My forest is full of old snags just like the one you see above. The story I was told was that many years ago, when the land was part of a cattle ranch, a defoliant was sprayed from helicopters to kill all of the trees. Then the same helicopters came by later and spread fescue seed. Fescue is called the grass that ate the county. Anyway, many of the trees did die (though many survived) and their standing trunks have been providing habitat for all sorts of critters for generations. Some of that has changed recently though. All of the rain we have had lately has saturated the ground. These snags, which have no roots to speak of but only stubs of their main roots from decades past, have little more than their contact with the soil to keep them standing. And since the soil has been soggy lately, many of the snags have been toppling. We've found a few on the road and across trails. Some have split cedars down the middle on their fall. A few are finding their way into firewood. Most will simply rot into humus now that they're in contact with the ground. Most of the snags I have cut have only been hollow in small parts. The rest of the trunk is mostly solid, well dried wood. I don't know about lumber, but it seems like the wood in these snags is still good for building. Might be hard to drive a nail into it though. Missouri calendar:

• Truman's birthday
• Watch for common nighthawks over cities at night.

Today in Missouri history:

• The Missouri Woman’s Suffrage Club was organized in St. Louis in 1867; the sole purpose of this organization was the political enfranchisement of women, the first such organization in the United States.
• Phoebe W. Couzins of St. Louis became Missouri’s first woman law school graduate when she was graduated from the Washington University Law Department in 1871.
• Harry S Truman, thirty-third President of the United States, is born in Lamar, Missouri in 1884. Harry had no middle name. The "S" was all there ever was to it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 1:01 am and is filed under Green Things. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.