Beauties of Shagbark Hickories and American Beeches

     Shagbark hickory and American beech are beautiful and interesting species of trees native to the eastern part of the United States.  Their gray bark is their greatest beauty and intrigue, in a polarized way.  The bark of the hickories is in long, partly-loose strips that look like they could easily peel off at both ends, making the trees look shaggy, hence their common name.  But the bark of beeches is tight, and smooth as paper, just the opposite of the hickories. 
     Winter is the best time to see the bark of these deciduous trees, when they are bare of foliage.  The hickories usually grow in the damp soil of forested bottomlands, while beeches flourish up slopes a little from the bottomland.  One can easily identify each kind of tree in winter by its distinctive bark, but beeches also keep many of their dead, curled, beige leaves clinging to their twigs through winter.  One can also notice how many beeches are in a woodland by that foliage on the trees in winter.  And beech trees have long, thin, amber buds that distinguish them in winter. 
     Both these trees can get massive.  Both have hard wood that is commercially valuable for flooring, baseball bats and other products requiring tough wood.  And these trees produce nuts that are eaten by squirrels, chipmunks, mice and other rodents.  Though the four-parted, thick husks and hard nuts of hickories are too hard for animals except rodents to chew into, many other kinds of wild creatures, including white-tailed deer, black bears, red foxes, gray foxes, ruffed grouse, wild turkeys and crows, consume beech nuts.  
     Both these types of trees have yellow foliage in October, adding to the beauty of that autumn month.  With the shorter periods of daylight each succeeding day and cooler average temperatures, deciduous trees, including these two, shut off water to their leaves, allowing them to die since they will have no use to the trees in winter.  As the leaves die, their green chlorophyll fades, revealing the yellow hue that was in the leaves all summer, but was overshadowed by the chlorophyll.
     Eventually, the yellow leaves of these trees fall off their twig moorings and plop onto the ground and the thick pile of fallen foliage on the soil.  There those leaves, along with the fallen leaves of other kinds of deciduous trees, shelter insects, land snails and other kinds of invertebrates and small vertebrates such as several kinds of salamanders, plus wood frogs, box turtles and white-footed mice.  And there that dead foliage rots into the soil, becoming part of it, which will nourish future plants.  Dead or alive, tree parts are valuable to the environment.   
     Hickories have compound leaves with five leaflets, but beeches have simple ones, with prominent "teeth" on their edges.  I don't know what advantage having simple or compound foliage has for the trees.  Perhaps it is nature working in different ways to determine what works better in the long run.  At any rate, leaves of the various kinds of trees help in identifying each species.
     Cavities form in the trunks and limbs of both these trees where strong wind ripped branches and twigs from the trees.  Squirrels, raccoons, certain owls, a variety of small, woodland birds, black snakes, honey bees and other kinds of wild life find shelter in those tree hollows from predation and the weather.  And some species raise young in them.
     Shagbark hickories and American beeches have several beauties and values.  But the bark on each of these deciduous trees is the most unique part of them.