In our yard, we have a few different kinds of oaks and maple and dogwood, a pecan, a black walnut, red buds, white pine, poplar, and several others. We don’t live in the woods, but on old farmland that has been somewhat replanted. A good selection of trees, but not dense.
One morning after a storm, when the sky was still darkly purple and the sun was poking through, making the the world, or at least our neighborhood, all dramatic, the contrast highlighted the large maple in the corner.
I hadn’t noticed before how much lichen was on the tree. A whole colony of it, spread across and tucked into the trunk. Beautiful in the sunlight. Greens and greys and purples.
And the little holes all along the bark of the tree from our winter yellow-bellied sapsuckers - a woodpecker that drills little holes in a row to access the sap. Where the sap has leaked out down the tree, the bark is now black - presumably with some sort of sugar-loving fungus or bacteria - another species living off the maple.
So many insects that live on and in the tree. Dozens of species of birds feed and nest on that tree (I’ve documented 52 species of birds in my yard this year - almost all of them will have alighted on that tree at one time or another). Moss, squirrels, raccoons. And then there are worms and mice and ants and moles and snakes and all sorts of critters among the roots.
How crazy and amazing that one single tree can host so much life.
British soldier lichen (I think):
A brown tree creeper on a dead stump
An eastern flying squirrel in a bluebird box
An anole (I think) on St. Croix, USVI