By: Steve Roark
Volunteer Interpreter, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park
Deer are social creatures and they need to communicate with one another. Sometimes it’s one-on-one trash talk, while other times it’s an alarm to an entire group.

By: Steve Roark
Volunteer Interpreter, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park

Spiders have been stereotyped as being dangerous and the natural tendency is to squash them before taking time to consider how beneficial and interesting they are. Their most unique talent is producing silk and spinning it into webs to catch prey.

By: Steve Roark
Volunteer Interpreter, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park

Black walnut is well known to most folks, but there is another walnut native to our area. Butternut (Juglans cinerea), also called White walnut, likes to grow in the same deep, moist soils like its black cousin, but is becoming rare to find.

Fall coloration of trees in our area is always looked forward to. The presence of a large number of trees having brilliant fall foliage is more unusual than you think, as the only other places in the world with a similar abundance of foliage colorations are northern China, Korea, and Japan. A common question this time of year is: will the colors be good or not? The answer is meteorological.

With autumn comes the nostalgia of the apple harvest, a fruit whose history goes back a long way. Legend and art have made the Tree of Knowledge that led to the downfall of Adam and Eve an apple, but the Bible only refers to a fruit. What follows is more apple knowledge of this famous fruit than you probably care to know.
Apples were first brought to America from England in 1629 by Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop. The first apples probably came from the trees Winthrop planted in Boston, from which “ten fair pippins” (apples) were picked in 1639.

September is noted for having heavy dews that bejewel cobwebs and soak your feet when walking through grass. The reason is that nights are getting longer, which allows the grass and other objects more time to drop below the dew point temperature and moisture in the air condenses on the cooled surface. Dew forms on vegetation more readily than other surfaces such as pavement because leaves and grass typically are thin and suspended in the air, causing them to cool more readily to reach dew point temperature.

The Autumn Equinox is one of two times of the year when the Sun is exactly above the Equator and day and night are equal in length. That’s as far into the science of what’s going on that I’ll go. It’s the astronomical beginning of fall, which is my favorite season of the year. After a long hot and humid summer, the crisp cool mornings, balmy temperatures, and visual clarity of lower humidity are very welcome.

You’ve likely got some age on you is you remember singing about Susie “pickin’ up pawpaws, put ‘em in her pocket, way down yonder in the Pawpaw Patch!” The Pawpaw is a curious native tree that gets attention this time of year when its fruit start to ripen. Also called a "Winter Banana" and "Custard Apple", the fruit looks like it should be growing in a tropical rain forest rather than the Appalachian Mountains. It is in fact a relative of several tropical trees in South America, and even the name "Pawpaw" is tropical in origin, being a corruption of the papaya tree to which it is not related.

By Steve Roark
Volunteer Interpreter, Cumberland Gap National Historical Park
If you hike in the woods late summer into fall you are likely to have a face to literal face run-in with spiderweb.
The culprit is the spiny orb weaver, who has a knack for building webs across trails at eye level. The number of webs increase this time of year as the spiders increase their food energy intake to be able to lay eggs before hard winter sets in.

This fall looks to be a good year for nut producing trees like hickory and beech, and oak acorns aren’t looking bad either. Fruit and nut production varies from year to year, and the reasons are many.