Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Death of a Tree

Just a few short months ago, I posted a beautiful picture of crap apple blossoms; I mentioned that it might be the last time the tree ever bloomed. How right I was.

It was VERY windy this afternoon. The wind blew and blew, with gust in the 50 mph's. The wind was so strong and loud that we never heard it fall. I stepped outside to get the mail, and the tree was lying on the ground.

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Poor tree. I'm not surprised it fell; I'm surprised it held on this long. You can see that the trunk is completely rotted around the base, save for one small bit of live wood that was feeding the current blooms.

Hopefully the downy woodpeckers babies living in the woodpecker hole are fully fledged...
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and have already flown away. This is the second year they have made a home in our crabapple; it's been quite a few weeks since we first noticed them this year, so I have some hope. They drilled this nest last year, about the time we noticed that half of the tree had died (and they were the reason we didn't remove the entire tree when we had our trees trimmed).

I didn't hear their soft cheeping when I tried to listen; but the wind was very loud.

9 comments:

Why S? said...

Aw, this made me sad. It's been a bad year for birds around your home. I'll keep my fingers crossed that the little woodpeckers were gone.

modernemama said...

Not my favorite birds right now but I hope they survived

Jennifer said...

I heard them VERY loudly this morning when I went to walk the dogs... and saw the dad up on a nearby branch. Hopefully he can find them, and won't abandon them!

They are VERY loud, and it's been 18 hours or so, so I'm guessing they are getting food.

We will have to wait on chopping it up to haul away!

pedalpower said...

Aw. It's always sad to lose a tree. Hope the woodpeckers make it!

Anonymous said...

We had a couple of nasty storms that came through our area in the last week or so, and the number of trees that have been knocked down is stunning. MysteryMan's parents lost a cherry tree that had been growing in their yard for 25 years.

Glad to hear that the babies made it through and dad is still around! Keep us posted...

Josh said...

I'm glad that it doesn't sound like the house or anything else was harmed when the tree fell down.

Christine said...

The Mother Nature Landscaping crew has been busy around our place to. I'm tired of picking up limbs and trees!

Anonymous said...

We also had some very bad storms come through the neighborhood last week - put an end to one of our glass tables on the deck (gonna post about that sometime or another)... so now we've got glass all in the back yard :-(

Hope the woodpeckers find a safe home, and I'm glad the tree didn't post a threat to your house!

Anonymous said...

A good friend of mine owns an apple orchard down the road from me.

Trees rot out at the base of the trunk if they are planted too deeply. Many times they come from the nursery that way. If you decide to replace that tree with something else, when planting, you want to clearly see the root flare above ground. You can't plant a tree too shallow, but you can very easily plant too deeply.

Good luck to the wood peckers, glad you have a brick clad house...