[Music]
What we'll be looking at here through
all these sort of forays into the woods is what I call forest forensics.
What we're going to be doing is, it's like going into a crime scene and
gleaning that for evidence to explain what actually happened in the past.
and that's what we'll be doing in the explanation of these woodlands,
going into forests and gleaning them for evidence that can
tell us what their past history is.
So for example we're going to be looking at the construction of stone walls,
the shapes of trees, if there's scarring on trees,
where the scarring occurs,
growth forms of trees, the general lay of the land,
the surface topography and all these very common features
we see out in our woodlands offer really rich evidence
for unraveling very detailed history. So as you'll see,
we can go into an area and not just tell if it was once open agricultural land,
but we can pin down if it was previously crop field or hay field or pasture,
we can determine when it was abandoned and go back to forest.
With logging, we can look at an area and tell how many times it's logged,
what was logged out.
We can again date those logging activities.
Same thing with wind,
we can go into a forest and figure out if it's been disturbed by wind,
what type of storms, whether they were
thunderstorms or Nor'easters or hurricanes.
We can also date when those storms occurred,
and the same thing with fire.
We can interpret that evidence as well.
There's a lot of evidence we'll be working with,
but my hope is you'll find that it makes good sense
in terms of exploring your region's forests.
[Music]
A stone wall like this one here is really iconic to central New England
and I define central New England as the
northern and western half of Massachusetts,
the bulk of Vermont, the bulk of New Hampshire,
maybe excluding the very northern tier of those states,
and the southwestern quarter of Maine.
And all these walls date back to what's called the sheep fever period.
The fever was
a wool growing mania that's been compared to a religious fanaticism.
Because it was sort of the first market scale farming opportunity
in the region of central New England.
Before that everyone had self-reliant farms
where they grew enough food to
serve their families but they weren't market farms.
So, there were three things that assured in sheep fever.
The first is Napoleon going to war against Spain in 1806,
and it might sound odd that a war in Europe has big impacts here,
but the Spanish had developed a special breed of sheep called the merino.
And the merino not only made a very ample fleece but it made
a wool that made woolen textiles that were not scratchy at all.
So if you have any "Smartwool" clothing products,
they're made out of merino wool.
Now, the Spanish were very smart
because they liberally exported the wool
around the world but they had an embargo on the sheep itself.
They didn't want anyone to get a hold of that breed
and become a competitor.
Well, it just happens in 1810,
the ambassador to Portugal was a Vermonter named William Jarvis.
And because of the war, and the Spanish not being able to really
keep their embargo in place,
he was able to smuggle 4,000 sheep out of Spain,
through Portugal, to be brought back to his farm in Wethersfield, Vermont.
So now, as of 1810, we have merino sheep here in central New England.
Two years later,
we went to war with Britain and one result of the war of 1812 is
that tariffs went up on all imported woolens,
giving anyone who could make woolen textiles here a huge
market advantage, and then two years after that
the power loom was invented,
which allowed mass industrial production of textiles.
And with the water power coming out of these central New England hills,
it vaulted this region to become
really one of the major wool and textile producing regions in the world.
Now, to give an idea how dramatic the landscape changes are
that come with sheep fever...
in 1810 when Jarvis brings over his first 4,000 merinos,
only about 20% of the central New England landscape below 2,000 feet
is open agricultural land.
But in the next 35 years,
as those 4,000 merino sheep swell to 6 million,
the landscape becomes almost 80% deforested
below 2,000 feet in this region,
the bulk of it in pastures for sheep.
So over half the area of central New England was clear-cut
to make way for sheep pasture.
Now, many people think that these stone fences
were built as soon as farms were opened up
and that's not the case.
Farmers much preferred wooden fences. They could put up
ten times as much split rail zigzag wooden fencing a day as they
could stone fencing.
It's only the massive deforestation
associated with sheep fever.. there's no longer enough wood
to make wood fencing anymore,
and so farmers, as those wood fences start to rot away,
have to go back to stone dumps,
and bring back the stone to make these stone fences.
In central New England it's estimated we have over 125,000 miles
of woodland stone fencing.
That means if we lined it all up it'd wrap the equator five times
it'd stretch more than halfway to the moon.
I've calculated, if we pile all this stone,
it'd be six times as massive as all the pyramids in Egypt.
And yet it was all done in just about 30 years.
So, if central New England was on the Mediterranean,
these stone fences, I'm convinced, would be the 8th wonder of the world. And yet it was all done in just about 30 years.
But we're not, so it's just an intriguing part of our history
that you see everywhere
when you wander the forests of central New England.
So one of the important things to do when interpreting forest histories
is to look at the surficial topography the ground,
and that's why I'm stopped here because
out in front of me, this way, there's the large mound and then
right over behind me in here
is a depression.
These are called either
pits and mounds, or pillows and cradles.
What pillows and cradles are... they're evidence
of a live tree falling over in the forest,
either by wind throw or snow or ice loading.
So, there used to be a tree growing in here probably about where that
small white pine is,
and wind coming from behind me blew the tree down that way.
It's roots ripped up out of the ground, excavating this cradle,
and then as the downed tree and its upturned roots started rotting away,
the earth that was within that root system
eventually was deposited as the pillow.
Now, if you stand on top of a pillow
and you look over the cradle,
you're looking in the direction the wind came from.
In this case, the stone wall I was just talking about is running
behind me over here, pretty much due east-west.
That's west that way, that's east that way.
So in this case if I stood on the pillow and looked over the cradle
I'd be looking due west. That's signature of a thunderstorm.
Most of our
stand-leveling winds, because of the high
frequency,
come from thunderstorm microbursts, and those are generated by
fronts out of the west.
A little bit later we're going to see
evidence of winds coming out of the east, which,
around here are usually associated with hurricanes
which happen on an average of maybe once every 130 years,
with a magnitude large enough to
knock down whole trees.
Now, the thing about pillows and cradles is,
they last a long time.
Big ones can be visible in a forest setting around here for up to 1,000 years.
And because of our robust disturbance regime,
with all sorts of wind events, and snow and ice loading events,
after a few centuries our
woodland floors get carpeted in pillows and cradles. Now,
there are some exceptions to that.
On very dry, sandy, gravelly substrates trees sometimes pop out
of the ground and don't make large pillows and cradles.
Up around Lake Champlain we get what are called clay plain forests,
where the substrate is clay and the roots of the trees are all very surficial
so if they go down they don't excavate anything.
That would be true of trees growing in saturated soils.
And then on
rocky ridge tops with very thin soils
you're not going to get noticeable pillows and cradles.
But whenever we're in a woodland with
glacial till soils around here we're going to get them.
So, if you have them what it means is,
you're either looking at a woodland that's always been forested,
it was never opened up for agricultural purposes,
or you're looking at a site
that may have been previous pasture land.
However if you go to a site where you're on
glacial till soils and the ground is smooth and even
on the surface, even though it's sloping,
then you're looking at areas where plowing removed the pillows and cradles.
If you look around here,
you're going to see that there's no pillows and cradles
or pits and mounds. The ground is very smooth on the surface,
it is sloping a little bit behind me downward but,
again, the key is the surficial features which are very very smooth.
That means in a woodland setting like this,
this area was plowed  in the past either as a crop field,
or as a hay field.
And the plowing
removed those pillows and cradles, that's why it looks smooth and even.
Now, crop fields were plowed annually
to make way for setting seeds.
Hay fields, if they were well managed, weren't plowed as often.
They were plowed a number of times to start to get rid of the pillows and cradles
because they get in the way of working a scythe.
The ground had to be
smooth and even. But once it got there,
if the hay field was
well maintained, it wouldn't be plowed that much.
Because of the difference of plowing frequency,
we get some other features that help us separate a hayfield
from a crop field.
But one thing I do want to point out first
are the pines that are growing around me,
particularly, not this pine right here, but the pine that's next to it.
If you look up about, you know, 7 feet up
you can see that the trunk forks into two trunks.
A lot of the pines in this stand are doing that.
And that's evidence that they've been impacted by the white pine weevil.
The white pine weevil is a native insect,
that lays its eggs on the very upper terminal shoot of a white pine.
But not any pine is going to do.
It only seeks out trees that are generally less than 15 years of age,
and growing in full sunlight because it wants to get a terminal shoot
that's about as fat as a finger, maybe something about like that.
Because that's going to be the forage for its young.
And older trees, or trees growing in shade, their terminal shoots are actually
probably a bit more like that, there's just not enough forage in them.
The female lays its eggs in the upper terminal shoot of
these young trees growing in full sunlight.
And when those eggs hatch out the larvae drill in
and eat that terminal shoot, killing it.
Which allows the tier of limbs below to
erupt and grow up to become the new main trunks.
When you walk into a woodland that has a whole array
of weevil hit pine trees,
what it's telling you is that this is the very first cohort of trees
that grew up in a once open site.
And we can use them to date abandonment
of former agricultural lands that have now grown up to woodland.
Now, one of the beautiful things about pine,
as we can see in this tree right here,
is that every year
they put on a tier of limbs. There's one right here.
There's one right here, there's one right up there.
These tiers of limbs are called limb whorls.
So on a number of pine trees if they're young enough,
you can actually count how many limb whorls there are,
and since they put only one on a year,
that number is going to be equivalent to their age.
If we did that around here on this site we're going to find out that
the trees, the older pines in here that are weevil hit,
are around 37 years of age,
indicating that in 1980 this was abandoned to grow
up to forest.
We're now at the lower edge of this
very flat area that in 1980 was, I remember, a hay field.
But, there's evidence to suggest that before that,
it was a crop field.
And that evidence is right in this stone dump here.
So right here we don't have a stone wall,
we just have a place where a lot of stone has been dumped.
And if I just look
basically six feet away from me at the ground out that way
there's no rocks anywhere. You only see them here.
But the critical thing about this stone dump is
we start looking at the rocks in here
we're going to find a lot of smaller rocks, you know... about
the size of a fist.
And when you get a lot of small rocks,
either in an adjacent stone wall, or a stone dump like this,
it means that the site abutting it was once cultivated
to grow crops.
Because cultivation is the only activity that both generates,
and then necessitates the removal of small stones.
So, if anyone has ever had a vegetable garden
on glacial till soils up here in New England,
they probably know every spring when they go out to turn their garden soils,
there's a whole new group of rocks
that they thought they maybe picked them all out the year before.
And people might think, well what's happening...
are the rocks reproducing underground or something?
And yet, we don't have to pick rocks out of our lawns.
Rocks do not naturally surface out of the soil
in forests,
because any place that has
roots of perennial plants, like trees, shrubs, grasses, things like that,
those roots hold everything in the soil together in a unit.
So in the winter when the ground freezes and expands,
and then the thaw when it settles again and thaws,
rocks are held in place.
But in a crop field, like a vegetable garden that has no perennial roots,
freeze and thaw cycles lifts rocks to the surface.
So one way to imagine it is, think of a rock like this,
sitting down in the ground...
winter is coming on;
the frost is getting deeper and deeper and deeper in the ground,
eventually gets down and latches on to the rock,
the frost continues to develop deeper
and the ground's expanding, so the rock is being
lifted up a little bit.
And what people don't realize is,
as the winter abates,
the thaw does not go from the top down,
it commences from the bottom up.
Because around here, once we get down below the frost zone,
we're into soil temperatures around 55 degrees Fahrenheit.
There's an incredible heat reservoir down there.
So as the winter abates,
all of a sudden that heat starts radiating upward,
thawing the ground,
the pocket where that stone originally was,
thaws and settles, and when the rock is released
it can't quite make it back to its original starting point.
And in this way, on crop field, stones are lifted up
a small amount every year,
and when they get to the surface they get picked out.
And then they're either going to be
just dumped into a stone dump like this, or
incorporated into stone walls.
As we get further east, into eastern New Hampshire,
eastern Massachusetts, a classic, classic crop field wall,
or cultivation wall,
are two sets of large stones, stacked up a few feet apart,
and then the rest of the wall in-filled with small rocks.
If you've ever seen anything like that,
that's a classic crop field wall.
Over in this part of New Hampshire as we move over into western Massachusetts
and Vermont, where there's not as much granite,
the walls will just have the small rock intermixed with them.
So originally this was crop field,
and then some time transitioned into hay field.
And most of that happened around the time of the Civil War.
Prior to the Civil War, farmers had to grow all their own grain.
And they're growing things like wheat, barley, rye, flax,
and one of the surprising things about flax was,
flax was not just grown for the grain but the fiber in the stem,
which made linens.
And back during the sheep fever craze
research I did indicated it took two acres of flax
to produce enough fiber for one twin bed sheet.
So many farms had 10 to 15 acres just in flax.
It was a lot of work.
And when you think about having to plow all that acreage
every year behind a farm animal,
pick out the rocks, sow the seed,
tend the crop, eventually sickle it down and winnow it out.
But after the Civil War,
rail starts linking up all these areas around New England.
And now grain being grown out in the Midwest is being brought in by rail.
Because of rail, that opened up market dairy farming.
Because now real dairy farmers could get their milk
products into urban centers very quickly.
And right about then farmers are saying, you know,
all this plowing for grain is such a huge amount of work,
I think I'm just going to use my proceeds from my dairy money
and buy the grain coming in from the Midwest
and convert my crop fields into hay fields or pasture.
And so, most likely this conversion happened about then, to hay field.
Behind me is the stone wall,
that's the wall we first encountered
when we entered the woodland here
and I talked about the sheep fever craze.
On the far side of it is that flat area
that we determined was originally crop field and then converted to hay field
and then abandoned.
And so now we're on this side of the wall.
We're going to interpret the history on this side,
which is a bit different than the other side that was crop field/hay field.
So looking around here,
the ground is not smooth and even
on the surface, it's irregular.
And this mossy mound right here is a pillow
and the area behind it where all the oak leaves are, is a cradle.
Then there's another mossy mound which is another pillow
and behind it, again a depression,
that's the cradle.
There's a number more behind me here
on, over on this side as well.
And they're all lined up in the exact same orientation.
So this is definite evidence of a blowdown.
If you get snow and ice loading taking down trees
they'll come down whatever way they're leaning.
But when they're all on the exact same orientation that's wind.
So that stone wall behind me is running from west
in that direction, to east in that direction,
and if I stand on the pillow and look over the cradle I'm looking this way
which is to the southeast. That's where the wind came from.
The only stand-leveling winds we get out of the southeast
are from hurricanes.
So what we're looking at
is a hurricane that hit this site
and toppled a number of smaller trees.
These are not real big pillows and cradles, they're smaller.
Now, I can still see
part of the trunk of this tree here, and right here
and right here are two parts of a limb whorl.
So I'm looking at
pretty small white pines that were blown down by a hurricane.
The only hurricane in this area of Keene,
New Hampshire, where we are today,
that has struck in,
in the tenure of these trees that still have their trunks here,
would be the hurricane of 1938.
Now, town records tell us that right around five o'clock
the wind speed started increasing.
They'd been gusting all day, all afternoon long
around 50 miles an hour, enough to bring down some branches and twigs
and things like that.
But between 5:00 and 6:00,
the eyewall of the hurricane of '38 hit this area.
So I'm guessing we would not want to be standing here
right around 5:30,
because I'm guessing that within 5:30 p.m. on September 2st 1938,
we're within half an hour of when these trees were toppled.
Now, like I said, these pines were we're somewhat small at the time,
And I'm guessing they're probably 20 to 25 years old when the hurricane hit.
So this side of the fence
that has pillows and cradles and lumpy ground of all different orientations,
there's a huge array of just boulders over there
on the surface which would exclude haying or crop-field.
But then all these young pines coming in,
this is indicative that this was a pasture,
and a pasture probably abandoned sometime in the 19-teens.
And that stone fence there was built
to keep animals in this pasture from getting in that crop field.
If that crop field didn't have a pasture abutting it,
let's say this was a woodlot,
there'd be absolutely no need to build a stone fence.
But having that fence there tells us that
that was built to keep animals from getting in the crop field.
So this was pasture, probably originally sheep pasture.
There is barbed wire on this wall.
That indicates that probably around the time of the close of the Civil War
this transitioned to dairy pasture,
because barbed wire is not good for sheep
in their heavy fleece they can't feel the barbs,
they can get tangled in it and injured.
So now we've got our two areas,
crop field that then transitioned to hay field,
pasture that was abandoned earlier,
then that hay field was abandoned 1980,
and this abandonment happening in the probably the 19-teens.
Young pine coming in just the way they did on the other side.
And then the hurricane of '38 coming and hitting the site. Now,
the hurricane of '38 was a monster storm.
At the time it struck it was believed to be the most
costly in terms of property damage of any storm in the world.
And on its 70th anniversary
they computer modeled if that exact same storm had hit New England at
that time, the estimated property damage was 125 billion.
That would eclipse any hurricane we've ever had,
including Katrina and ones like that,
and one of the reasons was
it was a massive storm,
it made landfall, it was probably a category 4 storm,
it was huge,
and it did something that no previous hurricane had done...
the Weather Service had predicted it was going to
turn out
to the Atlantic, well below
Long Island and Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.
It didn't do that, it came in over Long Island,
hit the coast of, uhh,
New England right at the Connecticut/Rhode Island
border,
then sliced to the northwest,
coming up over the Pioneer Valley of the Connecticut River
in Massachusetts,
then up over the spine of the Green Mountains in Vermont,
eventually exiting over Burlington and Lake Champlain going into Quebec.
It was still a full-fledged hurricane by the time it was going to Quebec.
No one's ever seen a storm hold together that long over land.
Out in front of me
is again
that flat area that was originally hay field and crop field.
Over to my right
I can see the stonewall that we've talked about,
beyond it, the abandoned pasture that has evidence of
small pines being taken down by the '38 hurricane,
and then in here I'm on another stone dump
at the edge of this former crop field, and again...
small fist sized rock in the stone dump.
But what I want to point out here,
if you look down to my left,
there is no stone fence in here.
This is just a stone dump.
And what that's telling us is
if I have a crop field in front of me and no stone fence
then behind me is an area that was always left
in woodland for a woodlot.
If that had been pasture back there and you
might be able to see that irregular pillowed and cradled,
lots of rocks and stuff,
if that had been pasture,
you can bet there would have been a stone fence here.
But the lack of a stone fence is saying
there was no need to put all the labor into building a stone fence,
the farmer just dumped the rocks here,
because they didn't need a fence here protecting this crop field
from anything behind us, meaning that was woodlot.
So, in this one little area here,
we have clear evidence of a crop field
that at some point was converted into a hay field,
probably shortly after the Civil War,
and then abandoned in 1980 to go back to forest.
Across the stone wall was a pasture,
probably abandoned in the 19-teens,
that get colonized by white pine that got blown down by the hurricane of '38
and then on this side of this crop field,
a woodlot that's always been forested and
never had a wall needing to separate it from the crop field.
We're in another section of the Goose Pond Preserve
and I'm standing in the cradle
next to a very large pillow.
So this pillow and cradle complex are really big,
indicative of a big tree that fell down that way,
with winds coming out of this direction over here.
So over here to my left there's another stone fence
going in that direction, it's running east,
and in that direction it's running west.
So if I stood on top of this pillow and looked over the cradle
I'm looking this way,
which means I'm now looking northeast,
that's a different orientation than we saw with the hurricane of '38.
Now, as you get closer to the coast of let's say Massachusetts,
Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine,
you can get stand-leveling winds from two types of storms
with winds coming out of the northeast: they could be hurricanes,
or they could be Nor'easters.
But this far inland,
Nor'easters usually do not cause stand leveling winds
this far inland away from the coast.
So this is most likely evidence
of a hurricane
whose storm track was to the east of Keene, New Hampshire.
The hurricane of '38, its storm track was to the west of Keene.
So when hurricanes go to the west of an area,
the winds come out of the southeastern quadrant.
If they go to the east of an area the winds come out of the northeastern quadrant.
Now,
along this pillow there's this black birch behind me here,
the bigger of the two black birches.
And,
black birch has a progression to their bark.
They start off pretty much smooth barked till about the age of 50.
Then they start getting vertical fissures in the bark,
you know, sometime after 50.
By about 80 years they start developing distinct rectangular bark plates.
But by around 120 or more years those
rectangular bark plates start shedding, and
I'm guessing this tree is probably around 110, 120 years of age,
even though it's not very big.
But it colonized on this pillow,
after this wind event.
So, that indicates that this wind event, whatever it was,
happened well over a hundred years ago,
and,
for a cradle or pillow this big to form,
and have its root system rot away completely,
could take 70 to 80 years.
That combination is taking us around, back around, 200 years,
So I think what we're actually seeing here is evidence
of the great September gale of 1815.
The eye of that storm passed over Jaffrey and Hillsboro, New Hampshire,
which the far east,
meaning the winds that hit this area would be out of the northeast,
and maybe a demonstration of this would help.
So, for this demonstration I'm going to use five sticks here to represent
five different forests on an east-west transect
across, let's say, New Hampshire into Vermont.
So,
this
stick here will represent a forest to the,
sort of like, the coast of New Hampshire, way east.
This will be, maybe, central.
This one could be Keene, where we are.
And this one can be
getting over into Vermont,
and this would be maybe western side of Vermont.
Now, hurricanes
have a counterclockwise flow.
So,
this hurricane is just going to come right up,
let's say,
center right over Keene, it's going to
be coming right over Keene like this.
Remember, the hurricane of '38
came over the western side of Keene on this side, hurricane of
1815 came on the eastern side.
So here's the hurricane coming up,
it's rotating counterclockwise, moving from the south to the north,
and when it gets up
to the point where that stand-leveling wind's...
and it's going right over the center stick,
the winds are going to come pretty much right out of the east,
knocking that stick down, or that forest down to the west.
Then as the storm gets up, sort of,
getting over this transect or getting up towards the transect,
on this side, the eastern side of the storm, the
winds are coming out of the southeast,
and dropping trees to the northwest.
And on the western side of the storm,
the winds are coming from the northeast, dropping trees
to the southwest.
And then,
if the storm's big enough these very outer forests,
the winds are coming right out of the south, dropping trees
to the north, and right out of the north dropping trees to the south.
So the eastern side...
the winds are all coming out of the southeastern quadrant,
the western side, they're all coming out of the northeastern quadrant.
And again,
this storm that made this pillow and cradle,
and a bunch.. there's some big ones over here,
blew winds out of the northeast,
we're too far inland for a nor'easter,
so it has to be a hurricane that tracked to the east
of Keene, so this site was on the western side of the
track
and, using that birch,
and the age for this pillow to form, I'm getting about 200 years,
and, if you subtract 200 from 2017,
you're getting back right around 1815. So I'm fairly confident
this is evidence of the great September gale of 1815,
which was the previous really powerful hurricane to hit this region.
Since pillows and cradles
generated by live trees being knocked over in a forest
can last up to a millennium,
the only way we can date wind events using them
is if we have one of two kinds of trees growing on them.
The first kind of tree would be a small-seeded, shade intolerant tree,
sort of like a paper birch or an aspen.
And that's what we have right here.
There's a paper birch growing on a pillow here.
Behind the tree is the cradle
and there's a number of pillows and cradles on the slope,
all lined up in the exact same orientation.
In fact there's a.. two I can see right down here...
that are nicely lined up with the cradle on this side
and the pillow on the far side. They're all in the same orientation.
In the past I've stood on those pillows and cradles down there
and taken a compass direction,
because if you
stand on a pillow and look over the cradle, you're looking
directly into the way the wind came from.
In this case,
that is due west, so the wind came from due west.
So this is a thunderstorm we're looking at.
And now we can use this paper birch
to estimate
when that thunderstorm hit here and knocked down a number of trees.
Now, paper birch is a tree that
that needs good light to grow in.
It's not really bark photosynthetic so its growth rates are pretty consistent.
So a basic rule of thumb is, if a paper birch is about a foot in diameter,
it's about 50 years old.
If it's 2 feet in diameter it's about a century old.
This paper birch here is about 18 inches.
And so it's probably right around 75 years old.
It's starting to have its canopy closed in upon,
so it might be a bit older than that now, might be 80 or so.
And down at the base here
I can see some stilting of the roots, in other words the roots are not
all quite below ground. On this side
they're raised up a bit.
And also I can see in its trunk about, maybe,
10 to 15 feet up,
the trunk on this birch is bowed.
It's going like this and then it bends back like this.
So what that is telling me is that this paper birch germinated
on the rotting remains of the downed
tree's roots
just before they were completely gone.
Maybe it was
5 or 10 years old when it, when
this whole root system of the downed tree collapsed
and that caused this birch to be unsettled a bit, it tipped it
and then it had to correct its
growth, growing back towards the gap dynamic,
so it's probably about as tall as where that bend is.
So based on the stilting of the roots,
the base of this birch, which
mean that it probably seeded in to the tip-up of the downed tree
very close to the end of its decay period.
So I'm guessing that probably this birch germinated on this decaying tip-up
just before the pillow formed,
probably about 30 years after the original tree was blown down.
So
that suggests that this thunderstorm, if we add the 75 to 80,
with 30 to 40,
that's suggesting this thunderstorm happened
somewhere maybe 110 to 120 years ago.
But only if we have a tree like this,
or another tree we could use is a stilted rooted tree
growing on a pillow, whose roots sort of flare out like the delta of a river.
Those are the only two trees we can really use
for estimating the age of wind events.