Thirty years pass, and the white ash sapling has grown into a seventy-five-foot tall, female, white ash tree with a dominating crown. Unlike her male counterparts, she produces brown peduncles or stalks of seeds, which will occur for a number of years (5 Hunt). Her flowers are purple and the fruit she produces rains down when the time is right. She’s housed all kinds of creatures at this point in her life. A wide variety of birds and rodents have made their nests in the branches and return each season to them. Bats and owls have roosted in her, deer have wandered by her, and eventually a trail snakes around her. Human hands touch her bark while ants march up it. Woodpeckers hammer into her wood, which is the hardest and most valuable timber amongst the ash relatives (5 Sydnor). Green ashes and other white ashes nearby join her in stretching up to make the canopy.
The tree is a hundred years old when the emerald insect flies in from across the sea. The change is subtle at first, streams of light filter through to the forest floor, striping the air. Steadily however, the streams of light become gaps of light in the air and pools on the ground. Leaves dry and cascade down and the tree’s branches become increasingly visible. Eventually, the canopy thins out entirely and all the ash trees are bare and leafless (864 Klooster). The female white ash tree stretches up, making nothing but occasional chirping and creaking sounds as the wood sways in the wind. Then, a windstorm hits the Dayton region, and with Death in the trunk, the white ash is pushed to her limits (Perry). A splitting sound, a popping sound? Delayed crashing once the tree has hit the ground from falling on other trees along with a sudden instinctual reaction from surrounding creatures.
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The female white ash’s hard-to-miss height is reduced to a decapitated trunk-body of bark. The emerald insect wreaked havoc and left behind ten-foot-tall remains; a fraction of what once was eighty feet tall. With time, all the ash trees in the land fall and leave behind remnants of a steady cycle. From the fallen trees, however, a new cycle emerges. The crown of the tree is surrounded and used by a melting pot of organisms, while the still-standing remains of the white ash trunk continues to house hundreds of fungi, insects, rodents, birds, and other creatures and vegetation.
A pileated woodpecker could benefit from the surge of dead ash trees (17 Kamnyev). Although pileated woodpeckers once nested high up in green ash trees, they need large, standing dead and decaying trees as well (232 Wallace). A male pileated woodpecker scouts for large dead trees for nesting, occasionally encountering another pair of bird species in those very same dead trees. He finally spots a dead and vacant white ash tree. Although his mate is with him and helps, he does most of the nest construction. After about three to six days, he finishes the 10–24-inch cavity. His mate for life checks it out and finishes the interior touches (“Pileated Woodpecker Life History, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology”). The more dead ash trees, the more places the woodpeckers can nest or forage for food, allowing reproduction success throughout the forest and the states within the species. Many birds compete for dead trees; therefore, the addition of dead ash trees may allow some species to recover their numbers from other habitat losses.
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When the eggs are laid, both mother and father incubate the eggs and take turns hunting for food. When they hatch, both parents help feed the chicks and stay with them for two to three months. They hunt carpenter ants, termites, and beetle larvae. Fruits and nuts also make up a part of the woodpecker’s diet (“Pileated Woodpecker Life History, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology”). The white ash trunk holds the three chicks as they are fed, begin to walk, and move around inside the nest, preparing them for moving outside of it. After about a month, the chicks begin to explore the world outside of the white ash nest. Eventually, the family of pileated woodpeckers do not return to the nest and rarely ever return (“Pileated Woodpecker”). The white ash nest may instead be used by another species of bird such as an owl species or perhaps another pair of woodpeckers.
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