Mims: The resilience of nature
Updated 12:00 am, Monday, November 19, 2012
This time last year, a series of welcome rain events began undoing some of the damage caused by the record drought of 2011.
Last year's rain came too late for Bastrop, which lost more than 1,600 homes to a massive wild fire. But last year's fall rain arrived just in time for bluebonnets to sprout and begin their winter growth.
Nature requires time to recover from severe droughts. Last fall's rain was urgently needed, but there was a drought-related shortage of many insects and animals this past spring
Over summer things changed for the better. After three years of absence, an opossum finally appeared on our place. Just before I began typing this column, a buck and a doe pranced across the field outside my office window. Yesterday they were browsing on sunflowers in the field.
Honeybees still are in short supply, but squirrels, frogs, snakes, dragonflies, wasps and spiders have been returning. So have butterflies and moths.
Some readers have asked about giant flocks of fast-flying butterflies. These are snout butterflies. On a recent day at our place many thousands of these tough butterflies were flying across the field.
The drought left behind millions of dead trees across Texas, including 15 mature cedar elms not far from our house.
The irony of those drought-killed trees is that their decaying roots may eventually nourish a very rare, drought-sensitive fungus.
Regular readers of this column may recall the exotic devil's cigar fungus I've been studying since 1998. This fungus grows underground only on the decaying stumps and roots of dead cedar elm trees.
During fall the fungus sends a dark brown capsule up through the ground, where it resembles a cigar. After a week or so, the capsule opens into a beautiful, cinnamon tinted star. It then emits puffs of spores that closely resemble smoke.
The devil's cigar is found only on one Japanese island and in half a dozen Texas counties between Seguin and Fort Worth. It is very drought sensitive, and the capsules do not emerge when there has been little rain. Last fall the only cluster that emerged on our place was where we had placed a sprinkler. None could be found in the woods.
This year, four clusters of devil's cigars have appeared near our house, and there are again none in the woods. Lack of rain was not the reason. Instead, visiting packs of feral hogs plowed through the woods and left behind trenches, tilled soil and no devil's cigars.
Unfortunately, the feral hogs that visit our place every year or so seem not to have been affected by the drought.
Forrest M. Mims III, an amateur scientist whose research has appeared in leading scientific journals, was named one of the "50 Best Brains in Science" by Discover Magazine. His science is featured at www.forrestmims.org. Email him at email@example.com.