SPICEBUSH BEAUTIES

      In the middle of April in southeastern Pennsylvania, and across much of the eastern United States, a yellow haze brightens the understories of many bottomland, deciduous woods.  That lovely, golden mist is created by innumerable flowers on native northern spicebushes that stand up to about eight feet tall and dominate many shady, deciduous forest understories on moist soil.   

     Some spicebushes are female and the others are male.  After being pollinated by bees, flies and other kinds of small, early insects that sip nectar from those golden flowers, and add more interest to the blossoms, each female bloom grows a green berry that swells through summer and becomes red by September.  Multitudes of those attractive berries are strikingly beautiful among spicebushes' green foliage that turns yellow in autumn.  

     During September, flocks of American robins, starlings, cedar waxwings and migrant thrushes eat many of spicebushes' scarlet berries, adding their feathered beauties to that of the spicebushes and the wooded bottomlands they inhabit.  Those birds digest the pulp of each berry they ingest, but pass the seed in a dropping, often far from the parent trees.  If that spicebush seed, and other seeds, survive the appetites of mice, chipmunks and squirrels foraging on dead-leaf-carpeted, woodland floors, it might sprout into a seedling spicebush.  Unknowingly, the birds sowed their food supplies into the future.

     All parts of spicebushes have a spicy, lemony scent that is enjoyable to sniff.  Simply scrape a bit of soft bark from a twig, or crush a leaf or berry to be able to smell that pleasant scent the year around.

     The green caterpillars of spicebush swallowtail butterflies hatch on spicebush leaves, and each larva rolls that leaf around itself and locks it with its own webbing.  Then each caterpillar continues to eat that leaf from inside, and pupate in it.  

     Each of those spicebush larva has two black spots on its thorax that look like eyes, which, I suppose, frighten away would-be predators that would have consumed that larva.  I have stared deeply into those fake eyes occasionally, and would have sworn they were looking back at me.  

     White-tailed deer, cottontail rabbits and voles ingest the soft bark, twigs and buds of spicebushes through winter when other food sources are buried by snow.  We may not see these mammals in the act of eating those spicebush parts, but we can see the chewed spots on the bushes, and those mammals' tracks in the snow.

     Northern spicebushes provide many beauties to us people and foods for a variety of wildlife.  They are wonderful bushes in the understories of many deciduous woods on moist soil in southeastern Pennsylvania through each year.