Falling trees

Finding newly fallen trees in the forest next door after a storm or strong wind is a common occurrence.  Some have snapped, others have toppled over, lifting plates of roots and earth out of the ground. Birch trunks lie bleaching among the leaf litter, while elsewhere dead trees remain propped against living ones at crazy angles. 

After the most recent winds, I find my familiar paths blocked. New paths need to be threaded through the debris. Birch, pine, oak and – identified by AI – hornbeam (grab in Polish). According to my neighbour to the north, this land has not been farmed for over 50 years and just left to grow wild. Over time, the woodland has been in the process of gradually changing its composition as successive generations of trees grow, mature and die.

Birch is a pioneer species; it is one of the first trees to move in. It grows quickly, tolerates poor soil and produces vast quantities of seed. But it is not particularly long-lived. As a young forest closes over and becomes darker, the birches which colonised the site decades earlier begin to die, like the one below, while slower-growing, more shade-tolerant trees continue developing beneath them.

What is striking about this forest is the quantity of dead timber that has simply been left where it fell. In a park or garden, a fallen tree is regarded as something that needs removing. Here, it is part of the system. A dead trunk becomes habitat for fungi, beetles and other insects, that provide food for woodpeckers and other birds. Gradually the timber softens, rots, collapses and is incorporated back into the forest floor, returning nutrients to the soil from which the next generation of trees will.

Trees that have been uprooted rather than snapped suggest that their root systems are shallow. Instead of one great root plunging vertically downwards, much of the anchorage lies relatively close to the surface. Under sufficiently strong winds the entire root plate can rotate out of the ground. As extreme weather events become more frequent, trees will adapt and new ones will sink deeper roots.

Once one large tree has fallen, those behind it become more exposed to the wind. Forest trees protect one another. Remove one and the aerodynamic conditions change for its neighbours. The prevailing winds are from the north-west; so far not one has fallen westwards over my fence since it was erected to mark the eastern border of my działka. There is, however, always a first time.

Standing among these fallen trunks, it is easy to think in terms of the deaths of individual trees: this one has died, that one has blown down, another is beginning to rot. But from the forest's point of view, the individual tree is almost incidental, the forest continues, new saplings will emerge from the forest floor and push up towards the canopy.

Left: bonus shot – last Friday's full moon, taken just around the corner from the next-door forest, where it opens out onto orchards. Shot on my Samsung Galaxy A20, f/1.8 at 0.8 sec exposure, 4,500 ASA.

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