Earth Almanac: November/December 2008

Tasty Berries

In high country and north country, from Newfoundland to Georgia and as far west as the Dakotas, clusters of red-orange berries bow the pliable branches of mountain ash. Feasting on this gaudy fruit are mammals—especially mice, squirrels, and humans—and such birds as red-headed and pileated woodpeckers, ruffed grouse, ptarmigan, sharp-tailed grouse, blue grouse, jays, thrushes, and waxwings. Most people find the berries too bitter to eat raw, but they add sugar and render them into wines, pies, and preserves they generally consider delicious. The tree’s twigs and leaves are a favorite browse of white-tailed deer, and where populations of these animals have irrupted in the absence of natural predation—such as in parts of Pennsylvania and New York—mountain ash has been eliminated from the forest mix. Seedlings are available at most nurseries. Make sure to plant them in full sunlight and in fairly moist soil. In addition to attracting wildlife to your yard and brightening the winter scene, they will ward off the malevolent effects of all witchcraft—at least according to British sources that have been feted as highly reliable, though not recently.

Frozen Fish

Long after most other anadromous fish have spawned, when ice glazes dead reeds and piles black and silver bands around side channels, chum salmon surge into their natal streams. As they mill around in shallow water their exposed backs may freeze, a mostly inconsequential hazard since, like all our Pacific salmon, they are now living gametes, literally rotting away as all energy is diverted to reproductive organs. Soon they’ll die, infusing sterile headwaters with marine protein without which few of their progeny would survive. Chums are also called “dog salmon” because they appeared only after people had dried sufficient fillets of other species and were thus used to feed sled dogs, or perhaps because ripe male chums develop long, canine-like teeth. They are the second-largest Pacific salmon (after kings) and by far the most widely distributed, ranging from Oregon to the Sea of Japan, Siberia, the Arctic Ocean, and western Canada to the MacKenzie River. Like pink salmon, but unlike kings, cohos, and sockeyes, juveniles migrate almost immediately to the sea, where they feed on zooplankton until they grow large enough to take fish. They’ll spend three to six years in the salt, then return for their one-way spawning run.