While 200-year old trees toppled in the winds and rains of Frances and Jeanne, other life is moving in at Big Pine Tract.
By DAN DeWITT
Published October 4, 2004
BROOKSVILLE - Kristin Wood's attention shifted from the largest and oldest living things at the Big Pine Tract north of Brooksville to some of the tiniest and newest.
Wood was leading a survey of giant longleaf pines toppled by Hurricane Jeanne when she noticed the ground was rippling with half-inch long toads.
"Look, they're metamorphosing right here," said Wood, when she came to a flooded section of the trail, one end of it filled with writhing tadpoles.
"The ones that are hopping off have just absorbed their tails."
Eastern spadefoot toads will lay eggs only in large puddles, which are devoid of predatory fish but linger long enough for the eggs to transform into toads - two or three weeks.
In other words, they thrive on hurricanes.
"They need an explosive rain. They need 4 or 5 inches of rain," said Wood, the director of the Chinsegut Nature Center.
She and the other Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission workers had reason to be discouraged by what they saw at the 420-acre tract, one of the last refuges of virgin longleaf pine forest in Central Florida. The winds from Jeanne and Frances brought down about 150 trees, several of them with mast-straight trunks a yard wide that had been growing for more than 200 years.
"There's very little of this old growth habitat on public land. It's very rare for this part of the state," said Davd Copps, a planning and design coordinator for the commission.
But the naturalists were also reminded that catastrophic storms are as much a part of the natural system as fire.
Butterflies and several bird species, including blue birds, will flock to the clearings left by downed trees. As the trees rot, they will fill with termites and carpenter ants that feed a variety of birds and reptiles, which in turn feed animals farther up the food chain.
Barred owls and flying squirrels will make their homes in dead trees; so will pileated woodpeckers, a family of which Wood pointed to, flying noisily through the woods.
"Some of the woodpeckers are going to really enjoy all our new, dead trees," she said.
Drenching rains that flood large sections of land give some beneficial species a rare chance to migrate, Wood said.
After heavy rains in the summer of 2003, for example, mosquito fish appeared in May Prairie, which intermittently fills with water. And several species, like the spadefoot toad, need such rains to complete their life cycle. Female toads will sometimes delay laying eggs for years, waiting for the ideal conditions.
"So your county commissioner who wants to nuke hurricanes would put them out of business?" asked Copps, referring to Hernando County Commissioner Mary Aiken's suggestion that NASA should work to eliminate hurricanes; Aiken actually suggested using any means short of a nuclear bomb.
Last week, Copps and two recreation planners, who had been rained out of working on a project in South Florida, stopped on their way back to Tallahassee to tour Big Pine and the 408-acre nature center, which lost about 100 trees, including hardwoods.
"That's very much a ballpark figure," Wood said.
The trees at Big Pine were protected from loggers by Col. Raymond Robins, who bought the land 100 years ago, along with the Chinsegut Hill Manor House. He didn't allow logging, but did, apparently, allow the trees to be tapped for turpentine, Wood said. Most of the older trees are scarred with "cat faces," the whisker-shaped scoring in the bark used to drain the resin.
Some of the trunks snapped at the site of these old wounds; others that grew in saturated soil were uprooted by the high wind.
The cat faces provide an important clue to the age of the trees, Woods said. Only mature trees were used in turpentine production, so many of these pines were already good specimens 80 or 90 years ago, when the turpentine industry in Hernando was its peak.
The trees at Big Pine were protected from loggers by Col. Raymond Robins, who bought the land 100 years ago, along with the Chinsegut Hill Manor House. He didn't allow logging, but did, apparently, allow the trees to be tapped for turpentine, Kristin Wood said. Most of the older trees are scarred with "cat faces," the whisker-shaped scoring in the bark used to drain the resin.
On some stretches of the trail, these giants had fallen 50 or 60 yards; even the oldest were not necessarily near the end of their life span, which can be as long as 400 years, Wood said.
But large trees are always vulnerable to lighting and wind because of their height, Copps said. By falling, they give young trees a better chance to grow, especially if the crowded understory of oaks and other hardwoods at Big Pine can be cut back and, eventually, burned.
Long leaf seedlings can grow only in open areas, like those created by wind-downed trees. A quick scan of the forest told Copps that few have been able to get established in recent decades.
"The young trees in here are 75 to 80 years old," he said.
The big trees would undoubtedly produce valuable lumber, Wood said, but the Fish and Wildlife Commission will not sell them because of their role in regenerating the forest.
The state Division of Forestry takes a different approach, said Keith Mousel, resource administrator at the Withlacoochee State Forest headquarters north of Brooksville. Forestry workers have taken only a preliminary survey of the damage done by the storms, he said.
"What we're seeing so far is not real bad," Mousel said, adding that a more complete inventory is under way.
"I've got folks, as we speak, flying the forest to see if we have any major blow downs," he said. The division depends on timber sales to support its operations and if the concentration of fallen trees is high enough, it will seek contractors who will pay to salvage the timber.
The crew at Big Pine only moved the trees to clear the trail. John Korycki, a technician at the nature center, sliced through the branches of one newly fallen pine with a chainsaw. Others pulled the branches away and tossed them into the woods, where they will stay.
