Until February

As late fall moves in, the fall blooming asters and goldenrods have all gone to seed, leaving dolomite glades and woodlands in a dormant state, one we'll be seeing for the next five months or so until the first flush of violets pop up. One lone flower remained on a woodland edge last week, a blaze of color in an otherwise khaki world. Yellow grasses and bare trees have their own stark beauty, with long shadows, mushrooms, lichens, mosses and exposed geology offering dynamism on the landscape.

Turkey food

Sitting in my Adirondack chair with a book has been a hazardous undertaking in recent weeks. Falling with the velocity of meteors from my stately pin oak and chinquapin oak, acorns continue to rain down today just as they have for the past three weeks.

Last weekend, three successive pin oak acorns nailed my shoulder and arm, causing me to move my heavy chair to a safe location under a cedar ten yards from the oak canopy. Intermittently, after I had moved the chair, acorns continued to fall next to the chair, acorns casually hurled out the window at me while I read. Naturally, it took a while before I caught on.

According to the 2009 Mast Report issued by the Missouri Department of Conservation, acorn production is down from last year in the Ozarks. Irrespective of the report, the woodlands I frequent are loaded with white oak and post oak acorns this year. Evidently, the turkeys these days are full of them. No, I haven't killed a turkey this season (nor do I plan to), but my local hunter cum colleague continues to bring in acorns fresh from the crops of birds he's killed. He's asked for my sketchy acorn identification skills so he can collect these species to plant in his own hunting grounds. The most common acorn found in turkeys killed in Boone Co.? Quercus imbricaria, shingle oak, a ubiquitous tree in these parts.

Squirrels should be well fed this winter, and their preference of acorns for storing and eating will impact the composition of our woodlands for years to come. Squirrels distinguish between white and red oak acorns; red oak acorns are higher in fat, but also high in the distasteful tannins. White oak acorns have less fat and also fewer tannins.

While squirrels prefer fatty red oak acorns, if white oak acorns are more abundant, they will eat more of them just after acorn drop. White oaks send out taproots days and weeks after they fall, while red oaks sprout the following spring. Since the tannins in white oak acorns are concentrated in the taproot, squirrels tend to eat them first, and store red oak acorns for the winter. Recent research has shown that squirrels will only eat the top part of the red oak acorn (about 60% of it) to avoid the concentrated tannins at the embyronic end. Even though squirrels eat the bulk of an acorn, the remaining part can still produce a tree. Estimates suggest that 74% of all buried acorns are never found again.

The thriving squirrel population in my yard has altogether ignored the bird feeders and suet this fall. With all the nutritious acorns and walnuts visible in my backyard after Thursday's fire, they have a veritable buffet that surely sustains them better than safflower seed.

Hold your fire!

To employ fire as an effective management tool, it must be applied judiciously and responsibly. With red flag warnings popping up all over southwest Missouri and 40 mph gusts predicted for tonight in the Niangua Basin, we decided to cancel today's prescribed fire event. The burn unit in question borders private lands on three sides, all grassy, flammable woodlands. To prevent being the cause of a raging wildfire through continuous fuels, we blew out our torches as soon as we lit them. Sorry kids, no pictures of woodlands in flames today.

Burnable woodlands

It must have been Monday when my fellow fire enthusiast colleague walked into my cubicle with a handful of red oak leaves he found outside our building. Slowly, while standing over my wastebasket, he crumbled each leaf into little bits and sherds. "It's at 7. No, 8. Fuel moisture of 8. It'll burn...." He could sense it like the rest of the old Ozarkers could that morning: perfect weather for burning woodlands that day. Actually, the weather all week has been conducive to fire (We skipped today because of those squirrel-y winds out of the north shifting all over the place....)

Last week's persistent and torrential rain events knocked all the pretty leaves from the trees, leaving woodlands full of bare hardwoods and with a thick layer of flammable fuel. A few days of clear skies and drying winds have created sublime fire conditions. Weeks like this one don't come along too often anymore, apparently, at least not as often as they did 20 years ago, according to my colleague.

Every fall and spring, fire weather conditions used to align perfectly with fuel moistures and appropriate wind direction and speed. Spring and fall seasons have been too wet in recent years, restricting fire season to one, maybe two days a week, say, once or twice a month. But a few years ago, you could feel it; fall would bring at least two weeks in a row like this week wherein the leaves crunched perfectly underfoot, the temperatures remained steadily in the 50s and 60s, winds blew magically 7-10 mph. These days are few and far between lately. Fall fire season is short to begin with, as day lengths shorten dramatically by mid-December.

But this week? Perfect. Never better. I'm headed to the Niangua Basin to set fire to a pristine glade-open woodland complex in the morning, and I hope the private landowners down there see the smoke, feel the weather in their bones, and set fire to hundreds of those awesome, grassy acres that have been maintained with fire for thousands of uninterrupted years.

When your costume is engulfed in flames

Thwarted! By my own gym! Trunks or Treats going on until 9 at the ARC. I feel so betrayed. The little girl across the street came over for her Snickers bar and stared for a long while at the big platter of giant bars. Saddened by the lack of trick or treaters, I removed to the fire pit to set fire to my costume. Take that, Halloween in Columbia. I hope an air inversion sets in to keep smoke hovering on my street all night long.

Using History as a Guide

This is all Max's fault. Max, my mother's next door neighbor, a remarkably enthusiastic 50-ish year old Shreveporter who runs a great SCUBA store in town, doesn't really know how to spend money. She has so much of it that she regularly dumps beaucoups dollars on random holiday decorations and really nice weekly presents for my mother (who can offer nothing but sacks of pecans and baked goods in return). I think the Hallmark store downtown is subsidized by Max and her SCUBA store. I realized this last Christmas when, day after day, she brought my mother some fancy Fitz and Floyd pitcher or a handmade ceramic gingerbread house with little blinking lights all over it or hand blown glass ornaments or fancy chocolates. I don't think my mom knows her last name or even where Max came from, but Max is very enamored with my mother. And Max loves holidays.

So, that single day last week when I was in Louisiana, I stepped onto the porch to change the wreath on the front door. The sunflower/geranium wreath was slated for the garage, and the enormous pumpkin/apple/silk fall leaves/orange ribbon wreath was ready to make its autumnal debut. As I stepped back to see how austere my mother's 1910 salt box house looked with a single pumpkin and a fall wreath on the front door, Max glides over with suggestions, easy ways to make my mother's house outfitted for Halloween.

Max had been working on her stoop all morning: enormous plastic spiders in webs, plastic jack-o-lanterns with little strobe lights flickering so brightly that I could have a fast aneurysm if I looked at them long enough, strands of purple and orange lights, one of those big inflatable ghosts with a snow globe full of flying bats, more pumpkins, black cat cutouts, black and orange tinsel. She does this for every holiday. She told me that she would "go out and buy your mother more Halloween stuff," but I explained to her that my mother "doesn't need more stuff." "But these are pumpkins and lights and banners you can use year after year. The pumpkin she has now will rot." Of course it will, because that's what most vegetables do over time....

I ran interference for my mother- deflecting Max the whole day -discouraging Max from bombarding my mother's old house with black tinsel and strobe lights and plastic pumpkins.

But Max made me think that my little yellow house in Columbia might not be as Halloween-spirited as hers. Of course, back when I had a good dog and a semblance of a social life, I really wouldn't think about Max and her decorations. I certainly wouldn't think that my spare pumpkin lights and pumpkins weren't showing enough Halloween spirit to my Columbia neighbors. But I began to think that maybe last year, I didn't have trick-or-treaters because my house wasn't as decorated as Max's. [I fully recognize that these are thoughts that only creep into a normal 37 year old's brain when she is so ridiculously tense at her job and misses her dog to the point of requiring frequent distraction to function properly.]

Leave it to the house that hosts the Army of Santas in Vienna every Christmas to throw down the gauntlet in the Ozark Highlands. I wrote about this house on Highway 63 last December, explaining that they clearly had more Christmas cheer than anyone else in the Ozarks. Zooming through Vienna earlier this week, I see that the folks with all the Santa Claus statues must have a separate storage unit for all of the ghosts, pumpkins and black cat figurines that now litter their front yard. 10 pumpkins, 20 ghosts, all smiling, some ghosts with cats under their veiled arms, cats with arched backs all lit up with little light bulbs.

So I don't have big cats in the yard, or even a single ghost. I have three pumpkins on the bannister, pumpkin lights around the door, little autumnal effects on my grapevine wreath (made by immigrants from grapevines harvested from Donaldson Point Natural Area, because I guess harvesting plants from a NA is cool with the managers there?), unswept oak leaves, and black construction paper bats fluttering in my window panes. So will it work? Will trick or treaters come to my house this year? I've passed the church at the end of the block that thwarted last year's Halloween by offering soulless car trunks full of candy to neighborhood kids.

The church sign now reads "ATM: Stands for AToneMent" rather than last year's message of "Trunks of Treats." Not sure what today's sign really means to the average driver, but to me it means that they may not support the car trunks full of candy on Saturday night! I no longer have a houseful of kids across the street to warrant the purchase of big candy bars for Halloween night. That smarmy little home schooled child who pirouettes down the street is still around, and will probably slap on some stupid wings and come over before sunset. I'll give her a Heath bar, her favorite, but will explain to her that wings do not constitute a costume. Fluffy tutus are also not costumes. A mask is not a costume. Masks are components of a costume, but it takes more than a mask to make a costume.

In preparation for the onslaught of trick-or-treaters, we consulted last year's bar graph of candy taken from the Pyrex bowl by little costumed hands. Reese's won, hands down, so we bought a big bag of Reese's, some boring plain Hershey's bars for the peanut allergy crowd, and the favorite bars of the kids who used to live across the street, in hopes that their mother will magically have a car to bring them over to us on Halloween. We picked up some big Snickers and Milky Way bars for the kids in really good costumes.


I joined the Social Committee after last year's costume contest (which I won and still proudly post my award on my cubicle wall) to help drum up support for events like the Halloween Costume Contest. The Social Committee has been a little distracted lately, and we may not even have a costume contest this year. Never mind the contest, I'm covering myself in red needle stage cedar slash and attaching little yellow and orange flames with floral wire all over the branches to represent a cedar slash fire. Because I will be more flammable than any plastic costume could ever be on Halloween, I may wear my sooty Nomex shirt instead of a brown turtle neck. When you don't have a dog or friends to distract you, you revert to that New Orleanian state where you commit 100% to dressing up for Halloween, even if you're a walking fire hazard.

Late October in the Niangua Basin