3.26.06
42°F
1 hour
1.2 miles
lost mitten
spring birds

Living temporarily in Findlay, Ohio, presents my hiking id with a dilemma:  where to hike within less than an hour's drive. The choices are slim, unfortunately, but I'm determined to check them all out.

Today I took off on a cloudy, post-winter day to see what the small, but promising, Oakwoods Nature Preserve had to offer. Locate a quick 10 minutes from Findlay, I'd hoped at least it offered non-man-made trails (translation: no paving!). In that area I wasn't disappointed.

The Preserve is a tiny 76 acres, but combines wetlands, woods, and prairie for an interesting (and quick) trek through those habitats. I did see a woodchuck briefly, and I'm sure when the foliage returns there'll be more critters to spot. But today I mostly had to be content with active birds. I spotted several brilliant cardinals and the fattest Robin I've ever seen (pigeon sized). But despite the small size, they (park service) seem to be doing a good job to eco-manage these habitats. It will be interesting to return in a few months to see the difference foliage makes.

Today's hike was a good, albeit short, cobweb cleaner for my head. Although not visually appealing (I don't think I've seen so much brown and gray all at once), the temperature was conducive for hiking and gratefully, no wind! The bareness of everything made me think about hiking post-winter before spring has a chance to make her grand entrance. In fact, I only found a couple of places where green ground cover was beginning to appear, and a couple of places where some nice green lichen covered a few logs. Other than that, one could enjoy the range of colors, so long as that included any tone between brown and gray!

The other starkness about a pre-spring forest, particularly one like this with no evergreens at all, is that the forest appears dead. While I noticed an above average amount of rotted and fallen trees (no doubt the same amount that's always there, just less obvious with a green canopy above), it was easy to wonder whether the forest would come back. Think about the early settlers, used to the evergreen-ness of the northeast, who lived through their first winter and had to wonder if all the vegetation in the forest had died! Had to be a strange event, seeing all those leafless trees looking identical to the dead branches and fallen trunks.

And speaking of trunks, did you know that a rare, prehistoric bird skeleton exists in this small preserve in Northwest Ohio? Neither did I. Actually, on all my hikes I like to look for tree oddities, and the two pictured here are pretty good spoils of that game. The bent trunk at right is very unusual in it's preciseness of right angles, and of course, the fallen trunk below does look like a dinosaur fossil that should be mounted in a museum somewhere. At least these two sights broke the brown-grey monotony a little bit. If I can't find critters to watch, then the natural art of Mother Nature is the next best thing. Usually I'm content with the odd fungi or two, but it's nice to have some interesting tree shapes to look at occassionally.

I'll return to Oakwoods later in the spring and update on the changes. Hopefully I'll then be hiking through a veritable green explosion of life, with a scattering of wild flowers to tint the scene.