Snowbirds

"Peekaboo," by Scott M Duncan in NE Ohio (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license)

It was a fine early December day — 18 degrees with partial sunshine and a howling wind.  A new half-inch of snow covered the ground.  I counted the birds at my feeders because it was a Project FeederWatch day.  For over 20 years, two days a week from November until early April, I’ve been counting birds for this Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology program.  On that day, I recorded a record 16 species of birds — 24 house finches, two American tree sparrows, a song sparrow, two white-throated sparrows, a swamp sparrow, 25 American goldfinches, 19 mourning doves, a pair of white-breasted nuthatches, a pine siskin, four tufted titmice, two black-capped chickadees, a male downy woodpecker, two red-bellied woodpeckers, a purple finch, and 50 dark-eyed juncos.

Fifty dark-eyed juncos!  It was a challenge to count them as they swarmed over the ground and back steps beneath the feeders, looking like giant black and white ants, and pushed the other ground feeders to the periphery.  I had hit an all time high junco count and the Project FeederWatch website questioned my number when I entered my results.  That’s because over half of FeederWatch participants report six juncos or less.  Last winter my average junco group was 40.2.  The other bird species averaged .5 to 3 except for pine siskins (17.8) and American goldfinches (17.2).  Furthermore, when we conducted our Christmas Bird Count on foot over our mountaintop property, we tallied 208 species.  And, by January, sixty juncos were visiting my feeders.

According to most sources, winter junco flocks consist of 15 to 30 birds and settle on 10-acre territories.  During the day, they go from food source to food source, looking for a variety of wild seed sources to sustain them through the winter. The millet, milo, and cracked corn they prefer at feeders merely supplement the 5000 seeds they must consume every day from wild sources such as lamb’s quarters, thistles, broom sedge, ragweed, foxtail, and chickweed.  Our unshorn First and Far fields and home grounds provide a wealth of such seeds.

Junco tracks in Plummer's Hollow (photo by Dave)

Then, as the day darkens, several juncos seek shelter in our juniper tree near the feeders, but most head for our three-acre Norway spruce grove at the top of First Field.  One of my winter pleasures is sitting at dusk on Alan’s Bench, which is enclosed by spruces, and watching the juncos stream in from all directions.  At first they “zeet, zeet” to protest my presence, but they soon settle down beneath the sheltering boughs.

We aren’t far from the nearest breeding area for dark-eyed juncos — the Allegheny High Plateau — so I suspect that’s where our juncos, at least the earliest arrivals in late September, come from.  But as their numbers increase, many may be migrating from as far north as the boreal forests of Canada.  Traveling from 30 to 200 miles a night, how far juncos migrate depends on the weather, the lateness of the season, and the amount of body fat they have stored.  In Pennsylvania female juncos move southward ahead of males and adult females before young females.  In fact, adult juncos winter farther south than youngsters and those young migrate later than the adults do.  But we have plenty of the spiffy, dark gray to black males as well as the duller gray females and young, all of which have snowy white bellies.

When I first studied birds, our juncos were called slate-colored juncos.  But in the 1970s, ornithologists lumped five species of juncos into one and renamed them dark-eyed juncos.  However, the ornithologists designated those former five species — slate-colored, white-winged, Oregon, gray-headed and Guadalupe — as groups.  Our slate-colored junco is by far the widest distributed of the groups, breeding from Alaska to Newfoundland, as far south as Texas and along the Appalachians to North Carolina and northern Georgia.  Within the slate-colored hyemalis group are three subspecies— Junco hyemalis hyemalis, J.h.carolinensis, and J.h.cismontanus.  Here in Pennsylvania we have both J.h.hyemalis and J.h.carolinensis, the former in the northern glaciated and high plateau areas, the latter in the more southern portions of the state, especially in the mountains of Westmoreland County at the Powdermill Nature Reserve, where they have carried out field and banding studies of juncos since 1983. Of course, for mere amateurs like me, telling these subspecies apart in the field is impossible.

Because our juncos reminded European taxonomists of their reed bunting, they named them Junco, which means “reeds” in Latin.  Hyemalis is Latin for “winter.” But many folks still know dark-eyed juncos as “snowbirds.”  Other popular names include “black snowbird,” “common snowbird,” and “eastern junco.”  Henry David Thoreau, writing his journals in the mid-nineteenth century, referred to them as “blue snowbirds,” “slate-colored snowbirds,” and “slate-colored sparrows.” John James Audubon wrote in 1831 that “there is not an individual in the Union who does not know the little Snow-bird.”  Probably they were called snowbirds because most people only saw them in winter when the birds left the forests for parks, rural roadsides, farms, and today for backyard birdfeeders.

Dark-eyed junco by Tom Davis in Wilmington, Delaware (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA)

Not only do juncos visit more feeders across the continent than any other species, but also they are incredibly abundant — an estimated 630 million strong.  Because they flock together during the winter, their winter social behavior has been a popular subject for researchers.  In these flocks, males dominate females, and within each sex, adults dominate youngsters.  You can observe this at feeders when birds lunge at other birds and flick their tails, exposing their white outer tail feathers.  Those males with the most white in their tails are the most dominant.  Usually, this behavior occurs in early morning or late afternoon when they are feeding more heavily, especially when it is very cold or snowy.  Those dominant birds feed in the middle of the food area, and it’s up to the subordinates to look out for predators.  They also get less to eat, which is a problem if food is scarce, but if food is abundant, both subordinates and dominants thrive.

By March, junco males have joined our spring bird chorus, their trills making a “lovely tinkling chorus… as if a myriad of woodland sprites were shaking little bells in an intensive competition” Canadian naturalist-writer Louise de Kiriline Lawrence once wrote.  The males leave ahead of the females and by late April, our last junco is gone. By the time the females arrive on their breeding grounds, the males have established a two to three- acre territory.  At first, they chase returning females.  But if one stays on a male’s territory, he begins courtship by fanning his wings and tail, continual hopping, and picking up nesting materials.

Those males with the most white in their tails are most attractive to females.  They also have the highest testosterone levels.  But do they make the best mates?  According to researchers Ellen Ketterson and Joe McGothlin, that depends.  Those males with the highest testosterone levels attract older, more experienced females because their songs are sweeter.  They also produce more offspring.  However, they are not very good fathers, and their offspring are smaller when they hatch and die at higher rates.  The fathers are too busy displaying and chasing after other females to feed their mates or offspring as often as the less testosterone-charged males.

The dominant males also die sooner. Often, they are too busy showing off to be wary of predators. In addition, their elevated testosterone increases their stress, which leads to the production of a hormone called “corticosterone,” That hormone gives them quick energy even while it breaks down protein, leaving them with atrophied feathers, muscles, and organs.

Junco nest in Vermont, by Kent McFarland (Creative Commons BY-NC license)

Despite this dominant male junco angst, most pairs practice social monogamy and raise two families a year.  The female chooses the nest site and builds the nest.  Most sites are constructed on or near the ground in a bank or rock face, especially if grass or other vegetation overhangs it.  The nest we found in Little Pine State Park along the Lake Shore Trail last May was in a road bank under a bower of dried leaves caught in several small branches.  My husband Bruce, 13-year-old granddaughter Eva, and I saw a bird fly out of the bank.  Eva quickly found and photographed the nest woven of dried pine needles, twigs, and grasses, which contained four pale blue eggs strongly marked with brown squiggles and a brown blotch at the large end.  We stood quietly, waiting for its owner to return, and soon heard and then saw a scolding junco nearby.  The park, a forested gem with a small dammed lake in Lycoming County, provides excellent habitat for nesting juncos.

Cordelia Stanwood, an amateur ornithologist and photographer who lived in coastal Maine during the early twentieth century, wrote that “the nest site varies according to its situation.  I have seen juncos brooding amongst the roots of a growing clump of gray birches, partially under stumps and rocks, below a tuft of leaves, in a brush heap shaded by small evergreens, beneath bracken, and many within the side of a bank or knoll, the wall of a knoll covered with bird-wheat moss, or the side of a steep bank just under the overhanging sod [which] seems to be the most typical site for a junco nest.  A depression is made or enlarged in the side of the bank or knoll, and the moss or overhanging sod form a natural roof.”  Exactly, except that juncos also build unusual nests such as on a ledge beneath a house gable in Nova Scotia, in a half-pound tobacco can lying on its side in Saskatchewan, in a wind-vane bird feeder mounted on an eight-foot iron pipe in Olean, New York, and, for two years, in a hanging planter in Trucksville, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.  The second year the female nested in April while Christmas greens were still in the planter and nested a second time, after the first nestlings fledged, in the planter when the greens were removed.

The female incubates the three to five eggs 12 to 13 days while the male warns of danger, keeps small birds from the nest, and tries to discourage eastern chipmunks, which are major nest predators.  Red and gray squirrels, deer mice, white-footed mice, jumping mice and weasels also threaten eggs and nestlings in some areas.

After the junco eggs hatch, usually within a few hours of each other, the nestlings quickly mature as both parents stuff them with mostly insects and spiders.  At 12 days of age, they leave the nest, although if they are disturbed, they can run off at nine days old.  Fourteen days later, they are able to fly well and feed themselves.

Then they are on their own and later join winter flocks.  It they are lucky they will evade a host of predators, including accipiters — especially sharp-shinned hawks — shrikes, owls, jays, feral and domestic cats particularly near bird feeders.  More than once in the winter I’ve watched a sharpie catch, kill, pluck, and eat a junco near our feeders.

But such occasional predation doesn’t seem to shrink our junco population.  Because they are such generalists in nesting habitat — breeding in coniferous or deciduous forests — and in winter habitat continent-wide, as well as in their food choices, dark-eyed juncos should remain a ubiquitous species for decades to come.

Dark-eyed Junco by Birdfreak.com, Rockford, Illinois (Creative Commons BY-SA license)

Charismatic Invertebrates

Daddy long-legs on spicebush leaf, mid-August

“Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

Isn’t it funny?  I started to write to you yesterday afternoon, but as far as I got was the heading, ‘Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,’ and then I remembered I’d promised to pick some blackberries for supper, so I went off and left the sheet lying on the table, and when I came back, what do you think I found sitting in the middle of the page?  A real true Daddy-Long-Legs!

I picked him up very gently by one leg, and dropped him out of the window.  I wouldn’t hurt one of them for the world.  They always remind me of you.”

That is what the orphan Judy writes to an anonymous benefactor who is sending her to college in the novel Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster.  Because Judy catches a glimpse of a long-legged man leaving the orphanage office just before she learns of her good fortune, she nicknames him Daddy-Long-legs.  His only request is that she writes him occasional letters, which reach him through a third person, about her college experience.

As a sentimental teenager, I greatly enjoyed this old-fashioned romance written in 1912.  That may be why I, like Judy, wouldn’t hurt a daddy long-legs either.  Whenever one crawls over me, I watch fascinated as it deftly uses its four pairs of long, thread-like legs to propel itself forward.

Usually, daddy long-legs appear on our veranda in late September and early October during harvest time, which is why another common name for one is “harvestman.”  Most visitors shudder and assume they are giant spiders.  They are not reassured when I tell them they are not.  Like spiders, they have their own Order in the animal class Arachnida.  Spiders are in the Order Aranae; daddy long-legs are in the Order Opiliones, so they are also known as “opilionids.”

“Opilio” in Latin means “shepherd,” and experts say taxonomists chose that name because daddy long-legs look as if they are walking on stilts just as European shepherds used to do so that they could more easily oversee their flocks. At least 6,400 species have been identified in the Order, but there may be more than 10,000.  Although there are four suborders, the slender, long-legged, delicate harvestmen in temperate regions are in the suborder Eupnoi.

Daddy long-legs on bergamot, late July

These are incredibly ancient creatures.  Well-preserved fossils have been found in 400 million-year-old rocks.  Those preserved in the Rhynie cherts of Scotland look modern despite their age.  Not only have they not changed much over the eons, but also species have been restricted to small regions because they don’t disperse farther than 50 miles.  These ancient arachnids are probably most closely related to scorpions, pseudoscorpions, and solifugeae, which include wind scorpions and camel spiders.

Their heads, thoraxes, and abdomens grow together to form compact, oblong bodies, usually no longer than 5/16^th of an inch, that come in hues of brown, if they are mostly nocturnal, or yellow, green, or reddish-brown if they are diurnal species.  They have a knob or black turret on top of their heads with a tiny eye on each side that can detect movement several feet away.  But they use their second pair of legs, which are longer than the others, as antennae to explore, search for food, and warn of danger. In front and to the sides of their eyes are two pores from which a chemical scent is emitted that deter large predators and ants.  Beneath their bodies, they have a pair of pedipalps or pincers with which they grasp, tear, and stuff food in their mouths, fight other harvestmen, and clean their legs.

They can easily discard a leg if it is caught and grow a new one.  The detached leg twitches in some species for a minute, in other species for as long as an hour.  In order to move, they have so-called “pacemakers” in the end of the first long section or femur of their seven-jointed legs that sends signals through nerves to the muscles in their legs to stretch.  Between signals the legs rest.  Some researchers believe that the twitching leg keeps a potential predator occupied while the daddy long-legs escapes.

Birds, mammals, amphibians and spiders, some of which are not deterred by their chemical defense, prey on them.  Thus, some species of daddy long-legs may defend themselves by gluing debris on their bodies or by playing dead.

Two daddy long-legs on horsebalm, early July

They, in turn, are omnivorous and eat small insects, plant material and fungi.  Some species are scavengers that specialize in dead creatures, bird dung and other feces.  Most ambush their prey and, unlike other arachnids, which must liquefy their prey before ingesting it, daddy long-legs can eat chunks of food.

In late summer and early autumn, after most daddy long-legs’ species have gone through six nymphal stages, they are ready to mate.  It is then that they emerge from their usual habitat under leaf litter, logs and rocks in damp forests to search for mates.  After mating, the female may lay her eggs immediately or wait for months.  The smaller male drives away rivals while she lays eggs a few at a time in soil or under rotten wood until nothing is left of her but an empty shell.  Only one known daddy long-legs’ species in eastern North America hibernates as an adult.  The rest die and leave their eggs to hatch into new daddy long-legs the following spring.

The other early autumn charismatic (to me) invertebrate is the walkingstick, distant cousin of crickets and (ugh!) cockroaches.  Walkingsticks belong to the Phasmatodea or Phasmida Order of insects, which includes European stick insects, walkingsticks, and leaf insects, among others.  “Phasma” comes from the Greek meaning “phantom” because their resemblance to sticks or leaves makes them difficult to see.  But when they appear on our white board house or on our screens, as they do in October, their stick-like bodies always impress me.

I’m not the only person who finds walkingsticks intriguing.  Some people keep them as pets, the most popular being the Indian stick insect — Carausius morosus — because it (or rather she) eats a wide variety of easily obtainable foods such as lettuce and privet and thrives at room temperature.  Also, that species consists only of females that reproduce by parthenogenesis and easily lay fertile eggs.

walking stick close-up, by poppy2323 on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC license)

But most likely, the walkingsticks I see every year are northern walkingsticks Diapheromera femorata, also known as “stickbugs,” “specters,” “prairie alligators,” “devil’s horses,” “witches horses,” and “devil’s darning needles,” among other quaint names.

Although I’ve never noticed any harm from these insects, they are defoliators of deciduous trees in the eastern half of the United States and Canada.  As young nymphs, they eat a wide variety of low-growing shrubs such as rose, juneberry, sweet fern, blueberry and strawberry.  As older nymphs and adults, they prefer the leaves of black oak species, basswood and wild cherry but will also eat quaking aspen, paper birch, hickory, locust and apple tree leaves.  However, this species does not fly and so even a stream or road will stop their spread.  Two parasitic flies — Biomya genalis and Phasmophaga antennalis — destroy the nymphs.  The former lays its eggs on a walkingstick nymph that hatches and eats the nymph, but the latter lays its eggs on foliage that a nymph eats.

The northern walkingstick, like daddy long-legs, mates in late summer, and the female continues laying up to 150 black and white eggs that look like miniature beans, three every day, until cold weather arrives.  She drops them wherever she happens to be on a tree, and they fall to the ground.  The eggs overwinter in the leaf litter and stay unhatched through the following spring, summer, autumn, and winter, only hatching into pale green miniature adults the next year in May or early June.

Northern walkingsticks go through six larval instars before maturing in late July or early August.  The female is larger than the male — 2 ½ to 3 ½ inches long — and he is brown and she is greenish-brown.  Both have long antennae that are two thirds the length of their bodies.

walkingstick on sycamore at French Creek State Park, PA, by Colin Purrington on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license)

To defend themselves, the young nymphs drop to the ground or jerk back-and-forth, but the older ones and adults remain still, stretching their front legs beside their antennae so that they look even more like harmless twigs.  They sometimes release a bad-smelling liquid too. Birds, such as common grackles, blue jays, wild turkeys, American crows, American robins, white-breasted nuthatches and Carolina chickadees, often prey on them, especially during an infestation when they are more noticeable. Five-lined skinks, Chinese mantids, white-footed mice, eastern chipmunks, and eastern gray squirrels also find them tasty.

With more than 3000 species worldwide, most of which live in the tropics, walkingstick life histories are diverse.  For instance, Eurycantha horrida (its species’ name hints at its ferociousness), has large spines on its hind legs that it uses to defend itself and to compete with other males. Some species, like the southern United States species, the American or two-lined walkingstick (Anisomorpha buprestoides), have defensive glands and spray a noxious chemical that repels birds and other insects, not to mention curious entomologists like Thomas Eisner who describes the spray as a “fine mist”  that had a piercing stench.  “My eyes hurt, as did my lungs when I got a whiff.  This was evil stuff.  I started coughing,” he writes in his book For Love of Insects.  The species is nicknamed “musk mare” and “devil’s rider,” because the small male spends much of his time astride the much larger female.  “They are not necessarily mating when thus found,” Eisner writes, “although the pairing is sexual, and the two do eventually mate and produce eggs.”

walkingstick nymph, SW Ontario, by jclucier on Flickr (Creative Commons BY-NC license)

Many stick insects that drop their eggs on the ground, including the northern walkingstick, have eggs with a large food body called a capitulum, which contains substances attractive to ants, similar to some plants that have food bodies called “eliasomes” on their seeds to entice ants to take them back to their nests so they will have a more fruitful place to germinate and grow.  In the case of stick-insects, the ants take the eggs back to their nests, cut off the capitulums, and feed them to their brood.  Then the ants discard the rest of the eggs in their garbage, where they will hatch and live in the ant nest, safe from predators.  Some species are even ant mimics.

Luckily, northern walkingsticks have never released a bad-smelling liquid when I pick them up, as I do with the daddy long-legs, and show them off to visitors.  Youngsters are particularly intrigued by both of them.  Then I place the northern walkingstick on a tree to demonstrate its excellent camouflage, and put the daddy long-legs back in the woods, knowing that both critters will soon be dying as the season of warmth ends.

All daddy long-legs photos taken on the mountain by Dave. Please click the walkingstick photos to see the larger originals on Flickr.

A Fruitful Year

Some years are more fruitful than others.  Last year was one of those years.  From mid-June until mid-August I never set out for my morning walk without slipping a pint jar into my pocket.  I wanted to be prepared to pick first the low bush blueberries, then the huckleberries on the powerline right-of-way, and later, in August, the blackberries that overhung the Far Field Road.

But for nearly three weeks in July, most of my berry-picking centered on our home grounds where, for the first time in more than two decades, black raspberries escaped most of the ravages of deer and the attention of black bears and produced a crop that I could barely keep up with.

Video of Marcia picking raspberries in 2008. (Subscribers must click through to watch.)

Back in 1971, when we first saw our place on a Fourth of July weekend, I couldn’t believe the abundance of black raspberries growing in the backyard. Over the years, as the deer herd increased, the black raspberry canes decreased. Then, the bears appeared. Those canes that survived the browsing of the deer, namely those growing on the steep slope below the front porch, were trampled by bears overnight and stripped of their almost-ripe fruit.

The ubiquitous white-tailed deer

During the last several years, our hunters have trimmed the deer herd and the black raspberries have begun to recover.  Last summer we had a perfect storm of berries — patches outside the kitchen door, below the front porch, surrounding the springhouse, on a steep slope beside the guesthouse, and in the guesthouse backyard.  Secondary patches thrived beside the driveway and in our side yard.  Every hot, humid morning I was out early, picking several quarts.  Although some went into the freezer for winter fruit salads, we ate most at our meals, either alone or combined with blueberries and huckleberries, depending on whether I had the strength and will to pick both in one day.

The word “fruit” comes from the Latin fructus meaning “that which is used or enjoyed,” and we certainly did both with our wild berry crops.  I did most of the picking.  Occasionally, I was rewarded with more than berries.  Once in the patch outside the kitchen door I found a song sparrow nest that contained four greenish-white eggs heavily blotched with brown.  While picking blueberries on the powerline right-of-way, a tiny American toad hopped in front of me.  Hooded warblers serenaded me as I harvested blackberries on the Far Field Road.

With all the bears on our mountain, I was surprised that they left the black raspberries alone and that I never encountered them amidst the blueberry and huckleberry shrubs.  No doubt, the incredible abundance of wild berries everywhere on our mountain kept them busy.  I, after all, ranged only a mile or so in search of berries, but I knew of other patches on neighboring properties that had as much or more berries than our property and that were not picked by humans. And the bear scat on our trails certainly showed evidence that they were enjoying berries as much as we were.

Not only did the wild fruit crops palatable to humans thrive.  So too did those palatable to birds and animals, such as the red-berried elder, also called mountain elder. This beautiful, native shrub likes cool, moist, rocky woods and blooms in April.  On steep slopes, where deer cannot reach to browse its twigs and foliage, red-berried elder thrives, bearing pyramidal clusters of berry-like drupes here by the sixteenth of June.  Our son, Dave, photographed chipmunks eating them, and I have watched rose-breasted grosbeaks gobbling them up.

chipmunk with red elderberries

The naturalist-writer Henry David Thoreau once wrote in Faith in a Seed, “If you would study the habits of birds; go where their food is, for example, if it is about the first of September, to the wild black-cherry trees, elder bushes, pokeweed…” The “elder” he meant is the common elder, those shrubs with flat-topped, clusters of small, white flowers that  are even more popular wildlife food.  By early September, those shrubs inside our three acre deer exclosure hung heavy with the umbels of purplish-black, berry-like drupes, and I flushed two ruffed grouse feeding on them.

Because common elder blooms long after the last frost — in late June and early July — it always produces a bumper crop of fruit.  “Many species of wild birds are attracted to the ‘banquet table’ which the common elder spreads in the fall,” William Carey Grimm wrote in The Book of Shrubs, such as gray catbirds, American robins, eastern bluebirds, northern cardinals, rose-breasted grosbeaks, eastern towhees, red-bellied woodpeckers, brown thrashers, and wood and hermit thrushes.  But because white-tailed deer browse on its twigs and foliage, the “common” elder has become uncommon in many areas. What the deer don’t eat, the sprayers of roadsides, drainers of swamps, loggers of stream sides, and abolishers of fencerows destroy, because this is a shrub of fencerows and waysides that flourishes in rich, moist soils along streams and swamps.  Those in our exclosure grow along its moist border, reaching a height of seven feet, while those that grew along our stream at the edge of our First Field wetland are gone because of deer browsing.

Wild black cherry trees are not deer food so we have many in all stages of growth including large trees. As early as the second of July, I flushed a brown thrasher fledgling that was eating wild black cherries from a medium-sized tree at the edge of First Field.  But it was mid-August before most of the cherries in the forest began to ripen.  Then they were loaded with fruit, some of which were green, some red, and some black.  Common grackle flocks quickly discovered them, and during an evening walk, my husband Bruce and I watched hundred of blackbirds stream over First Field and land on Sapsucker Ridge, their black bodies silhouetted against a golden sky as they ate cherries.

Cedar Waxwing in an ornamental cherry tree (photo by m. heart, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license)

The following day, Tim Tyler, one of our hunter friends, was cutting out black locust trees on First Field when he discovered a cedar waxwing nest with four pale gray eggs spotted with brown in a locust tree.  He immediately stopped cutting there and left a small grove of six trees standing to protect the incipient waxwing family.

Thoreau wrote about finding a small black cherry tree in “full fruit” and hearing the “cherry-birds — their shrill and fine seringo — and robins… The cherry-birds and robins seem to know the locality of any wild cherry tree in town…” “Cherry-birds” are cedar waxwings. Had the waxwings waited for the cherry crop, which was unusually late because of a cold spring, before starting their family?  They do, after all, feed fruit to their nestlings. On the other hand, it could have been a second nesting.  Successful cedar waxwing couples often have second families, especially during good fruit-bearing years.

I kept an eye on the nest from a distance and always saw the female sitting on it.  But on the fifteenth of September, a cedar waxwing keened from the bare branch atop one of the tall black locusts above the nest site.  It looked around alertly, as male cedar waxwings do when they are on guard for their family. I peered at the nest through my binoculars and saw the female on the nest as usual.  Then she flew up toward the male and both of them flew off.  I took the opportunity to check their nest and found four nestlings.  One looked more advanced than the others did, but this sometimes happens with waxwings because often the female starts incubating before she lays all her eggs.

That was the only time I went near the nest, but I continued to watch it from a distance.  Soon the nestlings’ little crested heads were visible above the rim of the nest.  At least one parent was on guard in the tall locust whenever I walked past. Based on my calculations, that the female sits 12 days on her eggs before they start to hatch—a process that can take form 48 to 96 hours—and another 16 days as nestlings, I expected them to fledge around September 24.

Sure enough, on the morning of September 24, the cedar waxwing nest was empty except for a broken egg still holding smelly liquid and two squished wild black cherries.  The nest had been woven of wild grape stems, lined with dried weeds and plastered on the outside with fluffy white material.

In addition to cedar waxwings, I saw red-eyed vireos, blue jays, and scarlet tanagers harvesting wild black cherries, but the list of songbirds and other wildlife that feast on them is legion.  Thoreau mentioned gray catbirds, brown thrashers, eastern kingbirds, blue jays, red-headed woodpeckers, eastern bluebirds and northern cardinals as the most common birds that eat wild black cherries, in addition to robins and cedar waxwings.  Huge piles of bear scat studded with cherry pits on our trails testified to their popularity with bears. And the smaller animals, such as foxes, squirrels, and chipmunks, also ate the fruit.

A bower of pokeweed above Coyote Bench ripened too in September.  Pokeweed, known by many alternative names, for instance, pokeberry, poke, redweed, inkberry, and pigeon berry—can grow up to 12 feet tall in rich, moist soil.  Its long clusters of dark purple berries and large shiny seeds are popular with many songbirds, especially mourning doves, hence its name “pigeon berry.”  Philadelphia-based bird artist, Alexander Wilson, wrote back in the early nineteenth century that “the juice of the berries is of a beautiful crimson and they are eaten in such quantities by these birds [robins] that their whole stomachs are strongly tinged with the same red color.” I’ve watched eastern bluebirds harvesting the berries from pokeweed growing beside our house.

Solomon's plume (AKA false Solomon's seal) in berry

Several of our spring wildflowers flaunted autumn fruit also.  In mid-September, I walked down our road and found twin orange berries hanging from the end of yellow mandarin stems.  A series of twin blue berries dangled beneath Solomon’s seal stems, bright red clumps of jack-in-the-pulpit berries bent over from their weight, and a string of pinkish-red berries hung from the stem ends of false Solomon’s seal.  Wild spikenard displayed upright clusters of wine-colored berries.  Even the small beginnings of maple-leaved viburnum shrubs had a few dark, bluish-black clumps of berries.

But the wild nut crops were thin or non-existent, probably due, in part, to a cold spell in late spring.  No wonder wildlife was busily harvesting the September fruit crops. Because nature often gives bounteously with one hand and takes with another, the more diversity we have in wildflowers, shrubs, and trees in our forests, the more likely the animals and birds are to find enough to eat even if a major food fails.
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All photos were taken by Dave in Plummer’s Hollow except where indicated otherwise.

August Natives

Joe-pye-weed in Plummer's Hollow, 2008

Joe Pye is back.  Not the Native American herbalist for whom the wildflower is named, but the gorgeous wildflower itself that towers above a sea of goldenrod in our First Field.

Once we had dozens of joe-pye-weeds lifting their clusters of tiny, purple-colored blossoms above the lesser field flowers in August.  Then they disappeared.  We suspected deer were the culprits, and since our hunters have reduced deer numbers, joe-pye-weeds have returned.

Joe-pye-weed is named for a Native American herb doctor who is said to have wandered around rural New England in the late 1700s and offered “his” wildflower — known as “augue weed” — as a treatment for typhoid fever.  Another Native American tribe considered it an aphrodisiac.  The Chippewas made solutions of it for inflamed joints, and the Potawatomi used its toothed, ovate-shaped leaves as poultices for burns.  In the nineteenth century, Americans treated urinary and kidney infections with it, hence its alternate names, “kidney-root” and “gravel-root.”

There are four species of joe-pye-weeds in Pennsylvania. The tallest is hollow joe-pye-weed (Eupatorium fistulosum), which can grow as high as twelve feet.  Also known as “trumpet-weed,” its hollow, purple stem is covered with a whitish bloom, and its blossoms are pinkish-purple.  It grows commonly in meadows, moist thickets, along roadsides and in floodplains.

Sweet joe-pye-weed (Eupatorium purpureum) has a solid green stem that is purple only where the leaves meet the stem, and its flowers can be pale pink or purplish.  When bruised, the plant smells like vanilla.  It likes drier, more shaded habitats such as open woods and fields.  Both it and spotted joe-pye-weed (Eupatorium maculatum) grow up to eight feet tall.  The stem of the latter is purple and spotted, its clusters of flowers flat-topped and purplish, and it favors wet areas—swamps, wet thickets and floodplains.

Eastern joe-pye-weed is much shorter, its stem finely purple-spotted, and its flowers purple.  This is the rarest of the species in Pennsylvania, preferring sandy, acidic soil in swamps, bogs, marshes and swales.  All four species have leaves in whorls of three to seven on their stems.

The flowers of joe-pye-weed hum with bees and are butterfly-attractants.  Although the insects aid in pollinating the flowers, the plant is also self-pollinating because of its closely-packed flowers, some male and some female, the pollen-bearing stamens touching the pollen-catching stigmas.

A stand of hollow joe-pye along Black Moshannon Creek

Another August-blooming Eupatorium that my husband Bruce and I found growing in a sea of Queen Anne’s lace in First Field during our evening walk was a single stalk of Eupatorium perfoliatum or boneset.  It too has clusters of flowers growing atop a tall stem, but its flowers are white and its stem hairy.  Its most distinctive feature is its opposite, lance-shaped leaves that clasp and surround the stem.

Boneset is another native herbal and its name may have originated from its use in treating dengue or break-bone fever that once ravaged the southern United States.  The fever is so painful that sufferers feel as if their bones are broken.  Sipping boneset tea, made from the dried leaves, was said to relieve the pain.  Another theory was that because boneset leaves were joined together, a poultice of the plant would help to knit broken bones.  Or, most likely, boneset tea was a pain-reliever for those with broken bones.

Boneset tea seemed to be a cure-all and was sipped to treat rheumatism, pneumonia, constipation, influenza, ringworm, and expelling tapeworms.  It was even purported to cure snakebite.  At least one account, by A.D. Magner in The New System 1883, seemed to justify that belief.  A young woman who lived in Mahomeny Creek, Jefferson County, Pennsylvania was bitten by a rattlesnake one morning, Magner wrote.  After the fruitless ride of her father to a doctor, who could do nothing, 20 miles away in Red Bank, the discouraged father was returning home when he was met by a neighbor who offered to help.  The neighbor ran across his field gathering boneset, chewing some of the leaves as a poultice to put on the bite, and he planned to use the rest boiled down in milk as a drink for the afflicted woman.  By the time they reached her, it was night, her tongue was swollen and hanging out of her mouth, and she was bleeding from her moth and ears.  But the neighbor kept changing the poultices and giving her spoonfuls of the tea throughout the night, and by morning, she could close her mouth and had stopped bleeding.  The following evening she was “entirely restored,” Magner claimed.

Probably the oddest use of boneset was by the Chippewas who rubbed boneset root fibers on special whistles they made as charms for calling deer.

Dried white snakeroot stems persist throughout the winter

Not all the Eupatoriums are as useful.  The most notorious one is white snakeroot (E. rugosum).  Even the deer don’t touch it, which is why it thrives in the edges of our fields and woods in late August and early September.  Cows are not as discriminating as deer and before humans realized it poisonous properties, their cows ate it.  This tainted the milk with a poison that killed thousands of eastern North American pioneers, including Abraham Lincoln’s mother Nancy.  It took decades before people figured out the culprit.

Native Americans, on the other hand, made a tea from its roots to help cure diarrhea, painful urination, fevers and kidney stones.  They also burned it and used the smoke to revive unconscious patients.

White snakeroot, also called “richweed,” has stalked, toothed, sharply-pointed, opposite leaves below three flower stalks, each of which supports clusters of fringy, white flowers that resemble the cultivated ageratum.  It blooms from August until early October.

Still another interesting native August wildflower that is making a comeback is turtlehead.  Once it flowered abundantly in our woods beside our stream, but it too is a favorite of deer and gradually turtlehead disappeared.  Then, a couple years ago, our son Steve discovered a large planting of it, hidden by the field grasses, at the base of a wet seep above our driveway.  I was elated, especially when Baltimore checkerspot butterflies fluttered above the patch.

These gorgeous black, orange and white butterflies lay their reddish eggs in clusters as high as 700 on turtlehead, or, less commonly, on English plantain and yellow foxglove.  The eggs hatch in two weeks and the larvae construct a silken nest and feed on turtlehead leaves inside the nest.  Although the larvae stop feeding in August, they over winter in their tent.  The following spring the bristly, black and orange caterpillars leave the tent and wander off to feed not only on turtlehead leaves but also on those of English plantain, honeysuckle, lousewort, and viburnum.

A turtle head blossom, from the field above the barn

Looked at head on, the white or pinkish flowers of turtlehead resemble the head of a turtle, and its generic name Chelone is Greek for “tortoise.”  Its species name glabra means “smooth” and refers to its smooth stems and leaves.  Other names for turtlehead are “turtlebloom,” “snakehead,” “codhead,” “fishmouth,” “bitterherb,” “salt-rheum,” and “balmony.” It too was a popular herbal, and Native Americans used it as a tonic, laxative, and as a treatment for worms, jaundice, and tuberculosis.  One tribe, the Malecite Indians of the Canadian Maritime Provinces, employed it as a contraceptive.  Herbalist Charles Harris declared it good for “the removal of toxic sludge from the stomach and intestines.” I prefer its use as a Baltimore checkerspot food plant.

Orange jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) or touch-me-not grows along our mile-and-a-half long stream.  But it is a favorite deer food and is severely pruned by them as summer progresses.  But inside our three-acre deer exclosure in the bottom, wet area, it reached its full height and abundance last August.  Ruby-throated hummingbirds buzzed from blossom to blossom, their long bills pollinating the flowers by picking up their grains of white pollen from one flower and depositing them in another, all the while they were obtaining choice nectar.

Bumblebees, too, like jewelweed nectar, but they and other bees and wasps can’t reach it all inside the pendant-like blossom and often bite off the back of the flower to reach the nectar, which I’ve watched them do.  However, jewelweed doesn’t need to be pollinated by any creature because it has cleistogamous flowers (flowers than never open) that produce seeds, not enough, however, to cover the plant in flowers as the English discovered when they planted it in their gardens, where there are no hummingbirds, and called it “orange balsam” and “swing-boats,” the latter referring to its dangling flowers that also gave it the name “lady’s eardrops” and “jewelweed.”  “Snapweed” is a description of how the plant throws its seeds when you touch them, hence, “touch-me-not.”

Orange jewelweed

Native Americans used it as a skin salve for eczema, athlete’s foot, and especially, poison ivy rash.  Our son, Dave, who is highly susceptible to poison ivy, has often rubbed the fresh leaves of jewelweed on affected areas, but apparently a better solution is to stuff any part of the plant and as much as possible into a pot of water and boil it for half an hour or more until the water turns deep orange.  Bottle and refrigerate it or freeze it for longer term use and spread it on the rash.  This herbal remedy works.

Not all the native wildflowers of August have herbal properties.  Some of my latest discoveries are merely interesting and occasionally striking such as spikenard (Aralia racemosa), which I found growing on our road bank. A member of the Ginseng family, round umbels of greenish-white flowers grow on a smooth, black stem and later clusters of dark purple fruit catch my attention when walking up our road.

On that same road bank, panicled hawkweed (Hieracium paniculatum) supports a yellow, dandelion-like blossom or two on horizontal stems.  Unlike the nonnative orange and yellow hawkweeds that grow in fields, panicled hawkweed is a woodland wildflower.

So too is smooth false foxglove (Gerardia laevigata), which is said to be parasitic on the roots of oak trees.  Its bell-shaped, golden flowers blossom on our Laurel Ridge Trail but are often nipped off by deer.  Still, a few manage to bloom every August.

Smooth yellow false foxglove, photographed on Laurel Ridge

Wood nettles (Laportea canadensis) have made a terrific comeback since our deer numbers have decreased.  From none to hundreds, maybe thousands of plants, which have spread from stream bank to road bank, they have bristly stems with stinging hairs as I discovered when I first examined the unknown (to me) plant several years ago.  Their branched, greenish flowers and alternate, egg-shaped leaves are their identifying characteristics.

All of these native August wildflowers, in some way, reflect the white-tailed deer that roam our square mile.  White snakeroot thrives because deer don’t eat it.  All of the others have increased, made a comeback, or debuted because we tried and succeeded in reducing our deer herd by using skilled and dedicated hunters who take between 38 and 45 deer off our square mile of property every year.

All photos by Dave Bonta. Click on them to see larger versions.