The Autumn Winds

Happy blustery Friday to you all.

Today marks the end of a quite exceptional walking week, filled with sunshine and gorgeous weather.

Today on the dog blog I wanted to contemplate the Autumn Winds.

And more specifically I wanted to suggest an evolutionary correlation between the winds and the remaining leaves on trees.

It is of course known that deciduous trees will lose their leaves throughout the autumn so that they may start afresh from Spring with new life.

The trees read the change in the Seasons thanks to moisture and temperature levels. This is why the leaves change colour, die and fall to the ground to provide rich nutrients which will help future growth once Spring arrives.

However what I would like to examine, and potentially suggest, is that trees have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to expect the yearly late Autumn Winds.

It is dangerous for trees to have too many leaves going into the dryer, colder Winter where storms will bring down trees with too much foliage.

What I have been thinking about on this most windy of Fridays is that the Autumn Winds serve as an insurance policy for any trees who have not yet shed their remaining leaves.

Have the trees adapted over hundreds of millions of years to shed the majority of their leaves before the annual strong winds arrive?

In the animal kingdom this type of yearly event would make perfect sense when looking at Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest and his Theory of Evolution.

Trees which did not adapt to make these changes would have suffered many more losses.

I resisted Googling the answer as I actually quite like my theory…. For me it brings the woods to life that little bit more, and the forest becomes ever more so enchanting.

Happy weekend

Doggies: Bamse, Lucy, Kimba, Lotta and Oscar