A Walk in the Woods

Feeling some serious cabin fever, I headed out for a walk in the woods on Wed., in spite of the snow and wet.  It turned out to be a very enjoyable bit of exercise at least.

One of the two gateway Sugar Maples that mark the entrance to the woods has lost a huge branch.\

I find myself feeling that the trail entrance is a little less dignified than before.

After walking here dozens of times over five years, \I finally noticed a Butternut tree, and it was right beside the path!

The top of the tree looked still alive, but not very healthy.  Now that I've noticed it (finally), I'll be watching to see if it has the Butternut Canker.

And this is my favourite old fallen log.  Right in the centre of that picture beside the old log, a nice patch of Trillium will be blooming in mid-May.

But what I really noticed were all the wet patches.  Now partially frozen patches of slush, there were numerous puddles like this in locations where I'd never seen them before.

Even out in the field, where I loop past to rejoin the woods trail.  Normally I can walk right around the edge of the forest here.

There is always a forested pond in the woods, in the far distance here, but at the moment there are a whole series of slushy ponds leading through the low area toward it.

And of course there were still some young Beech saplings holding on to their leaves, a favourite feature of the winter woods.

Did you notice that these are all black and white?  After taking them in colour, I realized that there was virtually no colour to be seen; it was all shades of white to gray, so I took out what little colour there was (like these Beech leaves), to see what it would look like.  I've never done that before!