This is What an OLD GROWTH FOREST in the Northeast Looks Like — Ep. 026

it smells glorious this smells so good it's very heady it's like florally and heady it's right next to the door it's right next to the door and this is the type of stuff like the cherry trees and things like this this is the type of stuff that i see being planted over there actually in the distance you'll see the shock of purple that's a cerseus canadensis and that is an eastern red bud so i could see like those colors coming through up on the on the driveway and hey what are we doing today where are you going uh i'm going to work wrong wrong department all i knew is that the dress code was earth's earth phone today oh i don't think i can go here i'm just bringing my laptop in case i have a chance to get some stuff done joey's a workaholic [Music] what's this little building this little oh yeah so there's part of a cemetery they had like a little service in there for people before they buried them yeah and now it's not really used for anything but it's really nice inside i got a chance to go in there a couple years ago we have to take note of this deer fence yeah yeah it was a big it's a big deal and uh this is what our forest could look like essentially that's right so let's go back 20 000 years yeah when this was probably under at least 2 000 feet of ice right and then the glaciers retreated and then various plants came in sort of in sequence like they didn't come out all once like it didn't reforest all on time with all the species like one species are coming in another and of course indigenous people came in too and colonized this region but we don't have a lot of evidence that native peoples are right here in this spot they think they probably walk down to the lake to fish but there weren't any villages right here we haven't found artifacts right like that so let's jump to the revolutionary war when that was fought and the united states won they didn't really have money to pay the soldiers because there was no yeah no government no money no currency yeah so they took land of course they took it from the indian people and they gave it to people who fought in the war yeah and so they gave in new york people got 600 acres so this was part of a 600 acre track started right that corner kind of went out that way in this way and it was given to a fellow named atkinson who just turned around and kind of sold it because a lot of them didn't want to farm it they just wanted the money yeah so you sold it that was his money for fighting and then that land got passed through a few owners we don't exactly know who they were because you know deeds and all those weren't really kept track up very well back then yeah but then a family called halsey got it like halsey road like halsey road halseyville is down here he was a state senator and so he was like a famous person he bought it and they cleared a lot of land they put up some mills along the creek they farmed it but for some reason we don't know why this section here didn't get cut down or farmed and the soil here is pretty good for agriculture one of the reasons why the trees are so large yeah so uh he kept it for a while in his family and eventually he wanted to borrow some money so he gave it to the bank the bank had it for a while and then they sold it to this wallpaper salesman in new york city to use as a place to come and camp so so far everything was cut for farming but this stayed probably because it was beautiful and you didn't want to cut it the wallpaper salesmen at that time you know wallpaper was like the biggest greatest thing and they have people who stole wallpaper like really rich and and uh anyway he made a lot of money off of that and so he came up here and bought the land and used it for camping yeah when he passed away his sons inherited it they weren't big campers they lived in new york they didn't want to come all the way up here so uh his name was smith henry smith he's buried right across oh okay so that's how smith woods that's how smithers got its name okay his sons didn't want it so they established like a little trust yeah and so we're going to give it to the trust for like a dollar and you guys can manage it and that was the 1909 wow thing and so then for like the next 100 years or so this trust had it they didn't really have a vision for how it could be used or it wasn't used for education or anything was just here and so then they decided they didn't want any more because in 1989 there was a big wind storm that blew through here and knocked down a bunch of trees and the people on the board thought oh we should harvest those trees and sell it because it's some money and we can use that to pay our board insurance and a lot of other people said no wind storms are part of nature you know just let the trees rot and yeah there's food for organisms and bugs and insects and all that right so there was this big controversy letter to the editor for little town of chewinsburg everybody was all fired up or what to do with smith woods and people came down on both sides of it so they ended up pulling the trees that fell out of here and uh they did log it yeah got some money but they got so much grief for that and from some other things they just decided they didn't want any more so they offered it to the qigong center who took it over right and from that point you know we put in trails and we started running educational programs but the big problem we had in here was there was no regeneration like when you look through here you can see it's pretty clear yeah and in a real true old growth forest you've got lots of regeneration we don't have that here because of the deer population is about 10 times higher here than what's considered natural or sustainable yeah right so when did the deer fence go in two years ago oh only two years 22 years ago so that was that was also controversial because people thought well it's supposed to be kept in its natural state and you shouldn't be fencing things out and it's going to look ugly yeah and all that but we did a lot of research and we found a fence that's practically invisible yeah and put that in there and it's made a huge difference and we'll see like we're starting to see these beech trees regenerate we're seeing maple seedlings come up with the trillium the wildflowers are amazing this year yeah so it's made a huge difference in just a couple of years so we think it's going to recover now that's really good news because you didn't do any kind of enrichment planting or anything it popped up over the two years so this gives us a really good indication actually as to what our forest might be able to do if we assemble that deer fence because ours is completely it looks like this it's bare ground yeah i mean we have some trout lilies and we have some may apples um but that's about it you know that we see on the ground yeah and very few seedlings and maybe some white pine seedlings and that's about it yeah yeah so we were um about when i first moved here like 20 years ago 25 years ago trumansburg there were a lot of trillium in here but you could just gradually see it diminishing yeah and then we put up the fence and then like the next spring or so boom that's amazing it came and you know trillium it takes is that some that i see over there we'll see we'll see some nice okay populations up here as we go it takes trillium you know seven years to grow from a seed to a flowering plant so seven years yeah i have no idea because you could either buy it as a bulb or some seed right so yeah but the problem is it's mostly in the shade most of the years it only has a this is a red one yeah there's two species here there's the red and then the white and we'll get some really good pictures here a little bit but it only has light for what four or five weeks yeah and so it has to do everything at that time so um in a forest like this most of the herb you know the spring of farmables only grow for a few weeks and that's kind of it i'm so glad we're kind of getting them right at the right time you see the big white floppy is that grand flora yes have you had to clear out any of the invasive yeah so that's the only sort of active management we do here is clear out invasive so we've done when we first acquired the woods we took out you know barbarian honeysuckle there wasn't a lot because it's the shade the most invasive is like light yeah so it wasn't a lot but we had some edges then the big invasive is this uh ground cover right here the vinca the vinca yeah it's like all over the place yeah yes this stuff it's pretty but it uh it's really invasive in the old growth forest because it's evergreen so when the leaves fall off the tree it's got four or five months of light right and it can keep growing so we're thinking about doing some research here with cornell to figure out how can we eliminate it but if you see down through there so much it's not like we can ever pull it out by hand you've noticed in our woods and i don't know if this is something that you could comment on but um we've had daffodils naturalize in our forests that's like but they don't seem to spread like a finger or something like that so it seems like it's not something that it's not considered invasive yeah they naturalize but not everything that naturalizes becomes invasive yeah and then so what are the oldest trees that we're seeing here and uh let's start with this hemlock so in i mentioned at windstorm in 1989 when it fell down a bunch of trees fell down yeah the logging company came in and uh took the trees out but they cut the the trees at the base and we counted rings and we found a hemlock that we aged to 1662. holy crap yeah so the hemlock 400 years ago almost yeah so hemlocks grow really slowly when those trees fell we measured the circumference of all these trees and counted the rings so then we could get a relationship between the size of the tree and how old it was estimate but so we for that species for that species we did it for different species and for this species we estimate based on a circumference that it was born in 1740. wow so 271 years that is that's impressive before the sullivan campaign before all of that right for all that yeah wow so it's seen a lot it's seen a lot yeah and so these are probably some of the older the hemlocks are probably some of the older trees but that oak that we saw is also pushing you know this age as well and they look so healthy so there are yeah we'll see evidence of that when we walk around okay so look how straight they are yeah so this is a white pine here it's absolutely fantastic amazing white pine you don't see that anymore no so new york used to have a lot of white pine trees they were cut for timber which is was fine that it has rot resistant wood and it's nice and light and so when they cut down all the trees and cleared this land the civilian conservation corps in the 1930s came back in and planted white pine yeah but there was a beetle that chewed the apical meristem of the white pine trees and stunned them all so if you go to like the national forest up here you'll find yeah acres and acres of white pine were planted by civilian customs basically they're all stubby little things they didn't get this tall so invasive species are terrible you know they affected white pine the wooly adelgid yeah hemlock the beach bark disease which we'll see it's damaging the beach yeah um emerald ash borer is right on our doorstep yeah and so our forests are really is there ashes in this forest too we've not found emerald ash borer yet okay you know we noticed it partially in the open areas of our land but in the forest where you have an ash tree and there's all the different species around it it's not effective okay so so maybe it's hopefully like if you have like a clump of ash you might be in a in a problem area but then if you have ash in with like everything else i think maybe they don't get to it or at least it's going to take a little while for them to find it which goes to show you that like biodiversity is where you want to yeah exactly we got some nice black cherry too really tall i almost don't even recognize it because mature bark is so different yeah and then same way right here is another black chair oh that one right there yeah wow it looks so different because you never see mature wood that big right yep oh yeah and look at you can see it now because it almost like breaks out of it yes exactly there's a little lesson it's like the hulk you know it's like wow that's cool it's so neat to see because you know we really wanted to come here because we found this 200 plus year old white oak on our on our land is this like smith woods material i don't know well it's old as i'm sure it's old as uh trees like that it also has like things growing on it yeah you know oh it's it's it's ecosystem into itself it's just so spectacular seeing something that large compared to everything else which is like so tiny yeah and you're like this is what a forest could really look like you know if you just let it regrow they often uh leave left those trees for property boundaries yeah so oftentimes around here you'll be going through a lot of smaller cheeses once you find this gigantic maple or oak which marked a corner of the property for somebody it's so beautiful it's close to the road so we were like well maybe that is a popular yeah but if i look off into the distance here i can see all the trillium like this let's walk up there so beautiful let's walk up there yep and we can see like maple ceilings coming up which we didn't solomon sealed geranium yep yeah what's this you know oh yeah that's actia um they call it doll's eyes produces a white berry with a little um red or black dot on it oh okay and the pioneer girls particularly you made little doll babies and use those for the eyes oh that's so funny yeah oh this is this brings me so much hope now we don't have vinca minor in our forest we just have like you know leaves but it's a trillium if this took two two years for this to regrow i feel like really there's hope yeah it's just uh just a nice little patch yeah some beautiful red specimens gosh they get so large too and then is this a another oak what is this one let me see what this one is i think this is a tulip poplar oh that's a tulip yeah and oh my gosh yeah that's toilet popper leaves it's yeah so if you look right here there's a tulip poplar yeah there's a bunch of them right here yeah they're all about that same size and they're about 130 years old and we we know that because we for the tree ring thing right and so the question then is there's this ring of tulip they're all about the same size it's all about 130 years old question is why is that here like that and the answer is if you look at the dominant four species in old growth forest it's beech maple and hemlock and if you look at the understory we see beech maple and hamak and that's because those are the shade tolerant trees and they eventually dominate because it's shady and they're the ones that survive right it's maturity yellow poplar only grows whether it's light it has to germinate in the light so around in here 130 years ago there was some event that opened up the forest and let light in so all the yellow poplar germinated at the same time and then they got shaded and no more germinated but there so there was a fire or a big uh wind storm or something right in this area yeah 130 years ago yeah and all the popular jewish it's so cool to be able to just um create these stories from just you know looking at the trees not only just like analyzing the tree rings but the composition and how old they are and i mean this and what was this that had fallen down here and what's that was a beach and what what's the importance of actually leaving it because you said that there was this yeah oh there's a huge um so back up a little old growth forest which by the way there's only three tenths of one percent of forests or old growth can i pull this out you sure can i've been pulling this out of my woods so most of the fort this is a garlic mustard right and it's like uh it's invasive i recognize the flower yeah it actually tastes good it was brought over here yeah people used it as a culinary herb yeah yeah kind of escaped so old growth for just so they're pretty rare i mean the beauty of this is it's so close to the road and it's so flat like most all growth forests you have to like hike a long distance or walk through the water to get because you can get the logging equipment really the cliff faces the cliff face yeah but here it's right along so it's really amazing it's still preserved and so it's only three tenths of one percent but they are the most diverse ecosystems that we have and what really constitutes an old growth like when does it become an old growth yeah so around here if you take like land like you have with nothing on it like an old field it's 350 years before it looks like this guys we're going to be here at that time so you got to take one of those you got to go into suspended animations for a couple of centuries and come back out wake up we'll never see it as an old growth woods we only have like that 200 plus year old and we'd have to live another 100 years to even even see that that's why we're just stewards we're just kicking the ball yeah so it's so what makes it old growth uh and the evidence of that is we don't see branches down low on the trees right so they always had it grow up really high uh before they saw light and started to branch the other thing is if you look at the the surface it's undulating because like this mound right here is where a tree fell over and tipped up the soil right and it leaves it and as we walk through here we'll see all kinds of tip up mounds and that's an another indication it was never plowed or logged or anything and that and that's also important for uh wildlife and everything too right letting the forest kind of create those undulations and yeah yeah stirring up the soil brings up nutrients and things like that and these trees that fall like this i mean this is a whole ecosystem in itself you know you got beetles and there was a entomologist you might uh clinton wheeler i think was his name yeah cause you're an etymology he discovered a species of beetle here in this woods that we've never found before yeah yeah it's in the book you can look it up it's probably not endemic but is it or they don't really know endemic to might be endemic to the northeast yeah i'm not sure but then you've got this whole you know decomposing community of uh fungi yeah they live on this too and have you ever seen any cool fungi here there's a lot of cool fun to hear yeah yeah we have the my colleges come out walk around and take pictures and things like that yeah because yeah there's a lot of decomposing so we want to keep this even you know it's phallus a beach it's succumb to beechworth disease it fell but you know it also provides food nutrients for the next generation of things that come along see there is a skeletonizer skeletonizing the leaf it's like a bug yeah now this looks like it had been a fountain what is that a foundation so here and right at the entrance in 1950 the village thought they could maybe turn this into a picnic ground i see so they made a couple of fireplaces okay oh wait here there's a japanese houseplant enthusiasts will know that this is a neoroid family with that speedix and space okay so this is where they would do like a little fire or something yes i think there are like two or three of these so they never really developed it yeah but they gave it a name it's called the piney woods campground i don't but anyway it never really took off but they did have a few rum that far well i just think that this is pretty amazing from the fact that like this is it it kind of seemed like tossing the potato like the hot potato like it did just never got developed in any kind of way and just by through luck or volley or yeah and now it's it's uh embedded in the deed that you know it can't be developed yeah so it should be forever yeah wild as close as we can get i mean it's human impacted obviously even from native peoples all the way up but no one can like log it or build a house here anymore is this this is blue cohosh oh that's cool too another good native yes they get those blue like really blueberries yep and then we also have i think there's a tooth wart know if you're familiar with this one or not oh no so it's tooth wart and the reason it's called tooth wart is because the teeth on the margins of the leaves yeah and the interesting the genus is denturia same root as dentures or denturia and tooth for so so does it taste have a taste to it no i don't believe so no and was it used for anything like for your teeth i think it's just because it has the just ridges you know back but a lot of people back in the day thought that if it looked like a tooth it might have something to do with it looks like a liver it's good we'll see hepatica on our way around but it looks like a liver and so forth yeah i mean this just gives me an indication of what's what's going to come back you know yup i didn't realize that you only had the deer fence for the last two years yes night and day i mean we don't even have solomon seal and i see your salomon seal coming back as well so are some of the beach coming up from um the beach bark disease oh they're coming up for the roots okay so it'll probably end up being like chestnut yeah where it'll go so big and then it'll die back down has there anybody been any kind of um enrichment planting like reintroducing like a the back crosses of chestnut or they're they have those trees yeah um and there's uh two approaches one is you know back crossing a lot yeah and then but there can also genetically engineer resistance into the trees and i believe syracuse has some of those okay and uh so but they're just not gonna like go out and populate yeah so and then also do you have hickory here yeah we'll see hickory okay it's usually in the dry or in the wetter area yeah we're serving the top it's a little dry then we'll drop down it'll be a little bit wetter than we got a hickory uh this is a nice light gap see so tree fell down opened up this gap and you can just look how there's a lot of plants growing in here and then they don't in the shade yeah and different species and so some of these will die out some of these are kind of shrubby some of the trees are short i'll show you the tulip poplar right here because now he's actually because now we have light yes look at that we have light we got tulip poplar here look at these here they're all germinating yeah right in here because there's a light gap and this is even is this like a raspberry that's a that's a blackberry right there but we do have uh raspberry right here as well and we also have um we have a lot of sugar mape when we talked about that we also have you know boxed elder maple oh yes which is coming in here in the light gap [Music] and then you have some um ostrich farms or are these yes yeah and of course garlic mustard again which likes the light yeah so you know we'll try to kind of pull it out they're it's pretty easy to pull out it's just so prolific yes yes there are four species of maple in here there's sugar maple red maple box otter maple and then there's a fourth species striped striped maple and there's a whole clump right here of striped maple wait but i've never seen like really big uh like i see it they don't they don't get big yeah but this is you know i don't know how long this has been here yeah because it could have come in in the light gap so it's great it's probably not more than 40 or 50 years very distinctive part very sick to bark yeah but the other thing is is distinctive about it every single one of these every single one of these is damaged here at the base huh you can look at all this little we'll grow every single one of them what do you think happened oh i know it happened it's uh from buck rubs the deer for rob love to rub their antlers on this tree yeah and i think all angelus do so there must be something about that tree that they like yeah because the common name for this further north is moosewood hmm and again the reason because the moose yeah like drove the antlers so i don't know it might be some smell or i don't know if it's texture why that would be different yeah but now that we excluded the deer we won't see that yeah but it's just so interesting that you see so much of that oh wow there's another big yellow popper and again our tulip tree yeah and one of the things i when i bring groups through here i asked them how old that tree is and i remind them that that hemlock was about the same size and so they all guess you know around the same age 300 days yeah but then it's not because it's much younger yeah because it spent its whole life in the sun so it grows really quickly and fast and you said also the soil quality here is pretty good so it probably grows faster it rhymes reminds me of cottonwoods like cottonwoods seem so young but they grow so fast exactly yep and here's some violets right uh-huh yes well they're so cute there's a nice clump of red some really big yeah the red trilliums the trilliums are just like that's one of the things that i was looking to like enrichment plant but you're you're giving me a lot of hope that just by excluding the deer they'll come back on their own i would imagine they might yeah oh look at these uh little collections of violets right here they're more dense right here well look at the american beach because you know again we have such tiny american beach and they've all been affected by the beach bark disease but you know this iconic like nice gray bark and it maintains that some of them get really you know they look like they have like cross-country tracks on it but this one maintains its smoothness it looks like it leafs out later than the others too yes at least it's the bigger trees do the younger trees come out sooner yeah and i don't know if it's some sort of an adaptation to help the younger trees when there's light they leave out earlier so get advantages of light before it gets shaded yeah whereas the bigger ones can take their time because they're gonna have light all summer long exactly it's like kind of like the mama tree and it's like i'll put out i'll put out my leaves later let my children yeah exactly yes it's so funny to like like you said that the old growth forest you're so close to the road you could hear it yeah and you expect that you have to like really travel out of your way to go see it so the fact that it's so accessible but i will say once the leaves come out it does get really quiet in here it's almost like a little peaceful sanctuary yeah maybe not so much right here but like it's a little bit further down so this just snapped off this spring this hemlock from the street right here so again the wind storm um it's not necessarily a very protected site so the wind does do damage and so we'll snap these trees off and do you do any kind of selective cutting now or culling in the only thing that's been cut in the last um well since keegan nature center has managed it is this tree right here in front of us we're going to see so we did cut a few norway maples because they're not native yeah but uh again because it's shaded and old growth we don't get a lot of invasives to cut yeah but we did um cut this tree down this spring because it was dead and it was really close to trail and it was dropping branches anybody getting anybody getting hurt so we it's funny they uh brought up some people out to film the dropping of this tree yeah so i came out with my chainsaw i was the one who got to cut it and so you know i make the cut like you're supposed to got it falling this way it started to fall and you had a little branch up there it got caught on that and it wouldn't fall and then they had to film and the camera and everything the tree went like that far and stopped like what are we going to do fortunately like that weekend there was a big wind storm and knocked it down oh my god but here's something really interesting you look bad though i did it right so this is interesting here if you look at the rings in the tree you can see that when the tree was young yeah look how tiny it is yeah and then somewhere in here it got up enough to get light yeah and it started to grow faster and it grew really fast until it started to get older and something must have happened to it because it died but it just died so the rings started getting closer so yeah you can look back a little bit in time and how old did you i counted this it was uh it was pushing 200 okay yeah hundred and i can't remember 170 maybe rings are counted wow in this tree insane and then do you ever go back you know with your uh where you're measuring the circumference and the species of tree and say oh yeah we're really close to that oh so there's a tompkins county community college has a professor who brings students out on a regular basis and they're starting to measure the trees and record their growth yeah so we'll have that data eventually i'm not doing it but yeah his class is doing it yeah that's cool yeah it's uh i think we benefit so much in this area with cornell and all the other universities that are doing studies and we really gain insight from that yep this is you know there'll be several studies as we walk through here we'll see there there's a penn state group collecting leaf litter in the fall there's like mentioned the group measuring his tree circumferences and classes come out here well we could really learn from it and i think that having something like this like it seems really aspirational for us you know with our young woods here's some of your trout lilies yep yep i saw those pop up this don't know if we'll see any flower because it's a little bit past yeah oh and then this is uh is this gallium or yeah it's a gallium i'm not sure what specific species it is maybe like odorada or something this is also one of our native species i'd like to see that come back oh here's a really good example of the beach bark problem so it's a scale insect and scale insect burrows in and this is the the white is on top of the scale the little wax they exudate and then it makes the holes and then the nectar fungus comes in those holes and then starts to girdle the tree and was this um always here no the fungus was always here but it never got into the tree because it had barked when this um this scale insect was introduced i want to say like maybe in the 1930s you know just again another invasive species has taken down the natives and it's really hard for resistance to develop in this if it was a disease maybe but when it's an insect drilling a hole yeah and then i guess like with the the scale insect you know i get the sense that you know there's some trees as they mature they get this really craggy thick bark right and then i look at beach beech trees and it's this very thin bark and i see that it's probably more susceptible exactly exactly so you won't see this happening to you know maybe even a sugar maple or a shaggy bark hickory or something like that yeah because it's shaggy bark yeah it's not it's not like it's not like the elder ash borer where that is specific to ash this could potentially effect that's a really good question i'm not exactly sure whether this scale insect will affect other trees that have smooth bark like right in theory it might like the striped maple the straight maple yeah but i've not seen it in this dry maple yeah it is it's nicely highly walkable here yeah so we have a mother's day hike yeah every year because it's nice and flat and it's the right time of the year to see the wildflowers and then here's your may apples there's some wet areas and we find them all strewn throughout the impatience they're coming up right here okay as long as i didn't step on it oh and black birch there's more blackbirds and so if you look at that black birch not this one but the next one over yeah you see all its roots are growing out of the ground oh yeah and so i always ask people why are the roots out of the ground of course everybody says it'll cause the soil you rode it away from the roots on the hillside so no black birch love to germinate on old logs or mounds so they get their roots established then the tree rots away and the roots gets exposed yeah it's very common for black birch to do that wow so a lot of them have these exposed roots has any of these trees been tapped for like birch we've not allowed people to tap trees in here we've been asked but we just feel like it's a little bit too intrusive yeah just while i choose to do the thing so here's a beach tree that succumb to the beach bark disease unfortunately and then is there any like need to clear it out or no i guess not because the fungus has always been here it's more about the scale that's right so the fungus has always been here it'll it's a wood rotting fungus it can do its thing yeah but it's the scale we want to get we would like to be able to get rid of somehow and i don't know how you how we do that so these beach that are coming up here would probably never get big no one there looks like it's already on its way out yeah and then this one pops up and this one already has a little bit of scale on it yeah yeah like this one this is actually isn't this when it starts to fruit when it gets too yeah you can see right there's a little bit there's a little flower right here so typically when it just has one it doesn't get the flour correct and then when you have two of these it'll start to get the flour and that's when you could fruit and then that's when you're you're able to to collect it and that takes many years also for it to get that large there's the yellow pot i've never seen yellow poplar with mature bark like that it's so cool because when it's young it's smooth bark yeah right yeah when i was first like learning my trees too i was really confused by that because i i grew up i guess it was secondary forest and the trees forest may have been 40 years old and the trees are still pretty smooth on the yellow poplar and then i come here it's like oh and you have to because like you can't see the buds they're all way up yes exactly you can see every once in a while some will fall off on the ground yeah you can see them that way yeah i always try to identify the trees where i'm looking at the leaves on the ground and i'm like i think it came from you and then you got some grape vines over here you haven't had any of um like invasive like oriental bittersweet or anything like that no okay nope i see it through pennsylvania but oh foam is this flower yes oh cool this i noticed was blooming in in the city in new york city but it looks like it's hasn't bloomed yet or no it has not bloomed yet okay oh here's the oh yeah the flowering the one that gets the the doll eyes and flower before it'll get its berries does it have a scent i haven't noticed the scent it's very faint but i can't even place what that smells like i have no words for it it smells like its own thing here we have some christmas fern right so this stays evergreen pretty much all year right yes so that's guess how it got its name christmas first yeah and how many acres is this city this is 32. okay but you said it one point it was six like was it six hundred six hundred yeah it was uh so from that corner like down this way yeah down that way okay and uh i'm gonna stand in front of here because i'm gonna ask you a question okay so this tree here yeah it's uh pretty there aren't very many trees this size and you can see from the bark it's not like a common tree that you'll see so it's a little bit on the rare side particularly this far north it's normally found much further south and we're not really and there's some here yeah but it's we're kind of at the northern end of its range we're at the northern end of its range northern end of its range and um it's related to tulip poplar magnolia family it's magnolia it's a cucumber magnolia and does it does it get really beautiful flowers way up high yeah but again it's really hard because it's such a big tree it's hard to see and then it produces these flowered because i feel like all the magnolia has flowered the smaller ones but these are going to flower now yeah and they produce those little cucumber like seeds yeah pods and all yeah very good yeah well you see you've said it's related to the tulip [Laughter] peter marks is a plain ecologist he was at cornell for years and years and years and he was a co-author in a book i gave you yeah anyway we came out here with him and we were walking through here for like the first time and he saw a tree he just he's oh there's a cucumber magnolia it was like so how that image in my head is so blown away i think it's so cool because like sometimes when i come out to the woods you know and i have i've been so you know stuck in the city for so long right and then you come out into the woods and you feel like you have literally having a religious experience because you're just like oh yeah i've been so far away from you for so long and then you see something that is almost pedestrian you know it should be you know common and it becomes so um astronomically like touching to you because you see it for the first time or see it in a long time that's probably how we felt about the magnolia yeah but i think they're beautiful in the landscape but to see one this large it's pretty incredible yeah yeah and it has it's silvery this kind of silvery papery bark like yeah it's really unique is it one of a kind here there are i found a few smaller ones down in the lower part but they're maybe that big yeah but nothing i i'm not seeing one this big do you think it was um their seedlings were munched on by deer are they tasty to deer you think or no i don't know because maybe that's why maybe that's why you haven't seen it it could be yeah because we found that that's true for our like our oak none of our oak has regenerated because it just it's like yeah yeah what's what's this actually this is um mayflower miriaphalon oh okay it produces little tiny little tiny white yeah flowers and a little stock here's a red maple and the bark's a little bit different than a sugar maybe it's hard to describe in words but it's uh well look at that beautiful beach back there that was not affected yet wow that is just so it's like a baby skin it feels like you know what it is it's beautiful and then another tree like that anymore we haven't seen it as the basswood oh yes the tilia this is um saunder this is the one that you love the smell of the flowers of that has the heart-shaped flower or the heart-shaped leaves and then looks like a sap sucker or something got into it a little bit yeah yeah some kind of woodpecker and they're pretty uh distinctive they have these side shoes come up from the trunk that's one of the ways you can tell it easily and you don't have to cut these back or anything like that again we're leaving it yeah it's natural stay because that's how it grows and then we see yeah blood root it's kind of like is there any more in this uh i saw what i sorry i saw a little one here we'll see more of it as we walk around yeah uh but there's this little patch right here where they're trucking through this looks like it could be someone's this is yeah so most people think that trees are solid all the way but older trees mostly aren't really the only it's only the outer part of the tree that's alive yeah and so that they used all the way through yeah that's pretty hard better get your hand like just bit off in there yeah it's nice and cold in there yeah you can feel like you're you know your cold one in there like a little store some drinks yeah exactly a lot more grapevines over here yes a little bit of light a little bit more water as we get a little wet because vines need lots of water to support themselves they don't have uh they don't have good structure all but they live by transporting water really quickly so they can grow quickly yeah so they need light and water when you light water the vines really grow like in the tropics yeah you have that combination oh here it is so here's yeah so here's a black birch black birch they're gonna grow and that soil is eventually gonna be right away right and then but this looks like it got its roots like cut off and it's coming off yeah but yeah this is this is such a great example of what it looks like and also what the bark starts to look like before it becomes the incredible hulk and it like breaks out of its bark and turns all craggy so what exactly happened here this is an old tree so this is so a tree fell over and it tipped up some soil and then the black birch started growing on top of that soil mound and then that soil erodes away and leaves the black birds with its roots exposed well when i think of birch i think of like the kind of first movers in the landscape or on the interstitial they don't last like a tremendous amount of time they're not old growth or like the dominant climax for us so i always think of them as like they probably need some kind of disturbance or something yeah and yeah does somebody have a key or a knife or something i want to i have a key i forgot yeah a key or i just yeah i just want to this is my get back i'll give it right back like a hundred dollar bill you know just uh run away so let's see if i can scrape this off here and unlock the tape yeah does it smell nice yeah it smells really nice i think sorry oh my god that smells like root beer or birch beer smell that got to hit that up wintergreen some of the uh native peoples would chew the sticks i when i was a kid i chewed the sticks yeah cheers really good it's so good it's like candy you almost like want to lick it [Laughter] so so years from now people are going to come along yeah and they're going to say oh the how come the roots are out of the ground and how come this tree has all these marks on it yeah exactly somebody's been scratching it right that's why that's my scratch and stiff tree so you can tell how many tours i've had how many scratches around the street oh my god another black where it's in a mouth yeah and then down here is a really good example when you start to reveal this you know to us it's like speaking a different language so it's so illuminating this is a the best example that i i think we'll see of a black birch growing on top of a tip up mound so this hemlock tree fell yeah right tipped up the soil and look what's growing omg that's crazy yeah because and you could tell it's because otherwise if it was growing if it was growing prior to it would have been growing horizontally which would be oh right exactly exactly right yeah yeah yeah that's crazy yeah unbelievable well they're opportunists let me tell you and then i see you could probably have some vernal pools in here oh this through this area is pretty wet yeah so if you notice we've come down now yeah from the top to the lower the soil type changes a little bit less well-drained uh-huh and so up here well-drained this would be really good agricultural soil it's like niagara it's a good agricultural soil down here it's not so much and a lot of people think oh because it's wetter the trees will grow bigger but actually smaller because there's less oxygen in the soil yeah but the species change so once we start walking through here we'll see species we haven't seen before like for example a yellow birch oh yeah the paper yellow bark yep and then i see some purple pinkish flowers down here that i hadn't seen before i don't know what they are on the right can you see it oh those are geraniums oh those are the geraniums okay well i did see the geraniums yeah we saw them right yeah so a lot of people think you know the geraniums are what they plant in their flower boxes but those are pellergonia yeah okay now i see an is that an ash tree or no oh no the one with the bark that's missing it is an ash tree yes yeah yeah so we'll start to see white ash yeah through here yeah there's something i don't think it's uh emerald ash borer but there's something chewing on the bark yeah but a lot of times um you know porcupines will scrape on the bark and chew in the bark looking for insects porcupines that's something we haven't seen yet that'll be fun to see oh i can show you a porcupine damaged tree back at the beginning oh okay yeah not a real live porcupine not seen any in here but we have evidence that they're here so but this looks like emerald ash borer that looks like boreholes no they have more of a c shape okay so i don't think it's here they're scraping off the outside so i'd say this is more maybe a bird or something okay okay that's good to know so even if you see it as damaged it doesn't necessarily mean it's the bore correct getting in there so how would you recognize the boar so from what i understand since they aren't here they're more of a c-shaped entrance hole okay c-shaped and then this is horn is this um hornbeams yeah australia yup flaky bark you'll see your hickory down here then too somewhere yeah we'll come up with a lot there's hickory right here oh yeah bit or not it looks like it's eating it's uh i know i got to get this sign out of there i couldn't won't come out now because [Laughter] this is consuming yeah and then witch hazel oh nice hammer melis yeah this gets uh yellow flowers during the winter time it's a really nice understory it's like kind of sub shrubby tree yeah so yeah flowers like late in the fall and during the winter yeah and for a long time people weren't sure why it flowered then because there's no pollinators out then but there actually there is there's a moth that pollinates it a moth that's amazing yeah this is one of those ones i'd like to reestablish as well i love the smell of it and what else are you going to get flowering at that time i know nothing so nothing i hear a woodpecker in there somewhere like dead trees yeah i don't know if you're noticing this uh saunder but we're starting to get more into kind of like a more of a forest that we have so we you're seeing more hickory seeing some white pine the horn beam the hemlock ah there it is the woolly adelgid so this was an introduced insect as well it's kind of like a little mealy buggy kind of thing and this is affecting our hemlocks a lot of our hemlocks have pulled through it though haven't they so my understanding is that you know we're right in the margin of this so like a really cold winter it'll kind of go away from here okay but it'll stay along the lake and we had a mild winter so i think that's why we're seeing it here because last year wasn't yeah so we're just on that edge okay we had a mild winter yeah it was long but it wasn't really super cold okay so temperature-wise there weren't really like it wasn't 20 below right right it barely it was great for cross-country skiing it was like the best winter we've had ever which is nice because there was a pandemic and you couldn't do anything but yeah cross-country ski almost every day white oak this is our this is like our big white oak like but ours is you have to fit three people around it to go around it there's a white oak right here too so i guess we could we could really estimate our white oak by using some of the um information right like from the cert actually physically measuring in our circumference you might be able to if it's i mean the problem is you know your soil type and moisture conditions are probably different different it's going to affect the growth rate right maybe differently this is i off when i bring my students here uh it's a good place to compare a red oak to a white oak because you can see the differences in the bark yeah and also white oaks tend to be a lot more erect in terms of the growth habit and red oaks are a little flatter uh-huh what do you covet like how would you really be able to identify one over the other well the bark is see that the bark in the tree is different it's a little more riveted more fissured and darker and then this is like silvery gray and like flaky you know and then look if you look up here you can see the branching pattern on the white oak it's a lot more upright like their branches are reaching up whereas in the red red ochre they're like that and of course you have the leaves too yeah fall the red oak has these like uh you know kind of toothed edges and the white oak are more like round lobed so here's a red oak leaf with a sharp teeth and white ochre a lot more [Music] smooth and then you're seeing all this uh trout lilies i've never seen so many trout lilies before in my life and we can see the little seed pod yeah the seed pods coming out it's warm oh my goodness look at this so these have already flowered and that's what's left so different so here's a younger magnolia there you go yeah not the big one so this that could be mama up there and then what's that one right there is that another oak yeah okay see when i look at these two i'm like oh the bark starts to look very similar to me all of a sudden and i think there's right here's a nice shag bark hickory tulip poplar so our our woods really dominate with uh shag bark and oak he's eating it too all the hickories are eating here [Laughter] so funny they look like little beaver teeth oh muscle wood muscle wood ironwood look at this and they have a little like it is this like a little like a little like starting on it yeah what are those spots yep it's a combination of algae and fungus that uh coexist co-evolve together this is a really cool tree because these could be pretty old but they're they could be tiny yeah they the rings are really close together yeah and they use this wood for uh like axe handles and hammers and things like that yeah so it's like really strong ironwood muscle wood but it also looks like mussels you know yeah yeah but the other thing problem with common names is that this is also called ironwood yeah this is the eastern horn beam yeah so horn beam but same thing has very hard wood yeah and uh can be used for those tools i haven't seen this really large though either um yeah they don't get massive i've seen a maybe like this bigger yeah oh yeah about sedges hey do you have any of that kind of um japanese grass that has come through here or no you don't have i don't know we haven't seen that yet okay so let me talk about these sedges for a second so a lot of people think these are grasses but they're not they're sedges they have edges they just have edges yeah whereas grasses don't yeah and the really cool thing about a sedge at least so i think it's cool when the seas are formed they have a little bag of oil attached to the seed the seed falls to the ground with this little bag of oil attached and then along comes an ant picks up the seed with the oil takes it back to its nest eats the oil and leaves the seed in a site that's been cultivated yeah it's dry yeah and all the little dead ant parts and all our fertilizer right so it's figured out a way to get itself to a garden in the forest and sedges do this and they also found trillium and a lot of these spring ephemerals do that it's a way of getting them to a good site for germination that's insane so it has like this uh what is it called mir mir mc mc like miramaktiki or miramicodia or whatever yeah yeah where they have that that combination where they partner with ants somehow yeah this is uh called an eliasome is a scientific name for that and then we also right here right there by your foot is a sensitive fern these are quite common you can see them on trail heads and everything and this is another lyrodendron yeah isn't it amazing wow that's so crazy it's unbelievable how large they are and how straight you know straight as an arrow right wow and so you have a little walking through the woods and i heard voices and people talking and laughing says oh come over and i was walking this way anyway say hi i got over here and i could hear the voices but i didn't see anybody and i looked up and they were way up in the top of the tree they crawled up the tree cornell has a tree climbing club oh my god yeah and i said how did you how did you get up there because i knew they couldn't like wrap something around the training climate so they they take a rope a little thin rope on like a a slingshot or a bow and they shoot it it goes up and they hope it catches a branch it comes down then they tie a bigger rope to that and pull it up over and then they repel up the rope up into the high trees and they were out here you know doing that practicing so i said you know how how high up are you they said we're between 140 and 150 feet oh my god i would my pants i would totally shut my pants to have trees that tall is really pretty impressive oh my god how do they do it and with the honey hunters joey that you filmed that go up into the trees how do they climb up with ladders they have um they have this thing oh so they wrap it around the tree and then with their feet they go up okay but man this is 150 feet tall something yep that's what they said the rope is 150 feet near the end of the rope [Laughter] here's a really good place to see some of these turnip mounds yeah they just they're all over the place so between these and the factory no branches down low yeah these trees are so straight so like that's when a tree falls over and the root is like kind of vertical right uh perpendicular to the the ground and then they just kind of die back yeah and then it forms these like when it's wet you can have those little vernal pools and that's great for the amphibians right oh here's some blood root nice little clump oh there we go yeah another one of our natives it's blood root and it's called uh blood ruby cross when you dig it up this clay yeah and break the root it's just red it just looks like blood and it has a nice white white flower on it yeah it hasn't quite flowered yet yeah flower buds should be here's the flower but right here it's coming up it hasn't flowered yet and the cool thing about this name of this plant the scientific name of genus is sanguinaria yeah there comes some blood yeah i haven't seen the hepatica yet though i know i was just this is what i was thinking yeah i saw one in here when i was here on sunday i was giving a tour and i saw it my brain is like foggy because i've been out of the habitat for so long and it's so funny how like all of a sudden some names will come back to me and others are like you know way back there with the cobwebs on well thank you marvin this is a pleasure because it really shows us what our forest can become if you just leave it and interestingly enough back in the turn of the century ten percent of our new york was forced to because all the rest of the forests were cut down and now it's up to almost 60 percent so we're making progress making progress and and hopefully now people have a better view of what their forest can become exactly because we didn't pay attention back in the day i guess yeah thank you so much marvin you're quite welcome that's really enjoyable yeah if you haven't heard yet we'll be donating and investing 10 of our youtube adsense revenue from this channel back into the finger lakes community we're so thankful that espoma our partners across both plant one army and flock finger lakes channels will be matching those funds this year as well as through a combination of monies and or products depending on the project so just know that by watching these videos you're helping the community here you

Channel: Flock Finger Lakes

Views: 6,071

Rating: 4.9708738 out of 5

Keywords: Flock, Flock Finger Lakes, Finger Lakes New York, homestead, homesteading, how to homestead, start your homestead, find your homestead, permaculture, permaculture farm, coliving, intentional community, upstate New York, agroforestry, summer rayne oakes, forest walk, old growth forest, Smith Woods, Trumansburg Smith Woods, old growth woods Northeast, Northeast forest, ancient trees, old growth forest US, old growth hemlock, beech, oak, woods walk, Smith Woods Finger Lakes

Id: RUAfSqKG3DE

Length: 61min 26sec (3686 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021