CHOKE CHERRIES

     Choke cherries are common, native trees in much of the northeastern United Sates, including southeastern Pennsylvania farmland.  Many of the them grow along woodland edges, roadsides and hedgerows between fields, and in some suburban areas, including one twenty-foot tree in our back lawn in southeastern Pennsylvania.  

     Choke cherry trees grow to be bushy, or small trees up to twenty-five feet tall.  They sprout from seeds in bird droppings, and underground runners, and sometimes make thickets of themselves.

     Choke cherry fruits are important to wildlife.  Several kinds of birds and mammals, including some of those in our home neighborhood, ingest the ripening red, or ripe, dark-purple, thin-skinned drupes of choke cherries from late July into early September.  The list of common, summering, mostly post-breeding, birds feeding on the pea-sized choke cherry fruits is long, including flocks of American robins, eastern bluebirds, cedar waxwings, purple grackles and starlings.  Other feathered species include individual blue jays, northern cardinals, northern mockingbirds, gray catbirds, eastern kingbirds and others.  These birds create an exciting, entertaining, and almost constant stream of comings and goings when they consume choke cherry drupes, including their seeds.  And these birds' lovely feathering adds to the beauties of the trees and their fruits.  

     Those birds digest the thin skins of choke cherry drupes, but pass the seeds in their droppings, thereby scattering those seeds far and wide.  Some of those seeds sprout into bushes or trees.  

     Gray squirrels, eastern chipmunks and deer mice ingest the tough seeds of choke cherries.  They have the sharp teeth and strong jaw muscles to easily do so.  Those seeds, of course, don't get to sprout.       Opossums, striped skunks, raccoons and white-tailed deer also eat quantities of choke cherry fruits, mostly at night, and pass their seeds in droppings.   

     In mid-April, in this area, leaves develop rapidly on choke cherry trees.  And colonies of tent caterpillar siblings eat some of that foliage at night, and together create a silken tent in a tree fork where they spend days in relative safety.  However, two kinds of American cuckoos specialize in consuming hairy caterpillars.  

     In the middle of May, choke cherry trees produce many tapered clusters of small, white flowers.  Those blooms are pollinated by a variety of nectar-sipping bees and other, smaller insects.     

     Choke cherry trees have a beneficial impact on wildlife.  Several kinds of wild creatures either feed on the flower nectar, foliage or drupes of those common, native trees.  Those critters make choke cherries the more interesting.  

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