Tag: Old English

 A low dam built across a river to raise the water level, regulate flow, or divert water into a channel. Unlike a dam, a weir is designed to be overtopped — water flows over it continuously. Weirs create a smooth, glassy lip of water that spills into turbulence below. They are ancient structures — some of the oldest human modifications of rivers.

 A depression in the ground created by large animals — bison, elk, boar, rhinos — rolling and rubbing in mud or dust. Wallows serve multiple purposes: cooling, parasite removal, scent-marking, and social display. Old bison wallows on the Great Plains persisted for decades after the animals were gone, holding water and growing different vegetation than the surrounding grass — ghost baths.

The physical condition of soil as it relates to its fitness for planting — its texture, structure, aeration, moisture, and workability. Good tilth means soil that crumbles easily in the hand, accepts water without puddling, and offers roots an open, welcoming matrix. Tilth is not a property of the soil alone; it is the result of how the soil has been managed. Years of careful cultivation, cover cropping, and organic amendment produce good tilth. Years of compaction, bare fallowing, and chemical dependence destroy it.

The distance between successive prints of the same foot — the length of one complete step cycle. Stride tells you how fast the animal was moving and, combined with track size, helps narrow the species. A walking coyote has a stride of roughly 12 to 14 inches; a walking mountain lion, with its longer body and shorter legs, may have a similar stride but a very different track pattern. In a gallop, stride opens dramatically — sometimes four or five times the walking distance.

The width between the outermost edges of an animal's left and right tracks — how wide the trail pattern is. Straddle, combined with stride, is one of the first measurements a tracker takes. A wide straddle relative to track size suggests a heavy, wide-bodied animal (badger, porcupine, bear); a narrow straddle suggests a light, narrow-bodied one (fox, deer, bobcat). Straddle is the animal's body width written on the ground.

 A structure built into or over a fence or wall that allows people to pass through while keeping livestock enclosed. Stiles come in many forms — stone steps, wooden ladder steps, squeeze gates, kissing gates — and are among the most quietly civilized features of the rural English and Welsh landscape. They are invitations: the land beyond is open to you on foot, but the animals stay put.

A swampy, marshy area — a backwater channel, a stagnant side arm of a river, or a shallow, reedy wetland. Sloughs are quiet, slow, and biologically rich: the water barely moves, the cattails grow thick, and the birds are everywhere. The word also means to shed (a snake sloughs its skin), which carries the same sense of something cast off and left behind.

A small, temporary stream — the trickle of water that forms on a hillside during rain, flows across a beach at low tide, or drains from a snowfield in spring. Runnels are the smallest channels that carry water — too small to be creeks, too temporary to be mapped, but the first links in the chain that builds a river.

 A feathery, opaque coating of ice that forms when supercooled water droplets in fog or cloud freeze on contact with a surface. On mountain summits, rime grows into elaborate, wind-facing sculptures on rocks, signs, and structures.

A year in which forest trees produce an exceptionally heavy crop of nuts or seeds — far more than in a normal year. Mast years are irregular, synchronized across large areas, and ecologically consequential: wildlife populations surge in response to the abundance, and the forest floor becomes a carpet of acorns, beechnuts, or pine seeds. The phenomenon is called masting, and scientists still don't fully understand what triggers it.