Crow’s Nest: Up on the hill

By Daniel Barringer, Preserve Manager

After work yesterday my son Owen wanted to go exploring on the hill across from the house. It was beautiful there (this was before all the wind and rain and return of frigid temperatures). The snow is getting patchy. The rocks are so thoroughly covered with lichen that they look like Serpentine—but it is the living symbiosis between algae and fungi that thrives here.

On the hill we found tree tags placed by summer campers in 2004. The kids used letter punches to make the labels for trees they wanted to “adopt.”  The labels include the kids’ names, the year, and the species of tree—here, a beech. It’s amazing how much those kids have grown in ten years, and how little has changed in the forest understory here. It was a challenge to explain to a five year old what occurred here ten years ago.

If you made one of these labels, come back and visit your trees. They’re still here.