It's Time to Say Goodbye to the Backyard Bur Oak

When we moved to Worthington in June of 2008, we chose a house with a massive bur oak tree in the backyard.  If you've followed this blog for a while, you will surely remember many great stories and photos about this tree.  The tree is truly massive, weighing an unbelievable amount- there's probably 250 TONS of wood suspended in the air in our backyard.

Well, since October 2013, we have been falling out of love with the tree.  One morning that fall, we awoke to a massive limb down in the backyard, having fallen overnight during calm weather.  At that time, we scheduled a tree company to take the tree down, but at the last minute, I made the call to give it one more chance.

Last Friday, Megan was at home, in her office, when this massive limb fell in a wrenching force.  If With the help of my dad, we've cleaned up most of the downed leaves. If anyone had been in the impact area, they would not have stood a chance. Thank God no one was injured, however, this giant limb remains perilously attached by a thread, threatening to fail at any minute.

Knowing that we can just not live with this anymore, Megan and I have decided without doubt that it is time for our family to say goodbye to the backyard bur oak.

The Old Bur Oak in 2009

When our house was built in 1966, this was literally the only tree on the block, as seen below in this photo hosted on the Worthington Memory website.

We have tried to be good stewards to the tree. As you can see, the tree is a part of the neighborhood and beloved by many. The three former owners before us obviously loved and cared for the tree.  We have tried to keep that legacy, unfortunately, this is a decision that was just too easy to make; we cannot live with this risk anymore.  The tree will be taken down within the next two weeks.

Perhaps one of the reasons that the limb failed this season is that the tree had an incredible year of growth, producing a flush of leaves and an incredible amount of acorns. Weston and Brody love the tree, and this is a difficult decision to explain to young boys.  "Don't you love nature, Dad?  If you cut the tree, you are destroying nature!?!" Yes, Weston, but we are fortunate this year that we have dozens of acorns to collect.  We can plant these, and grow many more young bur oaks, trees that we will gladly give to any friend that has plenty of space for a wonderful shade tree to watch and grow.

Goodbye old girl!

-Tom

Sunset

Lately I've been showing photographs of the sunrise, but this evening, I photographed the evening sunset.   I was struck by the contrast between the natural lines created by the gnarled bur oak limbs and the crossing angles created by the contrails just above the horizon.

-Tom

Warm Night in the Suburbs

Tonight I debated this question: Do I go outside and photograph something new, or work on older photos I have not yet processed?  Here's my answer.

-Tom

Female Red-bellied Woodpecker Searches for Food

This week, Megan alerted me to a woodpecker on our bur oak, in close view from our kitchen window.

I ran upstairs with the camera, and saw that she was exploring the deep furrows.

Red-bellied woodpeckers use their really long tongues to help them explore deep within trees.  You can barely make out that the tip of the tongue has barbs to grab hold of insects.

She must really be on to something tasty!

Look at that tongue, it's pink!

She explored dozens of furrows and holes in the bark.

And came up with a meal, which I believe is a non-native house centipede.

 

 

Woodpeckers have amazing adapdations for living in and around trees, it's really incredible that I was able to capture all of this detail right from my kitchen.  We love our bur oak, it is an incredible tree.

For more information about the amazing tongues of woodpeckers, including some very cool photographs, visit Hilton Pond Center.

-Tom-

Ready for Winter

All the leaves are down from our backyard bur oak- finally. We've spent the last four Sunday afternoons blowing, raking, and hauling leaves.

Tom

The Power of Small Things

Taking items out of their natural setting and into my basement studio is something that I find interesting.  This bur oak seedling was a casualty when I recently turned the soil in an area where I put a few new native perennials.  I found the miracle of nature working here- the shoots headed for the sun, and the roots headed for the soil.  There is so much potential in this little tree- If I plant it again, it could turn oxygen, carbon dioxide, water and nutrients into thousands of pounds of wood.  It could host lichens and moss, which in turn host insects and bugs, which are then feasted upon by woodpeckers.  It's hard to believe that our massive bur oak started out as a marble-sized seed.  There's quite a lot of power in one little acorn. 

Tom

Vertical Panorama Photography- The Bur Oak

Hi All- Megan and I are settling back into Ohio. There is just something about a week long vacation in Maine that made me wordless upon our return for a few days, but now that we're here and living our lives once again, I'm getting back into the swing of things.

As a photographer, have you tried shooting multi-image panoramas? If you haven't you really should. It's just crazy fun. I made this seven image composite of our backyard oak tree in Adobe Photoshop CS4. I've also used Canon PhotoStitch to make panoramas. PhotoStich is a free program that came with your Canon camera software (other camera owners will have to help me out with this one- does Nikon offer a free photostitch software?) Even if you don't have a Canon camera, you can download it and use it all for free.

As you can see, even with multiple photographs, I wasn't able to get the whole tree in the frame. Maybe I can? What if I took multiple vertical rows of images stacked upon each other, and then tried to use the Adobe CS4 photomerge tool?

Also- If you do go and try to do this- make sure you shoot in manual and turn off autofocus. You'll want the images to have identical exposures and focal point- if they don't, your finished product could look very strange.

All of this panoramic photography has been prompted by two things. First, this incredible composite image from the latest National Geographic that must be seen in the magazine to be appreciated. And second, I have been tasked to shoot a vertical and horizontal panoramic photograph for my most recent assignment at Columbus State.

Although this type of photography might sound gimmicky, it allows us nature lovers to present the natural world in interesting way that captures so much more information than a single frame image. It's almost like being there, but not quite, but just close enough to be really interesting.

Tom

Also- Here's another free panoramic maker, that a reader pointed out to me, this one from Microsoft.

The Old Bur Oak

Click for a larger image

I'm sitting down here in the man cave, listening to Megan laugh out loud upstairs in the family room. I think she's reading the latest from Janet Evanovich-I know she has been on the waiting list for months at the library.

I'm scrolling though some old photos- I'm thinking of purchasing a new lens for the camera, and I'm strongly considering the super-wide offering from Canon for crop sensor bodies, the 10-22 mm. This lens gets really wide- almost too wide. I rented it last fall and I've been going through those pictures to see how I did with it.

And here's a shot I took and wanted to share with you, but I don't believe it ever made it here. In this image you can see just how freaking huge our backyard Bur Oak really is. See those gigantic, gnarled branches up in the air? They themselves are the size of most tree trunks in our neighborhood. It is a really massive tree, and we're lucky to have it.

We had a great day this morning, as Megan ran in her first 5K, and I walked it with Weston in the jogging stroller- quite fun. I didn't even take any digital photos, just film, with the old early 1970's era Pentax SP500- we'll see how those come out. If you still have an old film camera lying around, run a roll through it now and then, you'll have a blast.

Tomorrow I'll share our images from Clear Creek Metropark.

Tom

P.S. Megan has just informed me she finished the book.

Good Morning, 2009

Good morning, welcome to 2009- I made it out this morning to catch the rising winter sun cast a fiery glow across the bases of these clouds.

Revealed

Megan guessed correctly, although she definitely had an insider's advantage. The mystery image is the fringe from a Bur Oak Acorn. Here you can see the full image of the acorn, and the acorn in in relation to the leaves of the bur oak. What is most fascinating about Bur Oaks is that the cap of the acorn almost completely covers the seed. The fringe is quite fascinating, isn't it? Thanks to Nina for reminding me about the fringe- I had taken these pictures this summer to share, but her comment on my sunset picture of the bur oak sparked my memory. This past winter I wrote a two part series on the Oak Trees of Ohio for the Division of Natural Areas and Preserves' "Natural Ohio" newsletter. For more information about bur oak, check out my article on Ohio's White Oaks in the fall 2007 issue.

Our Quercus

Megan and I have lived at our new home here in Worthington for over three months, but we are still getting to know our Quercus macrocarpa (that would be bur oak to the non- botanists out there). This huge tree, we have found, is the pride of the street. When we first met our neighbors, they did not hesitate to ask us if we liked the tree. There was quite a rumor going around that the new owners were thinking of cutting this beauty down, so we had to quickly squelch that one. Once they learned our last name was "Arbour", i think they understood that we would love the tree just as much as the whole neighborhood did.

Here is a shot of our grand tree using the Canon efs 10-22 super wide angle zoom which I rented one month ago. The oak leaves were just beginning to fall. Most of the leaves have yellowed and fallen by now, but in this shot, only a few leaves are on the grass.

Tom