WHAT GOOD IS A DEAD TREE?

Close-up photos capture many of the creepy-crawlies that move in to recycle a fallen tree over the course of a half-century.

Invitingly drawing readers in with promises of meetings with “springtails, farting termites, and an occasional snake and salamander,” Wechsler starts with a picture of a long, straight line of brown wood chips on a forest floor. He then goes back a speculative 50 years to show how an oak felled by an infestation of oak bracket fungus—aka “butt rot”—is systematically consumed by teeming waves of microbes, slime molds, bark beetles, carpenter ants, and other decomposers that keep the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen cycling. As promised, methane-farting termites do their part, as do various slithering temporary residents. Budding naturalists will delight further in Wechsler’s views of fire-colored beetles in various stages of metamorphosis as well as ultra-close photos of Carolina mantleslugs, dog vomit slime mold, and other enticingly monikered flora and fauna accompanying his matter-of-fact discourse on the way to final glimpses of an oak seedling and an acorn-eating chipmunk that signal “rebirth.” For those who just want the gist, he offers a bulleted summary of high spots at the end, plus guidelines for safe and minimally invasive investigations of rotting logs in the wild.

Tunnels into its topic with gusto and precision.