Now in early November, most of the leaves are gone. The creek doesn’t have many leaves either anymore. I notice that the plants which retained their leaves are the buckthorn shrubs. Buckthorn can also be identified by the small ‘spikes’ which appear between splitting branches. If you scrape at the outer layer of a buckthorn’s bark, you should see an orange layer. Part of what allows buckthorn to spread so quickly and far is its diarrhetic, often lethally so, effect on birds. Buckthorn are extremely hardy and difficult to kill, just like this racoon: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FyHH3V0Of8wTEXO1zeaTSMbNAatu6OWs/view?usp=drive_link
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