ENTS, For those of you on planning to attend the canoe trip on this Friday before the ENTS Rendezvous, I wanted to give you a couple of comments. The first Island we will be visiting is King Island. It is one that can be waded to from the west bank. The west bank is a relatively wide flood plain. If you look on air photos of the flood plain you can see the traces of several channels that cut across it indicating previous river courses and the the overall evolution of the feature over time. One thing we need to do while on king Island is to finish up the Rucker Index. We have measurements for eight species, and more are present, but we just have not measured them. We have Silver Maple (104.3), Black Willow, White Ash, Bitternut Hickory, Sycamore (120), Basswood, Hawthorn Dotted (39.3), Slippery Elm, Black Locust, and Butternut (66.1) noted on the island.The dotted hawthorn is the national champ by points. There are surely other species on the island, including at least another species of hawthorn and some cherries.. There is potential for taller trees than we have measured and there are more species to be measured. The one single stem Silver Maple is truly spectacular. The other thing for King and Baker is to see if there is regeneration of the silver maples and sycamores in the flood zone of the island.
Baker Island is the second island to be visited. it contains a 147 feet tall sycamore. The downstream end of the island was hit by a tornado in 1995 (Dale has a photo from a book). There is a neat fat basswood that was broken off at about 60 feet by the winds. I lost a measuring tape near the downstream end of the island. Maybe we can still find it. A broken top yellow birch is found on the left bank looking downstream at the side of the tornado area. it was not measured for height (maybe 25 feet) but does represent one of the few yellow birches known for the islands. Also check out the butternuts that were broken of by the tornado ad are now resprouting in the canary grass fields, and the really really nice hawthorns. See you all there Friday morning. Ed "Oh, I call myself a scientist. I wear a white coat and probe a monkey every now and then, but if I put monetary gain ahead of preserving nature...I couldn't live with myself" - Professor Hubert Farnsworth --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Eastern Native Tree Society http://www.nativetreesociety.org Send email to [email protected] Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/entstrees?hl=en To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
