If trees could talk, imagine the stories they'd tell
Happy fall, friends!
When is the last time you looked at a tree? I mean really looked? This time of year, we start to notice them a little bit more because the leaves are starting to change color and fall. But there is much more to these giant plants than just pretty foliage.
Trees produce oxygen. They provide shade. They shelter critters big and small. They even talk to each other! In addition to all of that, they are storytellers. Since we don’t speak the language of the trees, we must look at the tree itself to see evidence of what happened during its life.
Trees can live for a very long time, so they have plenty of stories to tell. On average, trees live to be about 100 to 300 years old, depending on the species. A lot of things can happen to a tree during that time!
Have you ever seen a tree that looks like it swallowed a beach ball? There’s a famous one in our preserves that has been the butt of many jokes. Those growths are called burls. These clusters of small knots covered in bark are the result of some sort of stress during the tree’s growth, such as injury or infection. Does your body share signs of stress? Have you ever heard an adult say that they “have a knot” in their muscles? Sometimes, you can also tell where branches have broken off and healed over, like when we get a scar from an injury.
Additional signs you might recognize are burn marks. These can be dark brown or black marks from where lightning might have hit the tree, or sometimes it’s the result of a fire.
Humans leave our marks, too. Maples are tapped for syrup, but like humans with a paper cut, trees can heal afterwards. Want a challenge? Visit the Snapper Pond Trail at Goodenow Grove Nature Preserve, where we do a lot of maple sugar activities in the late winter, to see if you can find healed maple trees.
Sometimes, you can see insects’ microhabitat in a tree in the form of a gall. Other animals leave their marks too — insects leave trails, birds make nests, squirrels inhabit cavities and sometimes beavers leave mid-meal.
Like humans, trees have their secrets, and you can’t tell if something is going on until you see the inside. That’s exactly what happened with a big, beautiful bur
oak here at Isle a la Cache.
Similar to August 2026, there were many strong thunderstorms in August 2025. Isle a la Cache preserve was mostly unaffected … except for our favorite tree. We call it the Witness Tree because we estimated it to be the oldest tree on the island and witness to so much history!
It was planted when only Native Americans lived here. It then saw generations of Indigenous peoples, French fur traders, American settlers and now visitors to the preserve and museum! Imagine the stories it could tell us! Although large and strong from the outside, the split revealed a partially hollow inside, indicating that the tree was sick.
I’ll let you in on a not-so-secret secret. I love to collect things, so when the tree fell, the crow-like instinct in me said, “Let’s collect a few branches to show visitors later!” But no matter which branch or piece of bark I picked up, there were dozens of species of moss and lichen and all sorts of insects still living in them, including a HUGE millipede! (A surprise, since I personally don’t find them that often).
It was a great reminder that trees are home to more than just birds. It was also a great reminder that the branches and bark were much better off staying on the forest floor than on my desk.
Think about it. How many hundreds of individuals called the leaves, branches, roots and cavities home over the course of the tree’s life? How many more will move in now that the tree lay on the forest floor? How many other stories is the tree a part of?
If you are lucky enough to see the rings of a tree, take a closer look. They reveal more chapters of a tree’s story, too.
Have a tree-rific autumn,
Jenna Krukowski
Interpretive naturalist
Isle a la Cache Museum
