The Connecticut woods are fundamentally a deciduous forest, meaning that in the fall, the trees mine the minerals from their leaves and drop them in preparation for winter. The dead leaves provide layer of leaf litter on the ground supporting an entire detritus based ecosystem of organisms. The trees in the Connecticut woods are secondary forest, growing in competition with many others in poor soils…the trees may be older than their small diameter would indicate. As the trees have grown, the lower branches die off as a result of shading by the upper branches; their maintenance costs exceed their productivity in the shade. So you see lots of dead and broken branches along the trunks in this photo.