I just got back to the Los Angeles area after two weeks with my family in the Midwest. This marked the first time I was really paying attention to what was alive around me during the Midwest winter, and I made it something of a challenge for myself to get out and find living things beyond what was planted and maintained. For today's expedition I wanted to explore a small region of unkept land that had been hit by the tornado a few years back and see how all the downed trees were impacting the ecosystem.
It was -15 Fahrenheit when I headed to the woods. My mission became seeing as many critters as I could in the cold. Though I didn't photograph every single chickadee I heard, I did try to get one or two of each group. I also followed the noises of woodpeckers as best I could. This meant sliding down into ditches and climbing out, crawling backwards under trees cradling my camera above the snow, and generally clambering around in the brush. My breath froze my eyelashes together when I squinted. It was a fantastic time. I returned only when my phone and camera batteries both died in the cold.
I don't think I can conclude anything really from one morning traipsing through the woods, but one takeaway might have been that the large downed trees from the 2019 storm look to have been mostly yard trees, chainsaw'd apart when they fell, whereas this little section of woods was too young (or something?) to have dead trees substantial enough for larger woodpeckers. This, plus what I read just a few days ago how important woodpeckers are for creating nests for other birds, marks another realization obvious in retrospect about how little I know about the interaction of birds and the environment and how much I have to learn.
