MULBERRIES AND CHOKE CHERRIES

      Mulberry trees originally from China and native choke cherry trees have much in common.  These abundant,  interesting, small trees are big in benefits to several kinds of wildlife in southeastern Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, providing shelter, and food in the form of decorative, berry-like drupes.  

     These trees are also scattered across the countryside by wildlife, including robins, waxwings, catbirds, starlings, skunks, deer, bears, opossums, raccoons and other species digesting the pulp of their drupes, but passing the fruits' seeds in excrement across the countryside.  In that way, those creatures insure food for their descendants in the future.  

     Both these species are adaptable pioneers, being two of the first trees to reclaim land disturbed by mining, agriculture and development.  Both grow rapidly, and some trees produce thickets from shoots on spreading roots.  In southeastern Pennsylvania they sprout and grow uninhibited along sunny roadsides, hedgerows and woodland edges where critters that ate their drupes passed through and excreted. 

     Mulberry trees from China grow quickly, up to fifty feet tall when mature.  Unfortunately, this attractive, beneficial species is short-lived.  However, each tree annually produces an abundance of juicy, one-inch drupes that are white, red, and attractively deep-purple when ripe in June and eaten by several species of wildlife.

     Choke cherry trees grow up to twenty feet high and are native to North America.  They, too, flourish along sunny woodland edges, hedgerows and roadsides where wildlife excreted their seeds.  

     In April, choke cherries produce drooping, three-inch-long clusters of small, white, fragrant flowers.  Bees and other kinds of insects sip the nectar from those blossoms, pollinating them in the process.  Hanging clumps of green drupes form from the blooms, and become pea-sized and deep-purple by August, when they are devoured by several types of wildlife.  Each mature drupe has a thin layer of pulp, but a large seed inside.  Those seeds are eaten by squirrels and mice that have teeth sharp enough and jaws strong enough to gnaw through the shell.  

     Tent moth caterpillars feed on choke cherry leaves in April and May.  At night they crawl out of their webbing homes among cherry twigs to ingest the trees' foliage.  And cherry leaves are food for a variety of other kinds of moth and butterfly caterpillars. 

     Mulberry and choke cherry trees are beneficial to a variety of wildlife.  And they have aesthetic value to us humans, too.              

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TWO GULLS AND A TERN

     Via a live camera and our computer screen, I saw flocks of post-breeding ring-billed gulls, Franklin's gulls and Caspian terns resting together, in early autumn of 2021, on mud flats and in inch-deep water on Lake Onalaska, a large, shallow back-water off the Mississippi River in northern Wisconsin.  These attractive birds are noted for regularly flocking together because they share inland, large-water habitats for nesting and wintering, and scavenge and catch fish and other aquatic creatures.  But each species also has lifestyles of its own, which sets it apart.             All these handsome, easily-seen species are graceful, buoyant fliers, quite adaptable and common across much of North America.  They are interesting to watch going about their daily activities, including nesting, getting food and loafing in big gatherings on rivers and larger lakes.      Ring-billed gulls, so-named for a black ring ...
Read more

WINTERING WATERFOWL AT BLACKWATER REFUGE

     During winter in years past, I enjoyed seeing and hearing, in person, big flocks of stately Canada geese, elegant tundra swans, overwhelming snow geese and several kinds of handsome ducks in wildlife refuges in New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware.  But during November, December and into January of 2020 and 2021, I watched flocks of those same kinds of waterfowl through Blackwater Wildlife Refuge's live camera in Maryland, and our computer screen at home.        Expecting big congregations of geese, swans and ducks by mid-November, Blackwater staff flooded two retention basins a few inches deep.  Those basins were dry all summer, which allowed the growth of grasses and other plants that produced seeds by autumn.  That vegetation was still standing in the basins when the water flowed into them.  A little later, some Canada geese, tundra swans and a small variety of ducks landed on the shallow water of those retention basins, w...
Read more

LAKE ONALASKA BIRDS IN FALL

     I have been watching water-loving birds on Lake Onalaska, a backwater lake off the Mississippi River in Wisconsin, via their live camera and our computer screen.  Most of the birds there are in flocks, making Onalaska loaded with feathered life during September into November.  Some species have been there all summer, while other kinds pour in from their breeding grounds elsewhere.        Non-breeding American white pelicans and double-crested cormorants were there all summer.  Both handsome species catch fish, but in different ways.  Pelicans form groups on the water to work together to herd small fish into shallows.  Then the pelicans dip their ample beaks and pouches into the shallows at once to scoop the fish into their pouches, straining water from their bills and swallowing their prey.      Cormorants dive under water from the surface and catch one fish at a time in their beaks.  They rise to ...
Read more