bio

Nurse log

A fallen giant that goes on being habitat for centuries after death. Raised above the leaf litter and the competition beneath it, holding water like a sponge, slowly softening and seeded with fungi, a nurse log becomes where seedlings root — which is why they root along it in a straight line. Walk any old temperate rainforest and you can read colonnades of mature trees standing in rows, each row the ghost of a log that rotted out from under them a century ago. Meanwhile it feeds the substantial community that requires dead wood: beetles, fungi, salamanders, and the woodpeckers hunting them.