We were minding our own business, sleeping soundly early last Friday morning when in typical Texas fashion, a sudden, crazily severe thunderstorm blew in unexpectedly. The meteorological know-it-alls never even predicted it. It just snuck in undetected. We were greeted in the predawn hours with a light show that would rival the aurora borealis. It was a frenzied disco ball of lightning with a little thunder tossed in as an afterthought, and very little rain.
Later in the morning when I was walking Millie, we happened upon this tree in our neighborhood. The homeowner was standing beneath it and bewilderedly gazing up. He said he had heard a huge boom while still abed and figured something nearby had been struck by lightning. Turns out it was his tree. But instead of the usual split down the middle or missing branch, this tree was almost completely stripped of its bark. If you look closely, you can see the vertical stripes of bark interspersed with stripes of no bark, all the way up into the top limbs. It was the most bizarre thing I've seen in a long time. Thin strips of bark littered the man's driveway, yard, and roof in a radius of about 30 feet from the tree. It looked as though a very tall, very hungry deer had dined on it. Just when you think you've seen everything........... If you click on the picture, it will expand so you can see the detail. Think Ripley's Believe It Or Not would be interested?
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4 comments:
Wow !!!! That is so weird. Do you think that will kill the tree?
Freaky deaky.
You can see very clearly when you click on the photo to expand it.
Will the tree survive without it's skin?
The owner thinks the tree will die. I can't remember the name of the tree--it was some Indian name I had never heard of--but it's kind of a junky scrub tree. He wasn't too broken up about possibly losing it. The strange thing is that this same guy lost a HUGE, mature oak from his front yard a couple months ago when that tornado went through our neighborhood. That one he misses.
Wow! That happened to a huge maple tree at 85 south broad when we still lived there. Mom and Dad were up for the weekend on one of our numerous renovation weekends. The strike woke us up. I was so scared, I didn't want to get out of bed, but dad got up and looked aroung with Jeff to make sure that nothing was on fire. In the a.m., we noticed that there were bits of bark in the front lawn, road and roof. Finally we discovered that the tree that was struck was in the BACK yard. The bark was stripped circumferentially from the top all the way to the base like someone had taken a gigantic whip form the heavens and struck the tree. It was absolutely incredible how far away we found pieces of bark.
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