Gordon Smith
Natural History of the Berkshires
10/30/09
Field Journal #6: Taste
When I went to my site on Thursday at about 4:30 pm, the weather was sunny, surprisingly warm with an ever so slight breeze, and the sky was cloudless.
Though I am always reluctant to taste plants I haven’t been expressly told are edible as well as tasty, I did sample a few plants while my courage was up. I chewed on the stem of a sugar maple leaf, hoping for a little bit of sweetness as per the tree’s name. This I did get briefly, but after a few seconds, the taste turned bitter and unpleasant, causing me to spit out the fibrous mass. Again hoping for a pleasant taste, I tried a white pine needle or two, and while they were nice flavor-wise, the texture soon defeated my gag reflex with the small splintery pieces that resulted from my chewing. After this, I tried one last plant, the wild mustard garlic. This tasted halfway between a blade of grass and a blade of chive, but was not pleasant. I considered sampling goutweed, but its name deterred me.
Another tour around the site led to several interesting observations and showed many large changes in the site. First and foremost, the white birches are all completely bare, as are the American beech, silver maple, chestnut and sugar maples. The large oak tree has turned completely brown, but as of yet the leaves have not fallen. The evergreens still look healthy, as does the goldenrod and the goutweed.
There seems to have been a reasonable large amount of animal activity recently. While at the site, I saw many more chipmunks than I had before, though this may have simply been timing. There was also plenty of evidence of the squirrels’ and chipmunks’ feeding. The number of fully eaten and stripped pinecones has increased drastically since last I visited. This most likely means that other sources of food are running low, and that now the pine cones are valuable for their seeds as they were not when other food was available. In the warm weather, the rodents were out in force, and I saw plenty of play going on. I also found, by the base of a white pine tree, a half eaten nut. As the picture below shows, the large chestnut is mostly eaten, and bears the marks of many small teeth, either from one rodent many times or from multiple rodents.
Half Eaten Chestnut
What was curious was that there was so much left. Scattered around the nut were small pieces of white nutmeat, and they almost appeared to have been chewed and spat out. There were not enough of these fragments to complete the nut, so it seemed that some was eaten, and the rest was left. I believe the strewn fragments and remaining half of a nut were the result of a very rapid feeding that was interrupted. But even if the feeding was interrupted, why leave the nut? In any case, an interesting find.
For a few nights recently, I have seen deer from my window in the Mission Park area. Though there weren’t any while I was there, traces were all over the site. Near the center of the grove is a large patch of goutweed, but when I arrived there I found many green shoots that appeared to be new growth. After investigating their tips and stems, I realized that they were simply goutweed (I think) stems that had been chewed off by deer. When deer graze, they usually also leave behind scat, which I also found in the grazed area. Judging by the concentrated organization of the dark pellets, I would guess a female left the scat, as males generally walk as they defecate, leaving a trail of pellets.
On the other side of my site, however, was another small pile of feces. While at first I thought it was again deer, I saw some distinct differences. The second pile had much less distinct boundaries between pellets; it almost seemed that the pellets had been softer and pressed together. They were smooth in texture, and the insides were green. This led me to believe it was a deer with some sort of intestinal issue that prevented full digestion of its meal and full uptake of water.
These signs also show me that deer have a much more active role in my site than I believed.