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Come back to this page each day to read another entry from Frederick R. Gehlbach's almanac of suburban natural and unnatural history, "Messages from the Wild," which chronicles the world of a forested ravine in central Texas.
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By Thanksgiving most deciduous trees are bare, or almost, but seedlings and saplings remain green a bit longer, having been protected from early frosts by the former canopy. Their leaves are larger than those of the canopy trees, an adaptation for gathering light in summer shade. Now they alone soak up the limited sun of this old year. Cultured versus native pecans are distinguished by their respective broad deep-green versus narrower light-green leaflets. Along a quarter-mile of the creek, eighty-eight percent of the young pecans I count are cultivars planted by seed-dispersing animals that unwittingly remake the forest. |
Frederick R. Gehlbach is Professor Emeritus of Biology and Environmental Studies at Baylor University. His ecological studies have taken him from New Zealand to Slovakia and, in the Americas, from Alaska and Newfoundland to Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. His research interests include the life-history strategies of small owls, small burrowing snakes and urban wildlife ecology.
From MESSAGES FROM THE WILD: AN ALMANAC OF SUBURBAN NATURAL AND UNNATURAL HISTORY by Frederick R. Gehlbach, Copyright © 2002. Courtesy of the University of Texas Press.
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