Explore the Forest in Fall
By Esther Kiviat

Fall is a fabulous time of year to take yourself and your children for an exploratory walk in a nearby forest. A "forest" may be a small patch of woods in a city park, a neighbor's wood lot, or a vast expanse of tall trees in one of the many great forests of the Hudson Valley. Wherever they are, the autumn woods are places of beauty and continuous change, as leaves burst into color and begin to fall, and plants and animals gradually get ready for winter.

In your backpack or walking bag tuck a garden trowel or old digging spoon, a magnifying glass, and a few recycled plastic bags and start out on a sensory excursion into the woods. Using all your senses--touching, smelling, tasting, listening, as well as looking--will help reveal the forest secrets.

As you enter the woods, it is almost immediately feels cooler, the light is dimmer, the only sounds are your footsteps on sticks and fallen leaves. Walk a short distance into the deeper forest, away from roadside areas, and sit down under a tree. It may be a conifer--an evergreen tree that bears its seeds in cones and usually has needles, such as a hemlock or a pine. Or it may be a deciduous tree--a tree that has flat, soft leaves and loses its leaves in autumn, like maples and oaks.

Feel the bark of the tree you are leaning against. Is it rough? Is it smooth? Is it scaly? Paper birch has smooth white papery bark; American beech has very smooth gray bark. Mature maple and oak trees have rough bark. Hickory trees have shaggy bark. Feel the ground under the tree with both hands. If you are under a hemlock or pine tree, there may be a thick layer of needles on the ground. Evergreens lose their leaves a few at a time all around the year, but their branches never become bare.

Lie flat on your back. Look up through the trees to the bits of open sky at the top. Little shafts of sunlight filter down through the branches. It seems very quiet at first. Close your eyes and let the forest voices seep into your consciousness. A woodpecker drums loudly on a tree trunk. Birds sing. An insect hums around your head. There is a rustling noise nearby. As you open your eyes a tiny chipmunk scurries away. You realize that the forest is not composed of just trees. It is vast community of living things. Creatures of all kinds are in the ground, under the bark, among the branches and in the air.

You also realize that the forest consists of various layers, from the tree tops to the ground. It is windier, hotter and lighter at the top. On the ground it is cooler, dimmer and moister. In between are other layers. Each is a little different, with its own conditions of moisture, light and wind. Different kinds of animals live or feed in each layer.

The top layer is called the canopy. It is made up of the green tops of tall trees. The canopy may be 25 to 250 feet high. In it live many kinds of leaf-eating insects and predacious insects that eat the leaf-eaters. Because there is ample food, insect and seed-eating birds also live in the canopy, in spring building nests in branches or tree holes. A ruby-crowned kinglet may conceal its 2 1/2 inch nest in an evergreen 75 feet above the ground. The red-tailed hawk builds a ponderous platform of sticks and leaves in the top of a tall pine, catching mice and other small mammals in the layers below. After the leaves have fallen, you may also spot a ragged nest of sticks high up a tree; this may be a squirrel's home. Squirrels scamper and feed through all the layers.

Below the canopy is the understory, composed of smaller trees up to about 20 feet high. In the maple-beech, oak-hickory, or white pine-hemlock forests of the Northeast, the understory may consist of dogwoods, sassafras, hornbeam, or younger trees of the kind that tower above it. If you find a sassafras with its mitten-shaped leaves, try scratching the bark to smell the fragrant odor. Many birds, insects and mammals make their homes in the understory, out of reach of large predators on the ground and protected from hawks, owls and harsh weather by the canopy above them.

The shrub layer, below the understory, is composed of shrubs or bushes seven or eight feet tall. In a dense forest like hemlock-pine woods, there is so little light that few shrubs can grow. In more open forests, a thick shrub layer offers protection for small mammals such as deer mice and chipmunks. They make their homes in burrows under the shrubs and feed on plentiful berries, seeds and worms. Insects also live in the shrub layer. Several species of songbirds nest in the low, thick branches. Ground nesting birds like grouse also build homes under the shrubs.

The herb layer under the shrubs is composed of soft-stemmed plants, like grasses, growing up to a few feet high. Here, in spring and summer, are wildflowers. Mosses, lichens, ferns and mushrooms are part of this layer. Caterpillars and other insect larvae feed on the plants. Deer browse on grasses, berries and tender twigs.

The ground level is called the forest floor. It is the garbage can for all the layers above it. Acorns, seeds, pine cones, feathers and fur, dead animals, branches, bark and leaves constantly fall on it. Many animals make their homes in this area including ants, insect larvae, snakes, mice, chipmunks, foxes, deer. Dig down in the soil about four inches with a trowel. You may find a few snails, ants and earthworms. Under the magnifying lens appear tiny mites, millipedes, springtails and other minute creatures that inhabit the top layers of soil. These soil and litter animals chew up waste materials and help them decay, returning valuable substances to the soil and air. Trees and other green plants convert these substances into food, and the forest cycle of life starts over again.

Before starting home, children may wish to gather a few items from the forest floor, such as bits of bark, acorns, leaves, a small rock or two, a piece of moss and a handful of soil. Do not pick ferns or flowers. Later at home the items can be arranged in a jar or bowl to make a tiny terrarium or be glued to construction paper to make a forest collage.

Among many places in Dutchess County with forests and woodlands to explore are Ferncliff Forest and Poets' Walk in Rhinebeck; Buttercup Wildlife Sancutary on Route 82 just south of Pine Plains; Stissing Mountain Forest Preserve, Pine Plains; Wilcox Park, Milan; Thompson Pond Nature Preserve at the foot of Stissing Mountain; Tivoli Bays Estuarine Research Reserve on the Hudson River between Tivoli and Barrytown. You may find other areas near your home, and if you're interested in going a little farther afield, why not try Best Hikes with Children: Catskills & Hudson River Valley, by Cynthia Copeland & Thomas J. Lewis. Published by the Mountaineers Books, a second edition just recently appeared, revised by local resident Sheila Buff.