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.

Little Clay Pots

In late April, little clay pots appeared on our forested trails.  Thumb-sized and sturdy, most were circular but some were oval-shaped.  Never before had I seen such constructions.  Near some of them, I also found small holes deeper than my forefinger could penetrate.  It was as if some tribe of lilliputians had emerged from the ground and secretly constructed them of mud, tiny stones, and bits of moss.

After studying dozens of the clay pots and finding acorns in some of them, I decided that they had somehow formed around squirrel-buried acorns and, in removing the acorns, the squirrels had uncovered the clay pots.  I contacted my favorite squirrel researcher and showed her the clay pots.  But she too had never seen anything like them.

The author's collection of mysterious "pots"

The artistry and diversity of the pots fascinated me. I filled a shoe box lid with them and put them on my desk.  Sooner or later, I hoped to find out what they were.

It turned out to be sooner.  On June 7, the second day of heat and humidity, our son Dave showed me photos of the little clay pots on the Penn State University Entomology Department’s website. They had been constructed by the nymphal stage of Brood XIV of the periodical cicada. Brood X, known as “the great eastern brood,” had emerged in many Pennsylvania counties, including our own, in 2004, but on our mountain, only Brood XIV, the second largest brood of periodical cicadas in Pennsylvania, emerges.

“In April, they [the nymphs] burrow to about an inch beneath the soil surface,” Senior Extension Associate Greg Hoover wrote on the Penn State website, “where they stop and await the proper time to emerge. If the ground is too damp, [as it was in April] mature nymphs build a protective earthen turret.”

But I wondered why I hadn’t seen them during the two previous emergences of Brood XIV on our mountain in 1991 and 1974. I e-mailed David Marshall, an expert on the periodical cicada at the University of Connecticut, for more information.

Cicada on the powerline right-of-way

“No one knows for sure why the cicadas build the turrets when they do,” he answered.  “Most of the time they do not, and yet sometimes a whole area will have them built way up several inches.  Theories range from differences in soil moisture/recent rainfall (nymphs somehow reducing the risk of drowning) to artifacts of differential exposure to light.  People were writing about this 100 years ago in USDA publications, and we have hardly learned any more since then!”

Furthermore, Marshall had no idea who or what had knocked all the tops off the turrets and why some contained acorns.  Neither did any other expert I consulted.  So I had to be content with solving half the mystery of the little clay pots.

We had started to hear the “phar-oah” calls of Magicicada septendecim, one of the three species of Brood XIV periodical cicadas, drifting up from bucolic Sinking Valley 500 feet below our mountaintop, a week earlier.  The day before we partially solved the mystery of the clay pots, Dave had reported that the periodical cicadas were emerging on the powerline right-of-way.  Summer had arrived with a vengeance and clad only in shorts and tank top, I hiked to the top of the right-of-way to welcome back the longest-living insects in North America.  Although I could hear the cicadas screeching down in the valley, those on the right-of-way were silent.

With their red eyes, golden-edged translucent wings segmented like stained glass windows by narrow bands of black, and the first segment of each leg the same orange-red as their eyes, they are strikingly handsome creatures.  They flew up from the scrub oaks and spun head-on toward me, veering off only at the last minute, their wings flashing in the sunlight.  Seemingly lurching under their own weight and barely able to maintain their equilibrium, they reminded me of miniature, poorly-loaded cargo planes.

Cicada on scrub oak

Still known erroneously by many people as 17-year locusts, the more than 2400 species of cicadas worldwide belong to the insect order Homoptera, whereas locusts are members of the Orthoptera insect order.  Back in the spring of 1634, when they emerged in Massachusetts, the pilgrims called them “locusts” because of their overwhelming numbers, which reminded them of biblical plagues of locusts.  They had never seen any insects like them because periodical cicadas occur nowhere else in the world but in eastern North America.

The Royal Society of London Journal reported this plague and wrote “that for the space of 200 miles they poisoned and destroyed all the trees of that country; there being found innumerable little holes in the ground, out of which those insects broke forth in the form of maggots, which turned into flyes (sic) that had a kind of taile (sic) or sting, which they stuck into the tree, and thereby envenomed and killed it.” Thus, the misnomer of “locusts.”

However, the truth about these insects is even more amazing than the folklore. Because cicada larvae have sucking mouthparts, they are closely related to aphids, scale insects, mealy bugs, tree and leaf hoppers.  Their small, fishlike larvae use sharp beaks to puncture tree rootlets and suck watery liquid out of them as sustenance during their 17 years underground. When one rootlet dies, they move on to another.

After more than ten years as deep as two feet underground, they move closer to the soil surface.  One researcher, Monte Lloyd, back in the early 1960s, dug up the larvae at various stages and found that they take a four-year rest during their underground growth.

It is probably the soil temperature — around 64 degrees Fahrenheit — that finally triggers the larvae to emerge from their tunnels after sunset, climb a shrub or small tree, and wriggle out of the exoskeleton of their fifth instar or juvenile stage.  The adults are white when they first appear, and cicada connoisseurs recommend eating them at that stage either plain or sautéed in butter and parsley.

Empty cicada exuviae on the powerline

“They have a nutty flavor, almost like a pistachio nut,” writes David George Gordon in his The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook, while Monte Lloyd says “they taste like a cross between an avocado and a raw potato” and maintains that they are delicious.

Even after they harden, in a day or so, they are excellent food for spiders, snakes, birds, and fish.  The largest wasp in the East — the cicada killer — paralyzes a cicada with its sting, pulls it up into a tree, flies to its nest still holding the cicada, and feeds it to its wasp larva.  But because of the cicadas’survival strategy called by researchers “predator satiation” or emerging in overwhelming numbers as high as 1.5 million per acre, predators couldn’t begin to eat all of them.

A predator fungus, though, Massopora cicadina, that infects the larvae as they burrow into the soil, can be a problem to populations.  The fungus stays with the larvae when they emerge 17 years later and while infected females mate, they don’t lay eggs. Infected males try to mate with both males and females.  This spreads the fungus.  But most cicada populations are fungus-free and perform as they should to perpetuate the species.

After four days of hardening and rest, the males form aggregations, also referred to as choruses or leks that sexually attract females.  There are actually three species of 17-year periodical cicadas, and their calls are their best identifying characteristic.  The most common is the “phar-oah” calling M. septendecim, followed by the ticking and buzzing of M. cassini, and the much rarer M.septendecula, which sounds like a lawn sprinkler.

Video link.

The males produce their songs using ridged membranes on the first segment of their abdomens, which are hollow and probably act as resonating chambers.  The silent females hear them through their tympana or ear drums–membranous organs located on the undersides of their abdomens.

The aforementioned David Marshall and John Cooley caged unmated females and after several days, when the females could hear calling males, they flicked their wings.  Evidently, males end each of their screeches with a downward slur.  If a female is interested in a male, she then flicks her wings.  The favored male makes a buzzing sound meant to keep other males away.  Then he changes his song into courtship mode and, if that works, the female allows him to approach her, whereupon the male performs a final serenade before mating.

All this singing drives many humans to distraction. Some even lock themselves in their homes and call the fire department.  But I enjoyed moving from the lek on the powerline right-of-way to the chorus at the top corner of First Field to another aggregation at the Far Field.  As dawn strengthened every day, the tide of sound began, swelling to a crescendo as the day progressed, fading away to a diminuendo and then a numbing silence at daylight’s end.  After three weeks, the sound became an integral part of my life.

A female cicada deposits eggs in a black locust branch

But even while some males continued to sing, I watched the females scrape Y-shaped egg nests in scrub oak branches on the powerline right-of-way with their long, black ovipositors, and, pumping their hind ends, deposit up to 20 eggs per nest.  A single female lays as many as 600 eggs in multiple nests.  Sometimes those nest-filled branches will break off and drop to the ground, but, for the most part, “nature’s pruners,” as periodical cicadas are sometimes nicknamed, do little harm to trees.  Even the adults’ feeding by sucking plant fluids during their four weeks aboveground, is relatively harmless to the plants.

By the first of July, most of the singing was over.  In six to seven weeks the eggs would hatch and the white, antlike nymphs would wriggle out of their nests, drop to the ground, and burrow into the soil.

Altogether, I enjoyed hearing and seeing my third emergence of Brood XIV on our mountain. Had I been born here I would have heard the 1940 outbreak a month before my birth, their thrumming calls reaching me through my mother’s womb.  The next outbreak–in 1957–would have occurred the June I finished my junior year in high school.  We had lived on the mountain three years and I was 33, at the peak of motherhood, my three little boys excitedly collecting cicadas in glass jars, when they emerged in 1974. During the 1991 emergence, the boys were off on their own, and I was 50 years old and busily engaged in my writing career. Last June I was 67 and, like William T. Davis, the so-called Cicada Man of Staten Island, who identified and named half the cicada species in North America, I have been pleased to track my life through Brood XIV periodical cicada outbreaks.  Such tracking gives me a keen sense of my own mortality.

***

For more information (and entertainment), consult cicadamania.com.  This website, started in 1998, is “dedicated to cicadas, the most amazing insects in the world.” They post photos and information about cicadas from as far away as Australia, and they diligently track the major broods of periodical cicadas in North America.

The Penn State webpage includes a timetable of expected appearances of the periodical cicada in Pennsylvania and the counties in which they may emerge.

The wings of cicadas eaten by predators littered the trail above the garage

All photos and video shot on Brush Mountain, June-July 2008, by Dave Bonta