Some days just sort of go along. Others are spectacular. Yesterday, for me, was a spectacular. No, I was not preoccupied with the colorful botanical effulgence that newly surrounds us.

I got to spend three hours watching dead trees! Concerning fallen trees, John Muir, the naturalist, explorer, and writer of Yosemite Valley fame, once remarked that "The burial of a tree is a beautiful thing." But let's begin with the standing dead.

Guess I should explain lest more of you than at present begin to think that my elevator doesn't stop at every floor. A dead tree, the bigger the better, the deader the better, constitutes a very special micro-habitat.

In the dead-and-loose-bark stage, numerous small creatures, including tree frogs, hide behind the bark for shelter, or maybe even for overwintering. Various insects drill holes in dead wood in which to deposit eggs, or maybe just in under a patch of loose bark. And who hasn't watched woodpeckers and nuthatches pecking their way along dead trunks and limbs in search of buried larvae?

Some birds nest in dead trunk holes. Squirrels may dig out a shelter cavity. Although the large pileated woodpecker sometimes is seen in eastern Kansas, I have not yet seen, in any of our dead trees, the large characteristic oval-shaped holes they peck out in the trunks. Fungi have a field day.

And when a dead tree falls, many sorts of more terrestrially-minded critters make homes either underneath or by burrowing into the log. Fungi and microbes switch into over-drive. Female carpenter ants burrow out huge chambers for either food storage or shelter.

But (time for a commercial), I ask the physical plant crew to aid in keeping our standing dead standing for as long as possible. If it seems that the potential falling of one of our trees may put someone in harm's way, please don't just cut it down. Try to run wire or cable from ground up onto the tree so that it will--in its time--fall harmlessly away from some trail or bench. They all will fall soon enough; and please don't haul them away.

Dead trees, both standing and down, add an important patch to the quilt of biodiversity we wish to nurture in our MLH Natural Area. And a healthy biodiversity, as argued by the famous conservationist, Aldo Leopold, yields not just land, but "community!"