Carpenter ant work

I've been hiking the first of the doomed fields and forest—the real estate to my west—continuously this winter, if for no other reason than I want to document every square inch before the developers move in to "improve" it, a grim prospect that will probably become reality as early as this spring. I'm savoring each trek as if every trip is the last I'll be able to make. It's a maudlin thought, but, just as an impending execution is supposed to concentrate the mind, the notion of an incipient demise sharpens my focus. That may be why I spotted a downed tree I hadn't seen before, and when I walked about 20 yards off the main trail to examine it, I quickly spotted the reason it had joined the fallen. Shades of that hardwood predator known as Superstorm Sandy—one of our recent windstorms had tested the trees to see which of them had been sufficiently weakened by the excavations of Carpenter Ants. This oak completely passed the test.