Does a tree make a sound when it falls and no one is there to hear? As for the metaphysics of that question, I don’t know. The science says ‘yes’ by the way. But in any case, a tree does leave an afterimage. This tree fell many, many years ago and the picture was not intended to show its afterimage, the angle is all wrong. Yet nevertheless, even decades later, the space where that tree once was remains. Branches have begun to fill in, but the trees around it were already grown when it fell, and no saplings have filled the hole, and so the image remains. Consider the tree just to the left of center and the one in the top-right corner and their complete lack of branches on the side of their trunks facing the camera, and facing the old tree.
Acair Fearann 
One could get into quite a discussion distinguishing among things like the physical events that make up the stimulus that is received by an auditory organ, the activity of that organ in response to the stimulus, the coding and transmission of that activity within a nervous system, the reception of that coded transmission in various locales, the motor reactions to that, and on to the conscious awareness, this last being what we might normally think of as “perception”. You can have everything else without the last step. And in terms of neural timing of events, the perception is quite often long-delayed after the motor responses (good thing, too, in the case of a falling tree nearby).
One could also get into quite a discussion of the “afterimage” left by all sorts of things, but there’s no question that the plant kingdom is particularly good at such. Consider those plants such as some figs that start in the top of a host tree, send roots down, send branches and leaves up and around, and eventually kill off the host tree . . . which leaves a very clear-cut “afterimage” of its trunk inside the network of fig roots. Your example is a pleasantly much more diffuse though definite one.
Which raises the interesting question about chaos theory and the butterfly flapping its wings back in the Jurassic period (query, were there butterflies in the Jurassic?) and thereby shifting the entire chain of events. I read a rather startling sci-fi story about the time traveler who took a trip back and accidently stepped on the butterfly. Chaos ensued.