ESSAY TITLE: "Good Oak"

BACKGROUND:

The essay "Good Oak" describes the cutting and splitting of an oak tree into firewood. As the annual rings of wood are cut, Leopold relates important moments in conservation history. The student worksheet outlines some of the structures found in a tree's trunk.

Key Words:

frequency curve, fauna, flora, cord, dust-bowl, refuge, prairie, pith, kerf, maul, raker teeth, radial, cross grain.

The "Good Oak" chapter in Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac is used in conjunction with the sample lesson; below are two small excerpts from the "Good Oak."

EXCERPTS:

"The particular oak now aglow on my andirons grew on the bank of the old emigrant road where it climbs the sandhill. The stump, which I measured upon felling the tree, has a diameter of 30 inches. It shows 80 growth rings, hence the seedling from which it originated must have laid its first ring of wood in 1865, at the end of the Civil War. But I know from the history of present seedlings that no oak grows above the reach of rabbits without a decade or more of getting girdled each winter, and re-sprouting during the following summer.Indeed, it is all too clear that every surviving oak is the product either of rabbit negligence or of rabbit scarcity.Some day some patient botanist will draw a frequency curve of oak birth-years, and show that the curve humps every ten years, each hump originating from a low in the ten-year rabbit cycle." (p.6 -7) "Now our saw bites into the 1920's, the Babbitian decade when everything grew bigger and better in heedlessness and arrogance-until 1929, when stock markets crumpled. If the oak heard them fall, its wood gives no sign. Nor did it heed the Legislature's several protestations of love for trees: a National /forest and a forest-crop law in 1927, a great refuge on the Upper Mississippi bottomlands, in 1924, and a new forest policy in 1921. Neither did it notice the demise of the state's last marten in 1925, nor the arrival of its first starling in 1923." In March 1922, the "Big Sleet tore the neighboring elms limb from limb, but there is no sign of damage to our tree. What is a ton of ice, more or less, to a good oak?" (p.10 A Sand County Almanac ...)

1. Students are given a sample tree cross-section. Ask them to make up a history for that tree's life that would explain the variations in annual
   ring growth.
2. Have them label the parts of a tree cross-section and then graphically correlate the annual rings to a timeline.

1. Provide an increment borer or borings from tree trunks (artificial ones available from NASCO). Have them relate the tree's growth to a
   historical time line.
2. Using a calorimeter, compare heat content of pines and oaks.
   

RELATED ESSAYS:

"Bur Oak"
"Mighty Fortress"