Witchy tree doesn’t spook wildlife





 

 

There’s a rather witchy looking old pine tree that towers high above my rural Agoura backyard. It’s on a slope near our community’s lake, and when I recline in my chaise lounge I look up into its uppermost branches, which stick out like—well, like witch’s hair.

Occasionally we do encounter witches flaunting stylish coiffures. There were the girl-witches on “Charmed” and Glinda the Good Witch in “The Wizard of Oz” and Elizabeth Montgomery in “Bewitched.”

Those Hollywood hairdressers know their stuff.

Illustrated fairy-tale books are not as kind, depicting witches as wild-haired hags. The pine tree in my rural Agoura community falls into this latter category.

Forget symmetry, style, form. Its branches spiral corkscrew-fashion in every different direction, showing fuzzy green needle tufts shading to a tinny orange then sooty black.

The tree’s profile on a moonlit night is genuinely heebie-jeebies inducing. It rears skyward with its mass of every-which-way tresses pinned like crepe paper streamers against the night sky. The tree’s crooked, furrowed trunk is conspicuous because those witchy tresses have grown somewhat threadbare and so expose the center of the tree.

An owl’s dark silhouette appears hunkered on a misshapen branch. Its mournful hooting spikes the spooky factor.

On closer inspection by daylight, the old tree is probably dying. It certainly is cramped on that slope, with a young oak lapping right against its trunk and adjacent healthier pines with big crowns rather bullishly hogging the witchy pine’s air space. The orange-and-black coloration is not festive Halloween decoration but dieback of the foliage.

Remarkably, those odd witch’s locks passing for branches attract more birds than any of the neighboring pines. At varying times, great blue herons, snowy and great egrets, crows, hawks and even a visiting osprey have been spied roosting in the tree.

Thanks to the many gaps in the convoluted foliage, handsome profiles of the larger birds are readily visible, and I can watch them as they survey the scenery, sizing up prey possibilities and the whereabouts of rivals.

Such a consortium of bird life gives the tree a voice—a chatterbox’s voice in fact. The other day the sounds emanating from the witchy pine that attracts rather than scares off wildlife were particularly bizarre. It sounded as if someone were broadcasting over a loudspeaker the growling of a hungry belly.

Herons are known to have voices about as melodious as an off-key tuba recital. But that time the culprits were a bunch of crows conversing in their peculiar language, a language only the late comedian Robin Williams could adequately and hilariously mimic, with its murmured gravelly clucks and staccato outbursts.

So the old pine tree, although as ugly as any nightmare’s witch, has its appreciative admirers that help keep it vital—and vocal.

Glasser is a writer fascinated by all manner of natural phenomena surrounding her home in the Santa Monica Mountains. Reach her at ranchomulholla@gmail.com.


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