Walking in the woods is always a refreshing and invigorating experience and good for the soul. Now that it is winter, a great remedy for cabin fever is to bundle up and take a winter walk. As you walk, note the forest trees as well as the ground below. Most if not all of the trees have lost their leaves. As a result, a whole new visual landscape opens to our eyes, and the leaf litter below us can offer clues about the trees that inhabit the woodland terrain.
If you are curious about the types and names of trees, you can also quickly identity one of the dominant northern Georgia forest trees, the beeches. They have a unique characteristic because their paper-thin, light beige leaves stay firmly attached to their branches during the entire winter. Continue your walk by picking up some of the leaves on the forest floor. Note there are many tree species, but I venture to guess, most of them are oaks. You will also see a variety of acorns, most of which have been partially or totally devoured. All oaks belong to the genus Quercus. Based on their leaf structure, the genus Quercus is divided into two major types, the white oaks and red oaks.
How can they be differentiated?
White oaks have leaves with round leaf lobes and red oaks have leaves with pointed leaf lobes. Please look at the pictures, and I am sure you can quickly distinguish between these two types of oaks. Oaks are the most valuable landscape and forest trees in the eastern United States. For this reason, oaks are considered a Keystone Tree. They have earned this designation because their acorns produce life-sustaining nourishment for a variety of living things. If oaks were eliminated from the eastern U.S., the entire ecosystem would suffer.
As I write this article when the outside temperatures are hovering around freezing, I have begun to reflect on how the animals find food and…
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