Treetops have been a place I always wanted to visit. Being afraid of heights has kept me on the ground, but I remain enamored with what I can see and hear from the safety of terra firma. Taking the time to arch your neck and look up into the canopy is a worthy exercise if nothing more than to wonder and contemplate what lies above.
I did try to be brave as a child and climb as high as I could in any tree I encountered. Ten feet is my limit, past which my knees become weak and I am convinced that some unseen force will sling me to the ground. When I do find myself on a ladder, I am exhausted quickly because of that scenario playing in my head.
As a naturalist, I am well aware of the many critters of all types that live in trees. Squirrels defy the laws of physics and balance. I am jealous. Birds, bats and insects fly, and many other vertebrate and invertebrate creatures enjoy something up there, even if I cannot see what.
Insects alone benefit from the vast numbers of leaves in any given tree. That is a lot of green to eat and eat they do! They are in turn, the prey of countless other critters. What lives under bark and in dead wood is equally diverse and interesting.
For treetop dwelling insects, we can certainly hear many, like the summer daytime chorus of Cicadas and nighttime symphony of Katydids. The volume of both can at times be quite loud. Some say the sounds amount to a bunch of noise. To me, it is calming and calls for a time to sit and listen.
But there has been some work on finding out what lives in treetops. As a budding scientist in college, my major professor and I marveled about what one scientist had discovered in the tops of tropical rainforest trees. The young man was looking for a specific group of tree-dwelling beetles and decided to fog 11 trees of a single species. As the insecticide reached the tops of the trees, insects of all kinds rained down on the cloth sheets he had stretched on the ground, coating them with multiple inches of insects. The year was 1973.
As he reported back in about 2010, teams of students were still sorting through and pinning the thousands of insects that had been collected. The scientist had long completed his work on his beetles, but they were a tiny fraction of the goldmine of other insects that had fallen from those trees – one tree species of many!
So, what of our subtropical trees? Who knows, but I would venture to guess that we too would have a thick layer of insects on our sheets to sort through. Perhaps one day. In the meantime, just taking the time to look up has its benefits. Putting aside the thought of what lives up there, the architecture of the branches that hold up all those leaves can be mesmerizing. What could have made those branches bend or twist like that? And taken as a whole, the “habit” or structure of many types of trees are distinctive and beautiful.
Take the time to look up past the horizon and contemplate the beauty of treetops. Try closing your eyes and listen. The world above may not be easily accessible, but it is certainly there and worthy of our attention and respect.
Hope to see you in our great outdoors!