Raggedy Spring in Paint Rock

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It’s a bit raggedy, but spring is already with us in Paint Rock.

Heart and mind open to a new year when the trout lilies bloom, and we’re delighted to see them whenever they emerge. But forgive me if I wish they would wait.

I’ve been coming to this forest for almost two decades, and this is the earliest I’ve ever seen blooms of twinleaf, Cumberland trillium and bluebell. It’s not uniform – only about 10 percent of each are in full flower, and the rest have emerged rightly suspicious of this February warmth. But we usually advertise early April as bluebell season at Paint Rock, and this is so early, it’s haunting.

I’m happy to write this off as an unusual spring. It can happen under any circumstance. But there’s always the nagging worry that in a few decades this won’t seem unusual at all.

It’s hard to avoid questions of climate change at Paint Rock. It’s one of the reasons we’re here: We felt like this would be an ideal place to understand not only how a changing climate might affect forests, but also how this forest, in particular, might help us find a path through the changes to come.

I don’t know who or what should get the blame for the 80 degree temperatures this week, but when you step back, it’s clear that something’s going on. Only a few can remember how long and cold winters once seemed in the Tennessee Valley. Until recently, temperatures well below zero were common. Between 1895 and 1990 – during the first century of Huntsville record keeping – there were more than 30 days at zero degrees Fahrenheit or below. Temperatures of NEGATIVE 10° F or below occurred once every 15 years or so – at least they did before 1990.

Maybe no one wants to remember January 1940 in Huntsville, when there were 6 days at 0°F or below, including two days at negative 5°F and three others at negative 6°, negative 7° and negative 10°.

If this doesn’t sound like the Alabama you thought you knew, it’s because Alabama has changed. For the past 33 years, there hasn’t been a single day at zero and below in Huntsville, even though it was once a normal occurrence several times each decade. You could show similar dramatic changes in every Alabama city.

So the “extreme” cold event of this winter – when temperatures got down to readings of 4°F in Huntsville – wasn’t evidence that winters are getting colder. Instead, it was a sign that we’ve gotten so used to warmer winters, even what were once ho-hum cold spells now seem extreme.

This may sound like the same story you’re hearing across the country, but it isn’t quite. Something else even harder to explain is going on in Alabama and parts of Georgia. Even as temperatures are getting generally warmer at night, winter and summer, there has been another surprising change in our climate that will leave you utterly perplexed: Our growing season is getting shorter. 

That’s right, we’ve got FEWER frost-free days between the onset of spring and the close of autumn. In nearly every other state in the continental U.S., the growing season is getting longer, much longer. But not here. The opposite seems to be occurring. Late frosts in spring and early frosts in fall are changing our seasons in ways many aren’t prepared for.

As spring backs up into winter and winter rolls over spring, that’s obviously going to result in major collisions in our forests and farms and gardens. I can’t find anyone who kept up with this precisely in Alabama, but we’ve had a number of flower- and fruit-killing “late” frosts that seem to have repeatedly reduced fruitful years for hollies, wild plums, hickories, hard maples, shortleaf pine and other species we’ve monitored.

You want me to tell you what that means? Sorry. I don’t know. Neither do any of us. Because we’ve studied the climate of Alabama about as well as we’ve studied our forests …not well at all. 

What I do think I know is this: There is something contrary about the climate of Alabama, something that runs counter to what we know about the climate in much of the eastern U.S. There’s good hard evidence that contrariness is ancient and persistent, and that’s one of the primary reasons Alabama has the richest biodiversity of any state east of the Mississippi. It’s why many believe Alabama’s flora and fauna has had an outsized influence on the forests from the Carolinas to New England, from Tennessee to Wisconsin. And it’s why studying and preserving Alabama’s forests is so important not just to those of us living in Alabama, but to every forest in North America.

We’ll look a bit more closely at our contrary climate and its consequences in columns over the next few weeks.

Bill Finch paintrock.org

Better Wheels for Paint Rock

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Joe Ruf and the new electric trail bike that he and Dave Drenning researched and purchased for the research center

Even when we don’t want to, we leave a pretty big footprint on Paint Rock. Or to be more precise, tire print.

Yes, we chose the Sharp Bingham Preserve many years ago for our research program because – among other things – its forest seemed relatively intact, and undisturbed by the kind of wholesale human disturbances that affect many forests.

At the same time, the forest is accessible to research precisely because it has the most disturbing of human intrusions …a decent road network.

The challenge of maintaining these roads almost makes us feel like we run our own DOT. Paint Rock gets 70 inches of rain a year, and roads are washed out frequently by the increasingly heavy rains that have developed as climate changes. Many creatures are reluctant to cross even dirt roads, and so we are creating isolated populations that may develop genetic issues. Roads are freeways for invasive species, and clearly affect the trees, plants and ecosystems for a great distance around them, while pouring silt and mud into the fragile cave systems. 

In the past few years, we’ve tried to greatly limit car and truck traffic in the forest, which requires bigger and bigger roads and degrades those roads more quickly. We now move about strictly in slightly smaller 4-wheel-drive UTVs.

But even these leave a serious scar. Hunters have long appreciated that deer and turkey scatter at the sound of these loud engines clattering down the roads. You can imagine the challenge of trying to study birds, reptiles and other forms of mobile wildlife. And like everything else in the human sphere, the buggies just seem to get heavier and heavier, wider and wider, degrading the road almost as much as cars and trucks.

That’s why Joe Ruf is standing by that pretty pale blue bicycle on the cliffs of Paint Rock.

Joe is a rocket scientist (yes, they have the real thing in Huntsville) and an avid cyclist. His friend Dave Drenning is a cardiologist, and equally enthusiastic about cycling. And when we let them know that we wanted to try to develop more appropriate transportation for the Paint Rock Forest, the two of them threw themselves into research, and came up with what we believe will become a primary work tool in Paint Rock – one of the new generation electric cargo bikes.

A bike with a name like “Surly Skid Loader” sounds like it ought to be pretty rugged, and it is. It manages the rough sections of our roads better (and faster) than many buggies would. We liked this bike because it was obviously designed to carry lots of  gear, and we’ll probably be investing in a trailer to carry even more. You can carry a hundred extra pounds or more of research supplies without breaking a sweat. Joe’s huffing and puffing beside me on his non-motorized bike was a useful reminder of how much a boost even a novelist cyclist can get from the electric motor.

But best of all is its footprint, a tiny fraction of any of the four-wheelers now in the forest. No gas, no exhaust fumes, and virtually no noise. You can hear the rustle of leaves, drops of water dripping off the cliffs, the quietest calls of spring birds as they settle on Paint Rock.

Thanks to Joe and Dave for starting us on a whole new way of seeing Paint Rock.

We’re building a research center out of living, growing trees

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We’re building a research center out of living, growing trees, and we need your help

The Paint Rock Forest Research Center has a backbone. It’s called the forest dynamics census.

It’s what sets us apart from any other research center in the country. Its one of the primary reasons researchers would want to come here. It’s a unique platform that facilitates ground-breaking forest research that simply can’t be done anywhere else. And while other facilities in the world have similar census programs, no census in the temperate world is more diverse. When complete, our census will be by far the largest in North America.

But completing this census is like building a major research complex. You can envision the great work that will be done there, but you have to build it a brick at a time. And each of those bricks comes with a cost.

This year, we are on the verge of major breakthroughs in attracting research to our census plot and the preserve. A lot of what you’ve been reading here about the distinctive genetics of elms, oaks, maples, ash, shortleaf pine and others is a preview of the kind of research we’re attracting. It’s the kind of research that literally can change the future of North American forests. Give us a call and ask us what the research center can do to prevent the extinction of ash trees in North America, as the emerald ash borer wipes out 99 percent of ash in forests it invades.

But we have to finish the building. We’re at a critical time, with a great promise of funding in coming years, but a big hump facing us in funding for this year’s census.

We’re halfway through the 60 hectare research construction that we planned…and the 15 hectares we hope to finish this year will bring us much needed new information in the battle to save American ash and elm species, and to understand how forests work and survive.

Please consider participating in our Quadrat, Hectare and Scholarship support program. For $6,250, you can support the census on one hectare – about 2.5 acres. For $250, you can support work on one 65 foot by 65 foot quadrat, about the size of a city lot. That doesn’t cover all our costs – but it’s a great start, and we’ll work to double your donation to meet the cost of the program.

Donate to the Quadrat Hectare Capaign

Below are the names of the great people who have supported the Quadrat & Hectare Campaign

Robert Gandy – The Seed Man

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We’re sitting on something like 400,000 shortleaf pine seeds right now –
seed that will be used to restore the Southern Cumberland’s great lost
forest system. It’s pretty safe to say that’s the largest collection of
shortleaf seeds in Alabama in the better part of a century. By next
spring, we anticipate we’ll have close to 2 million. That’s about 20 times the number of seed we promised when we started this program.


There are many reasons for our success. But one of the biggest is the
fact that Robert Gandy picked us up off the sidewalk, dusted us off, and
showed us how the big boys collect and process pine seed.


Robert is a legendary seed collector for the forest industry. He’s done it
in Central America, he’s done it all over the South. But not even Robert
had ever done shortleaf pine seeds before. So I think Robert saw
shortleaf as the final Everest of seed collection, the last and most
daunting mountain that must be climbed.


We schemed for months about when to collect – because there’s only a
few weeks when cones are ripe enough and before they throw their
seeds to the four winds. He attended our collection sites almost daily,
assessing the quality of our seed. He custom built machinery that would
coax the seed out of the cones, then air dry them, then remove the
“wings” that help seeds fly away, then separate the live seed from the
dead seed.


And when it was over, he sent the processed seed to colleagues at the
U.S. Forest Service who declared it to be 99 percent pure live seed. It
doesn’t get any better than that.


What’s even more important is that Robert is helping us create an
industry in Paint Rock focused on the restoration of native biodiversity.
Robert’s custom-made processors can be used for many types of seed,
and we’re already in discussions with lots of folks about how to begin to
develop a seed processing and propagation facility that brings new
opportunities to the valley, even as it fuels restoration of the
Cumberland’s largest lost ecosystem.


Volunteers like this make us what we are. There’s no way we would have
succeeded without his help. I can’t calculate the debt of gratitude
we’re going to owe Robert when all this is done. But so far, all we have
to do is sit around and listen to his dry jokes while he spins out
pound after pound of shortleaf seed.