Read The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature for Free Online

particularly vitamins C and E. Native Americans also knew this and chewed winter evergreens to keep healthy through the winter.
    Ice permeates the mandala’s plants, but each cell carefully recoils, enforcing a microscopic separation between ice and life. By reversing this cellular contraction, twigs, buds, and roots are able to revive in spring and carry on almost as if winter had not happened. A few plant species, however, take a different path. Leafcup herbs completed their short eighteen-month lives last fall and now stand dead, surrendered entirely to winter. They have sublimated into a new physical form, like snow passing into vapor. Like vapor, these new forms are invisible, but they surround me. Buried in the mandala’s litter are thousands of leafcup seeds, waiting out winter. Because seeds have hard coats and dry interiors, they pass through the cold months largely protected from the assaults of ice.
    The impression of desolation in the mandala is superficial. Within the bounds of this one square meter are hundreds of thousands of plant cells, each one wrapped into itself, intensified in its withdrawal. The quiet gray exterior of plants, like gunpowder, belies the energy that is latent here. So, although titmice and other birds give a vigorous display of life in January, they are trifles compared to the power stored in the quiescent plants. When spring sparks the mandala, the energy released will carry the whole forest, birds included, through another year.

February 2nd—Footprints
    T he tips of a maple-leaf viburnum have been chiseled off, leaving beveled stubs along the shrub’s branches. The animal that clipped these tender shoots has left three footprints in the mandala, aligned east to west. Two almond-shaped impressions make up each footprint, sunk two inches into the leaf litter. This is the signature of a cloven hoof, the seal of the artiodactyl clan. Like nearly every terrestrial community the world over, the mandala has been browsed by a cleft-hoofed mammal, in this case a white-tailed deer.
    The deer that passed through the mandala last night was careful in its choice of browse. The viburnum shrub had stored food in branch tips, readying itself for spring. These young tips were not yet toughened and woody. The shrub’s tender growth has now been robbed, digested, and reinvested in deer muscle or, if the nibbler was a doe, in the body of a fawn in her womb.
    The deer had help. Freeing the food locked inside the tough cells of twigs and leaves requires a partnership between the very large and the very small. Big multicellular animals can nip off and chew woody material, but they cannot digest cellulose, the molecule that constitutes most plant matter. Microbes, tiny single-celled organisms such as bacteria and protists, are physically puny but chemically powerful. Cellulose does not give them pause. Thus is born a gang of thieves: animals that walk around and grind up plants, paired with microbes that digest pulverized cellulose. Several groups of animals have independentlydeveloped this plan. Termites work with protists in their gut; rabbits and their kin harbor microbes in a large chamber at the end of their gut; the hoatzin, an improbable leaf-eating bird from South America, has a fermentation sac in its neck; ruminants, including deer, have a huge bag of helpers in a special stomach, the rumen.
    Microbial partnerships allow large animals to use the vast stores of energy locked up in plant tissues. Those animals, including humans, that have not entered into a deal with microbes are limited to eating soft fruits, a few easily digestible seeds, and the milk and flesh of our more versatile animal cousins.
    The saplings in the mandala were pinched between the deer’s lower teeth and the tough pad on its upper jaw that takes the place of upper front teeth. The woody morsels were sent to the back teeth to be ground up, then swallowed. When these pieces hit the rumen they entered another ecosystem, a huge