Text is wrapping to next line even though there's more space in column

Also: i see some odd tracking on some of the words, as if some manual tracking override has been applied ("the trees....etc")

You might be seeing an affectation of Paragraph Composer where it's trying to balance the rag on the entire paragraph. Change to Single-line Composer for that paragraph and you will see the difference as that ignores the look of the whole paragraph and will fit all the words that CAN fit in each line. The drawback is you might have a weirder-looking paragraph.

If you have access to Creative Pro Magazine, Charles Nix wrote a great article on "Spacing Type in InDesign" to give you some guidance:

https://creativepro.com/spacing-type-in-indesign/

Show what the Justification settings are being set for the paragraph. You can show it in the Paragraph Style > Justification (or on the Control Panel menu > Justification:

Also, you're not allowing hyphenation on a relatively narrow measure which could help a lot.