Winter Walks and helping at Stadium Woods at Virginia Tech

      

                                     Cars are parked on the root systems of these old oaks-- a no no.

Woooo --- it wasn't half as cold as I thought it would be on Saturday, the day we had our first "cleanup" of the year at Stadium Woods. Stadium Woods is (there may be some grammatical debate on whether the verb should be "is" or "are", but with an expanse of wood/forest we Americans tend to use the verb "is") located behind Virginia Tech's Lane Stadium, and been the site of controversy and back and forth arguing and contesting of decisions concerning its future. After all, when you're talking about 300 to 400 year old oaks in the middle of town, a rare occurrence on the populated East coast, then maybe something should be done to help this woods thrive and survive.
     In the past the university has talked about cutting up this 14 acre forest to create an exercise facility for the football players. Considering the fact that there is actually a forestry major at Virginia Tech, you would think they would want to keep the woods intact, especially when studying all these white oaks, (which most of them are) and what ecosystem is unique to white oaks. But they didn't seem to care about this. So the "Friends of Stadium Woods" and the local Master Naturalists have had to be the advocate for the woods. Tsk, tsk.
     But a group of students came out on this sunny day to help pull up alien invasives like Privet, Japanese honeysuckle, English ivy, and Oriental bittersweet. These are plants that once they get foothold  in an area, they overrun the native plants and can kill them off and change the ecosystem. We had some students actually using shovels, like the two guys working under me, to totally, "totally" get rid of multi-flora rose. This woods already has a good share of brambles from black raspberries and wine berries, so the "sticker bushes" of multi-flora aren't too welcome. It is really an overgrown mess in some places, so we worked in our winter coats, hats and work gloves to pull out and pile up invasives taking over the woods for a few hours. 
     Even if it's not been decided by the university president at Virginia Tech whether or not  to fully keep this forest intact, we will continue to strive to clean up the invasives. There are trails locals and visitors can take, bringing them close to trees you need two to three people to reach all the way around. And that's big, let me tell you!

Of Stars and Winter Walks

    I remember (where has the time gone) a few years ago, when oldest son Zeb was between jobs and we walked on a sunny day at nearby Bisset Park. It was a year of "many snows, "and I was glad to have on my hiking/snow boots because most of the paved trail was wet with snow, though there were foot prints you could step into. The sun shone through as the trees were bare, and it became almost like a sunny spring day in temperature. Winter walks can be nice or (as in the case of the Great Backyard Bird Count) incredible frigid and uncomfortable. As I get older I seem to tolerate the harshness less and less. If we are in the midst of climate change I wish the harsher weather would be left behind.
    But, spring or winter, nature seems to have a need to "jut" out in front of us. In December,
(this is late winter now but I am thinking back) I was out at midnight because I was told there'd be an array of meteorites or "falling stars" shooting all over across the sky. Granted, it was cold and I only stayed out on my deck a little over 10 minutes, so I only saw 2 or 3. They were tiny, brief, spurts of light streaking across the sky, faint punctuations in the sky, and not the dazzling fireworkslike display I was hoping for. Nature can do that, not making much of a splash. Certainly in winter, the colors are hidden, the trees lay dormant, the birds have fled. We like to have the colors of nature around us all the time, but winter pushes them away from us, perhaps to appreciate them even more when they do come back around. Thoreau may have considered winter his favorite season, but I guess you would have to say that in an area with such long winters. I was born in Massachusetts but have no interests in being there in winter!