A Taste of Nature              By: Claudia Corona            10/30/09
Neither the slight chill in the air, nor the cloudiness of the day could dampen my mood today. I was going taste-testing! But not at just any site, I was going to Hopkin’s Forest!
I walked into the forest, fully expecting a buffet of colorful leaves and lively green plants, but that all came to a screeching halt when I saw the my site before me. If I didn’t know anything about seasons, I’d think that the Earth was permanently dying. Two weeks ago there was rows of white snakeroot, shrub honeysuckle, and other plants along the trail. But now, nothing but dried up leaves and parched plant stems littered the ground. The ferns were still around, but that’s because they are evergreen plants and they remain green throughout winter.
Even the trees looked dead! Two weeks ago they were a live, rich, vibrant brown color, and now, they all looked dried up. No tree had a lively color to it; the maples. beech, and birch trees all sported a dull gray color. They all looked how they felt (of little energy) and it made sense. As the northern hemisphere approaches winter, trees absorb all of the energy that their leaves have (as a result of less sunlight hours), and then shed their leaves in order to store energy for winter. But that’s not enough, the trees also have to “power down” and go into a sort of hibernation mode in order to survive the cold winter months, which would explain why they looked less vibrant.
“Chirp, chirp!”, is all I could hear while I take in what looks to be a perished forest. Now that more than 90% of the leaves on all the trees had fallen, I could see the birds flying around from tree to tree. There were quite a few birds today, more than I’d ever seen or heard before in my site. The birds were too high up for me to identify, but they couldn’t have been more than 6 inches tall and there were lots of them, flying through the trees and landing amongst the still living shrubbery. I was surprised at the strong presence that the birds were making, both in sight and sound. I briefly wondered why they were still here, there couldn’t possibly be anything of use to the little birds, the majority of the flora was nonexistent! I couldn’t figure out the answer at the moment so I moved on.
The forestry along Ford Glen Brook may have been stripped of its vibrancy, looking like a barren land with nothing on the ground but arid leaves, but that wasn’t going to deter me from my taste-testing! I looked around and sought out any plants that weren’t already dead or potentially dangerous for me to digest. All I could see was japanese barberry and lady fern. Though the japanese barberry had lost most of its leaves, and had a pale orange color to it, it still had vivacious red berries on its branches.
That’s when it clicked. The birds were here for food, specifically berries. Now that almost all of the plants and shrubbery had been cleared away, the red berries were more noticeable and easier for the birds to collect or eat. I wanted to know what all the hype was with these red berries, so I decided to eat one. I put one in my mouth and bit into it, immediately tasting an acrid liquid. It reminded me of eating unripe fruit; sour and dry. I spit that out after a couple seconds, not wanting an upset stomach.
Now feeling a bit more courageous with my taste-testing, I went after the lady fern. The lady fern felt dry in my mouth, and tasted like grass, so I spit that out as well, definitely a less interesting taste than the berries. I’d also always wanted to know if paper birch tasted like paper, so I cut some bark out and tried that as well. The bark was pretty sturdy and hard to chew in my mouth, it felt like I was trying to chew paper, quenching that curiosity. At this point I wished that for some water to get the taste of flora out of my mouth, and I thought about the stream water…but however thirsty I was, I decided to not risk getting Giardia (diarrhea), so instead I called it a day and walked back home, happy to have had a taste of nature (literally!).