A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1190 entries
deadfall
Deadfall is fallen timber lying on the forest floor, and in bulk it is the tangle of down trunks and limbs that makes off-trail travel through old forest slow and awkward. The same word names a kind of trap, in which a weighted log or stone is propped up and set to drop when the bait is disturbed. Both senses are about a heavy thing coming down.
Etymology
The word is a plain English compound and both uses are American, with the trap sense recorded first, in the eighteenth century. Foresters and ecologists mostly use the term coarse woody debris instead, which is one of the least poetic pieces of vocabulary in the field, given what it describes.
Notes
Deadfall is not waste. A down log holds moisture through a dry summer, seeds germinate on top of it as a nurse log, and it feeds a succession of beetles, fungi, salamanders, and small mammals for decades. Foresters measure it, because a stand with no deadfall in it is missing most of its animal habitat.