This post completes the circular story of the wetlands for this year. We’ve seen the beautiful trout lilies and other wildflowers of spring, the birds, insects and animals of summer, and the beautiful colors of fall. Now we see winter but before we know it, it will be time to show those spring trout lilies again. This is a beautiful place, with many unusual things that I haven’t seen anywhere else, so that means I’ll have to keep coming back.
Wild raisin (Viburnum cassinoides) is a native viburnum that likes wet feet so it’s right at home here in the wetlands. In fact I’ve seen more of them here than I ever have anywhere else. They’re easy to spot at this time of year because of their dangling clusters of round blue black fruit. The fruit is edible and is said to be quite sweet, and Native Americans ate them fresh or dried.
If you aren’t sure if what you have are wild raisins, just look at the buds. The valvate buds have two long bud scales that look like a blue heron bill, but the scales don’t cover the center of the bud. There is another native viburnum called nannyberry (Viburnum lentago) that has very similar buds, but its scales cover the entire bud. It also has edible berries, but its berries are more oval or elongated than round and they ripen slightly later. The difference between the flavor of the berries I’ve read, is nannyberries have a prune / banana type flavor, while wild raisins taste more like actual raisins. In any event birds love them both so if you want to try them you might want to get after it.
Bright sunshine showed these blackberry leaves were still green.
If you aren’t sure if what you’re seeing is a raspberry or a blackberry, just feel the canes. Blackberry canes feel more square than round and mature canes will have a groove or two in them that will run the length of the cane. Just watch the thorns.
These blackberry leaves were finished with photosynthesizing so they no longer needed to be green. Blackberries and other brambles like swamp dewberry often have deep purple leaves at this time of year.
American wintergreen is another plant that turns purple when it gets cold. Oil of wintergreen has been used medicinally for centuries and a soothing tea can be made from the leaves. The fragrance of the oil is unmistakable because it is used in toothpaste, mouthwash, pain relievers, breath mints and many other products but you should note: If you are allergic to aspirin you should not eat the berries, leaves or any teas or other preparations made from this plant because it contains compounds very similar to those found in aspirin.
I saw lots of berries on these plants and thought of my grandmother as I picked a few. When I was just a small boy, after we visited my mother’s grave we would go into the woods so she could teach me about the plants that grew there. Teaberry plants grew in abundance and she always called them checkerberries. Since she often had trouble getting up from a kneeling position before long it was up to me to find the berries and I usually found a lot of them. She loved them and taught me to love them as well but on this day these berries were kind of on the mealy side. I thought maybe they had been frozen and I didn’t care for their texture, but the flavor of Clarks teaberry gum was still the same.
There are lots of gray birches here. Though they aren’t quite as pretty as the bright white paper birches they do have white bark and they’re far more common. It is rare that a day goes by without birches in it.
Gray birches have the odd habit of having upright male catkins rather than ones that hang down like so many other trees. Before they flower in spring though, they will have changed position and will be hanging down. How they might benefit by standing upright, I don’t know. Plants don’t do things just for the fun of it though; every time they use energy, there is a good reason behind it. I’ve always thought that part of the fun of nature study was trying to figure out why they do what they do. If you watch them very closely, like each day in spring for trees, their secrets are often revealed. You don’t have to stand there watching them; often just a glance each day will show you something is different. You might see that those birch catkins that were standing up yesterday are now hanging down. I don’t know this as fact but I would guess in this case that the catkins would want to be pointing downward so water didn’t get in under the shingle like bud scales when they opened. If water reaches the flowers and freezes in a cold spring it can damage or even kill them.
The female cone like gray birch strobiles are larger than the male catkins and they always hang down. A close look shows that each one bears many hundreds of seeds. The small seeds are shaped like triangles with tiny wings, and are blown about by the wind in late fall and winter. Unless that is, birds get to them first. Many songbirds love them. You can often find the snow under a gray birch littered with hundreds of tiny seeds after a storm and chickadees and other small birds will be feasting on them. If they aren’t eaten they can persist for years in the soil.
But I would guess that most birch seeds do get eaten and to make sure I knew how it was done this black capped chickadee landed right in front of me to show me. It was easy to see where the name “black capped” came from. These are beautifully colored little birds but they don’t sit still long so few of us ever get to see them up close. Quite often I’ll notice as I walk on trails they fly along beside me from bush to bush, always just out of sight of the camera.
Luckily this one wasn’t camera shy so we can get a good look. How it can find those tiny birch seeds in all that gravel and pine needles, I don’t know. They’ve got better eyes than I have, I do know that. Males and females look almost identical but you can tell them apart in spring by their song. The males have a beautiful “fee-bee” mating call that sounds both sad and sweet, and it just doesn’t seem like spring is here until I hear their call. They also have an “every day” call that sounds like “chick a dee-dee-dee,” and I would guess that’s how they came by that part of their name.
We’ve had some up and down weather lately. One day last week it was 48 degrees and as I came out of a store I noticed this cluster fly hanging out on the hood of my car, enjoying the warmth of the engine that was wafting up from the gap between the hood and fender. Google lens told me it was a cluster fly and I learned that their name comes from the way they cluster together on your window sills on sunny winter days. They get into attics and other warm spaces and spend the winter there, but unlike the common housefly they don’t lay eggs on food.
One day it was very warm and all the melting ice created a heavy mist. Since I had seen flies and even mosquitoes around I thought I’d go and see if the spiders had built any webs in the wetlands but no; apparently they all disappeared. I’ve read that orb weaver spiders die in winter but the egg sacs the females leave behind ensure a new generation in spring.
The ice was melting quickly and in a day or two there wouldn’t be any left except in places that saw no sunshine.
There is so much beauty in this world, sometimes it seems like these posts have now reduced themselves to nothing but beauty. But I’m here to report what I see in nature and beauty is what I see, because it’s everywhere I look. I find that my thoughts of whether or not something is beautiful are based more on how something makes me feel than how it looks, and the simplicity of a pickerel weed leaf tip sticking up out of frozen pond grabbed me and held me for a time. I love the colors and the minimalistic, abstract feel, and the way the leaf’s shadow looks like it has been colored in with a crayon. That’s due to tiny bubbles in the ice, I think. I must have taken twenty photos of this scene and this is the one I liked the most.
There is never ice everywhere here in the wetlands; even in the coldest winters there is always open water to be found and mallards are expert at finding it. I found the mallards seen here swimming in part of a pool that hadn’t frozen over completely. There was Mr. Mallard…..
…and there was Mrs. Mallard. I love the way they float along so serenely, and I loved the beautiful patterns in her feathers.
Actually on this day I saw far more of this than I did serene floating. These birds were hungry, and they were finding plenty to eat down there on the bottom.
There were lots of black eyed Susan seeds for other birds to eat. Goldfinches love them and there are lots of goldfinches here. Other birds that eat them are chickadees, cardinals, nuthatches, and sparrows, all of which can be found here in the wetlands.
All of the same birds also eat aster seeds. Years ago I started leaving garden plants standing for the winter so birds could eat the seeds and I usually have a yard full of birds. Most of the smaller birds hide in the big eastern white cedar out front and they fly into it when I open the door to leave. Bigger birds just fly up and perch on the many bare limbs of the maples, cherries and crab apples and watch what I’m doing. I don’t feed them but they know I won’t harm them so I’ve had generation after generation nesting here. One of the great pleasures I find in nature is in the spring when I can start opening the windows to hear their songs at dawn.
I saw lots of bird’s nests here but I chose to show this one because one side support had let go and it was tilted so we could easily see inside it. I thought back to last summer and what birds I had seen in this spot. There were lots of catbirds and a few blue jays here but I can’t say with certainty which of them would have made the nest. A baseball, which is about 3 inches in diameter, would have fit right into it. There are lots of grapevines here as well and this and other birds had used their peeling bark to build their nests, along with straw and whatever else they could find.
I always look at the grape tendrils because sometimes I see amazing things in them like horse heads or Hindu dancers, but on this day all I saw was a grape tendril. It seems like my imagination has decided to take some time off lately.
Miles off in the distance it looked like Mount Monadnock had received a dusting of snow. It usually snows on the mountain before we see any down here in the lowlands. It had rained here the day before, so I’d guess that it fell as snow up there. Once there is a buildup of snow on the mountain it will most likely stay snowy until May, depending on the weather. I’ve been up there when the snow was so deep I had to kind of swim / crawl through / over it. It’s a good thing I was young because it was exhausting. I felt tired right down to my bones.
I couldn’t stand around thinking of mountains for very long because there were some dark clouds moving in, and it was cold enough to snow. I snapped this one last shot of the clouds and stayed dry all the way to the car, but I woke the next morning to find that we’d had a dusting of snow overnight.
Beauty, joy, serenity, simplicity, and wonder; I found them all while making this post and I found them without really even trying. I know you’ll find them too, and much, much more as you travel through life.
Go to the winter woods: listen there; look, watch, and “the dead months” will give you a subtler secret than any you have yet found in the forest. ~ Fiona Macleod
Thanks for coming by.
Note: As I did last year at this time I’m taking a short break from regular blogging, so posts will be sporadic until they resume in March. I need to just be quiet for awhile so I’ll post the usual “Christmas card” post next week and then, unless something comes up I’ll be back in March. I expect something will come up before then though. Last year all of the sudden I was writing poetry. And don’t forget-you can always go to the archives up there on the right hand side and wander through them. There are 12 years worth of blog posts there.