color of the body (thallus) of this crustose lichen.

Crustose rock disk lichens (Lecidella stigmatea) look a lot like tile lichens (Lecidea tessellate,) but tile lichens have black fruiting bodies that are sunken, or concave, and rock disk lichens have black fruiting bodies that are raised or flat. These lichens are very common on rocks of all kinds and grow in full sun.

Granite firedot lichens (Caloplaca arenaria) have a gray body (Thallus) and dark orange fruiting bodies (Apothecia,) but the fruiting bodies are so crowded that it’s often hard to see the gray thallus. This is another crustose lichen that doesn’t mind growing on granite in full sun.

Golden moonglow lichens (Dimelaena oreina) can get quite big but I usually find them at dime to quarter size. They grow in groups in full sun on granite and often grow quite close together. The examples in the above photo were fruiting, and that is something I don’t see them do very often. Their apothecia are the dark, cup shaped bodies in the centers of the examples shown. I’ve never been able to find out why so many lichens seem to release their spores so late in the year.

 

I showed toadskin lichen (Lasallia papulosa) in a recent post and quite a few people seemed interested in it, so I thought I’d show it again here and go into a little more detail.  This lichen is very similar to rock tripe lichen (Umbilicaria mammulata) and if it wasn’t for all of the warts it would look very much like it.  The warts are called pustules and on the back of the lichen there is a corresponding pit for every pustule. When wet the greenish color of the algae that is present comes through on the surface. The black dots are its fruiting bodies. Each lichen is attached to the rock at a single point that looks much like a belly button, so this is an umbilicate lichen.

When wet toadskin lichens are rubbery and pliable and feel much like your ear lobe but when they dry out they are much like a potato chip, and will crack just as easily.  Like many lichens they also change color when they dry out, and turn kind of ashy gray like the example in the above photo. Toadskin lichens are also some of the hardest to find-I’ve only seen them growing on hilltop boulders.

However since most lichens grow on trees, soil, rocks, stumps and logs they’re virtually everywhere you go. Many are quite small though, so you have to walk slowly and look closely to find them. Once you’ve seen a few you’ll start seeing them almost everywhere you go. I know of a few that grow on trees right in the heart of downtown Keene.

The trees are coming into their winter bareness; the only green is the lichen on their branches.
~Verlyn Klinkenborg

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Things I’ve Seen

 

I went down a road that I had been curious about for years, just to see where it went, and found myself in a wide open, treeless field. When you live in a state with 4.8 million acres of trees places like this are pretty special, so I took a photo of it. When I looked at it later on the computer it looked like a tropical, white sand beach. Unfortunately the “sand” is snow, but I can dream.

After being surrounded by forest for nearly all of my life, being in a place like this makes me feel strange, like being in a house with no walls. It’s great to visit places that are so wide open and have such “big sky,” but I don’t think I could live there. I wonder how prairie people stand it.

Since I complained about having only seen script lichen twice, not only am I seeing it everywhere now but I’m noticing different kids. The dark lines, which are the fruiting bodies (apothecia), are very different between the upper and lower halves of this photo. The upper ones are long and horizontal while the lower ones are short, branched, and squiggly. I think the upper example is elegant script lichen (Graphis elegans) and the lower common script lichen (Graphis scripta). There are 39 species of script lichen.

  

The yellow body (thallus) and dark orange, cushion shaped fruiting bodies (apothecia) tell me that this is a sulfur firedot lichen (Caloplaca flavovirescens).  Though I see this small lichen occasionally this is the first time I’ve ever seen its apothecia. I found this one growing on a stone in an old stone wall. There are 131 species of Caloplaca in North America alone, so identifying them can be challenging.

 

I thought this crustose lichen might be one called tiny button lichen (Amandinea punctata), but after some reading I find that tiny button lichen rarely grows on rock. It prefers bark or wood dust.  Since this lichen was growing on nothing but rock I have to lean more towards rock disk lichen (Lecidella stigmatea), which is described as having a dirty white, gray, brownish gray to sometimes partly pale rusty thallus (body) with blackish brown fruiting bodies (Apothecia).

 

The fruiting bodies of the rock disc lichen are either even with the body of the lichen (plane) or are convex like those shown in the photo. If they were concave we would most likely be looking at one of the map lichens. Each one of these little apothecia isn’t much bigger than a period made by a pencil on paper, so you have to look closely when trying to make a good identification. Luckily the camera often sees what I can’t.

 

Pileated woodpeckers were building condos in this pine tree.  They roost in hollow trees and have many entrance holes to the nest, but I’m not sure if that’s what was going on here.

 

I had to hold the camera up over my head and shoot blind to get this view looking inside a pileated woodpecker hole, so it isn’t the sharpest shot you’ve ever seen on this blog. You can see that he has excavated all the way to the hollow heart of the tree. I wonder if they know the tree is hollow before they start excavating.

 

It took me a while to find it because there are a lot of trees out there, but I found the tree with the zig zag scar again. I don’t know why I thought I’d learn any more now than I did when I first ran into it last fall, but I wanted to see it again and take a closer look. Of course I don’t know any more now than I did then-just that it’s a scar deep in the bark of a white pine that looks like a zig zag. It starts below the soil level and runs up the trunk about 3 feet and then stops. I don’t know if lightning or another natural event caused it or if it was a boy with a pocket knife.  It is an oddity though, no matter what caused it.

I did some online searching and didn’t find anything that looked like it but I was contacted by another blogger who found an old hemlock with an even stranger scar. If you’d like to see it, just click here.

 

This close-up shows how thick the bark is on either side of the zig zag scar and how they come together like a zipper. The bark on older white pines is naturally platy and deeply furrowed, but it looks to me like the tree has been trying to heal this scar for a very long time.

 

I saw a culvert that directed spring water off a hill and into a pond. I tried to get a shot of the miniature waterfall and the ice cloak that it had wrapped itself in, but it’s a little hard to see that in this photo.

 

There is a lot of old fencing left in our woods from the 1800s when this was all pasture land. One day I saw a dead pine limb that had grown around the wire of an old stock fence and had broken away from the tree and was now hanging from it. The diameter of the limb was probably about 2 1/2 to 3 inches.

 

For the limb to have grown around the wire as it did, both would have had to have been undisturbed for quite a long time, I would think.  I’ve heard of some strange things being found in trees, but wire isn’t that unusual. It is a logger’s nightmare though-imagine running a chainsaw into that. .

 

I found a piece of pitch pine bark that had orange colored parts that were as thin as paper.

 

This is what I saw when I held the piece of pitch pine bark up to the light. Is this what a squirrel sees from inside a hollow tree?

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

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