I really enjoyed the opportunity to get off campus last Saturday on the Fischer Old-Growth Forest field trip. Special thanks to Rose House Fellow Todd Bittner for leading the trip and for all of the information he shared with us about the geology and history of the forest. One of the things I found most interesting was the differences we were able to see in the vegetation between fields of different ages. The first field on the outside of the forest had been farmed up until fairly recently, so shrubs/trees/etc. hadn’t taken up root yet; the next field had been abandoned earlier than the first, and it had been overgrown by a thicket of invasive shrub; the next field was older still, and was more of a forest than a field by now: it had tall trees and some underbrush; the last environment we saw was the old-growth forest, which was populated by evergreen trees that are hundreds of years old–because of the denseness of the canopy, this section of the forest had little undergrowth, because there wasn’t enough sunlight to support it. The delineation between each of these different environments was very clear as we walked through them. It felt a bit like entering a textbook diagram. Considering that the old-growth forest is one of the spaces Cornell uses as an “outdoor classroom”, I guess it’s pretty ideal that that’s the feeling it gives. At any rate, it was exciting to learn how to read the signs given by the landscape and vegetation to make inferences about their development. I think I will look a the local landscape with a slightly sharper eye now.