The forests slumber, they are in their long winter dream.
They are not totally silent and comatose, of course. The resident birds still sing, but in a cold, muted fashion, intent only on maintaining contact with each other and warning of danger. The robust songs to declare territory and attract mates will come later.
I always liken the dormant forests to sleep in humans. We can’t survive without seven or eight hours of shuteye to recharge mind and body. It is the same with the forest, although the time-frame is far longer, the full three months of winter after the slow slide to shutdown in the autumn.
Unlike deciduous forests in the northern hemisphere, our eucalypts and wattles do not shed their leaves and do not become the living skeletons which dot the winter landscapes of Eurasia and North America. But they curb their growth all the same, starved of long hours of sunlight.
As I walk the forested foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington I can see for myself the woods are not totally asleep. The tiny blooms of common heath rock in a gentle breeze, and an eastern spinebill comes to call, hovering momentarily to dip its long scimitar bill into the flowers, to feast on nectar inside the bell-shaped flowers. And the leaf litter still squirms with worms and other invertebrates, providing food for dusky robins which watch and pounce from perches on tree stumps and fallen branches.
The leaf litter and these rotten stumps and dead branches is a clue to the fecundity of the winter forests. It is a world not always obvious to the human eye, like the fleeting, darting flight of the robin on the hunt for food. Here’s another world, fed by fungi; the powerhouse of the winter forest, breaking down rotting matter from the boomtime of summer and turning it into nutrients to feed the forest in summers to come.
I seek out myriad forms of fragile fungi in autumn and then winter, prolific when conditions are wet and free of the burning rays of the sun. And in the fungi hunt I also become aware of the lichen, in greys and reds which adorn rock and tree trunk.
The lichens are ancient, formed of a symbiotic relationships between fungi and algae and they deserve to be thought of differently from the plants on which they often grow. They are part of a forest within a forest, a rainforest of lichens, mosses and liverworts that have a parallel existence aeons older than flowers. They store memories of evolution and creation, and have been witness to the advent of more sophisticated lifeforms, of flora and fauna, and the one lifeform that has come to dominate all others, ourselves.
The gentle, grey, silent lichens have seen it all. The birth of life on earth and ultimately the birth of homo sapiens. The lichens have also been witness to the Tasmanian human story, from the meanderings of Aborigines in these forests, to the Europeans that came to replace them.
In a forest glade, replete with flitting birds and a birder watching them, the lichens reveal two worlds in one place, a symbiosis between body and soul.