Fungus-weakened root systems create wildlife refuges that hunters cannot penetrate

Evidence

My woods is headquarters for a family of coons; few of my neighbors have any. One Sunday in November, after a new snow, I learned why. The fresh track of a coon-hunter and his hound led up to a half-uprooted maple, under which one of my coons had taken refuge. The frozen snarl of roots and earth was too rocky to chop and too tough to dig; the holes under the roots were too numerous to smoke out. The hunter had quit coonless because a fungus disease had weakened the roots of the maple. The tree, half tipped over by a storm, offers an impregnable fortress for coondom. Without this ‘bombproof’ shelter, my seed stock of coons would be cleaned out by hunters each year. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 267

Categorization

• XREF: An elegant concrete case of disturbance history (disease → windthrow → bombproof den) legible in present landscape — squarely the Reading the Landscape method. — connects to: Tree disease and decay sustain a web of wildlife that healthy woodlots lack — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 277; An old-growth forest’s apparent chaos conceals a web of fungal and water interconnections — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1018; Root-system depth determines which species survive coastal gales — Vinson Brown, Reading the Woods: Seeing More in…, 163

Broader Connections

• An old-growth forest’s apparent chaos conceals a web of fungal and water interconnections #expands (0.78) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1018
• Root-system depth determines which species survive coastal gales #complicates (0.72) — Vinson Brown, Reading the Woods, 163