June
The chief industry in Ithaca is education, and June marks a major shift in the academic cycle. The university and college students have departed, many directly following the commencement celebrations in the final weekend of May; and the staff and academics remaining on campus are no longer harried by crazy workloads and impossible deadlines. By the end of the third week of the month, K–12 schools close, releasing the students and teachers for the long summer vacation. Although it is business as usual for many people, our local world settles into a slower and more considered groove.
The natural world, similarly, gets into gear for the summer. Unlike the world of human affairs, though, much of the natural world is revved up, totally focused on the business of growing and reproducing. In most years, regular bouts of rain sustain the creeks and waterfalls and nourish the lush, green vegetation. As the days lengthen, little by little to the summer solstice, this world is bustling with life—especially bird and insect life.
Two of the essays for this month concern birds: the mockingbirds and their relatives, all great songsters (“Mockingbirds”), and the ospreys, which lord it over the Finger Lakes on long, narrow wings as they hunt for fish (“The Osprey”). Late June is also the time when caterpillars of the spongy moth appear; in some years, they cause devastating defoliation of oaks and other deciduous trees in the forest (“Spongy Trouble”). We begin the month, though, with an essay about flowers, specifically poppies, with some thoughts on flower names and their confusions (“Poppies”).
Poppies
Our backyard is ablaze with the brilliant yellow of greater celandines. Several years ago, a greater celandine plant arrived under the black walnut tree, and we let it be. Our uninvited guest interpreted our response as an invitation to grow and multiply. We are entirely content with this arrangement. We and the bumblebees love the brilliant yellow flowers.
The greater celandine came to North America with Europeans, as a valued medicinal plant. The yellow latex that exudes from a broken stem was used as a remedy for jaundice and to treat warts. Rather weirdly, some people believed that swallows collect the latex and apply it to the eyes of their fledglings to help them see, so the greater celandine also acquired the rather dubious reputation as an eye medicine. Please don’t try this out; the latex of greater celandine stems is highly corrosive.
Greater celandine is a stupid name for this lovely plant because it encourages a mental association with the lesser celandine. This is wrong because the greater celandine is a poppy (that latex is a clue) and the lesser celandine is a buttercup.
Last week, a friend came over for afternoon tea on the deck. She was delighted to see our greater celandine, but she knows it by a different name. She and other upstate New Yorkers call it “mustards” because the stem juice stains your fingers “as yellow as mustard.” Then, barely drawing breath, she contrasted the welcome mustards with the disliked garlic mustard, which takes over any backyard unless weeded out assiduously. With my zero tolerance policy toward the highly invasive garlic mustard, I was totally in tune with our guest’s sentiments . . . except that the word mustard lumps our pretty yellow poppy with garlic mustard and other real mustards, meaning the brassicas or crucifers. Our friend’s “mustards” is no more a mustard than a buttercup. Naming stuff helps us make sense of the world, except that the sense-making can occasionally be nonsense.
Another plant is holding its own among the greater celandines under our black walnut tree. It is the Asian bleeding heart, Lamprocapnos spectabilis, a garden plant from China. I have read repeatedly that bleeding heart is a wonderfully descriptive name for L. spectabilis and species of the closely related genus Dicentra, because each flower is the color and shape of a rose-red heart with an extension at the bottom that looks like a drop of blood. This description sort of works for the fringing bleeding heart (Dicentra eximia), which is entirely red and native to the eastern US, but it’s a stretch for the Asia bleeding heart in our backyard because its drop of blood is a brilliant white. Even less plausible are the two bleeding heart species that are abundant in our local woodlands. Both have entirely white flowers without a speck of red. One is called squirrel corn (Dicentra canadensis) because its underground storage organ both looks like the kernel of corn and is apparently eaten by squirrels and other small mammals. The other is Dutchman’s-breeches (Dicentra cucillaria), named because the flower is shaped more like a Dutchman’s pantaloons than a heart. Nevertheless, they are all bleeding hearts.
Our nomenclatural struggles with the bleeding hearts are not yet over. Botanists agree that bleeding hearts are closely related to poppies, including the greater celandine/mustards plant. Some say that bleeding hearts are a different group from poppies; others argue that they are a quirky kind of poppy. For now, the poppy people are winning. This means that I can say we have two kinds of poppy under our black walnut tree—the greater celandine and a bleeding heart—and neither looks like a poppy.
There are no “typical poppies” with bright red flowers that are native to North America, but the common poppy (Papaver rhoeas) was brought from Europe by accident. This poppy has done very well on the coattails of agricultural humans—so much so that no one knows exactly how or where it lived before people created fields of wheat and barley in the eastern Mediterranean ten thousand years ago. The poppy traveled to the British Isles with Neolithic farmers about six thousand years ago, and it arrived in North America with British colonists some four hundred years ago. Curiously, one of the several US names for the common poppy is the Shirley poppy. I suspect that is because the most popular garden variety of the common poppy is known as Shirley Single Mixed, even though wild poppies in the US are predominantly agricultural escapes, not garden escapes.
The opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) provides another twist to the struggles with names in the poppy family. The opium poppy is grown for its opium, a potent alkaloid in the latex of the unripe fruit capsules. The latex seeps out when small cuts are made in the capsule, which is very convenient for harvesting. There are other reasons to grow the opium poppy. In Britain, it is valued as a pretty garden plant, and it poses no drug-related risks because the opium content of the unripe capsule is negligible in the cool British climate. The opium poppy is also the source of poppy seeds that are used in cooking. As the poppy seeds mature, the opium content declines, and the poppy seeds are harvested from the ripe fruit capsules. The varieties grown in Europe yield blue-black seeds used in breads and cakes, whereas the varieties grown in Pakistan, India, and Malaysia produce white seeds used in curries.
The poppy seeds I buy in the grocery store are imported. That’s because it is illegal to grow opium poppies in this country for any reason at all. And it’s not just illegal; this law is enforced. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) famously raided Thomas Jefferson’s historic house, Monticello, in 1987 and dug up the opium poppy plants that had been grown in the kitchen garden for two hundred years. I am not sure if the lesson there is that no one is above the law . . . or that the DEA takes its time enforcing the law.
Part of me thinks it is a great shame that the poppy grown as a garden plant and for poppy seeds is painted with the same nomenclatural brush as the poppy grown for opium. Another part of me thinks it is always useful to know where our food comes from. After all, very tiny amounts of the opium alkaloids persist in the ripe fruit capsule of the opium poppy. There’s not enough for poppy seeds to be psychoactive, but there is enough to be detected by the latest analytical methods used in drug testing. If you are considering an occupation that involves regular testing—perhaps a professional athlete or a member of the US armed forces—I recommend that you don’t indulge in any curries that use poppy seed paste or any salads with vinaigrette from poppy seed oil. For the same reasons, you will have to decline when I offer you a slice of my lemon and poppy seed bread.
Mockingbirds
My first encounter with mockingbirds was literary. I was captivated by a story that had all the right ingredients: the goodies and baddies were unambiguous, and the plot bounded along with lots of action. Just as importantly, it was deliciously incomprehensible at every level.
The cover of the paperback version of To Kill a Mockingbird in my family’s bookcase was stained with an ugly brown ring. Clearly, it had served as a placemat for a sloppy cup of tea, and I suspect that was its sole use before I started to read. I recall my father asking me what it was about. I replied without a moment’s hesitation, “Mockingbirds,” anticipating that these birds would soon figure prominently in the plot. I had no idea what a mockingbird might be, but I had the mental image of the Mock Turtle from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with wings stuck on its back. I was probably eight years old. I am sure that, if my father had known the story, he would have realized it was totally unsuitable and taken the book from me.
In case you don’t know, To Kill a Mockingbird tells you nothing about mockingbirds except that they make music, don’t nest in corncribs, and won’t get shot at by Jem Finch.
However, if one waits long enough, some mysteries solve themselves. I am now very familiar with mockingbirds. Scout Finch and I have the same species in mind—the northern mockingbird—which thrives in New York, Alabama, and every other continental US state, as well as the southern reaches of Canada and much of Mexico. The mockingbird isn’t a glamorous bird, unless you are into “gray above” and “whitish” below, but its character more than makes up for these deficiencies.
The mockingbird has an exceptionally long tail, which it raises as it runs along the ground in search of insects, and then it does a wing flash, meaning it stops and raises its wings to “full-up” in a series of jerky movements as if it were a poorly oiled mechanical toy. In the process, a large white patch on each wing is revealed. Birders argue about why mockingbirds perform wing flashes. Perhaps this behavior scares off predators, perhaps it scares insect prey out of the grass.
Mockingbirds also like to sit on a fence, at the top of a tree, or on a telegraph wire, where they sing gloriously. Of course, lots of birds sing, but the mockingbird is one of the few to make real music. The song is mostly whistles and trills, but the exact pattern of notes changes all the time. That’s because mockingbirds keep on learning new songs, and they like to mimic the sounds of other birds, frogs, and even mechanical gadgets.
One small disappointment is that we don’t often see or hear a mockingbird in our backyard. Our compensation is that a related species graces our backyard all summer. That’s the gray catbird, whose song is just as varied but perhaps a little less fruity than the mockingbird’s. In some ways, the catbird is more fun because it also mews like a cat, sometimes sounding more like a cat than a cat does! The catbird is a darker gray than the mockingbird, and it has a dainty black cap and, of course, a long tail. This year, we have a pair of catbirds nesting in the forsythia.
There’s a third species of mockingbird found in the US: the brown thrasher. This bird is often cited in the books as prone to hiding under bushes and in woodland thickets. Two brown thrashers visited our backyard over a couple of days in late April this year, and I can vouch that they are very striking birds. Forget the shades-of-gray search image for the mockingbird and catbird. The brown thrasher is a rich chestnut brown above and has bold streaky spots on its creamy front. The thrasher visitation was a backyard first for us. We think these birds were taking a brief rest in our yard during their long migration north. As well as being a little higher on the glamour scale than the catbird or mockingbird, the brown thrasher is a musical wonder, reportedly with more than a thousand songs in its repertoire.
Altogether, mockingbirds and their friends—or, more formally, the Mimidae—are very special birds. They are restricted to the Americas. Other than mockingbirds, thrashers, and New World catbirds, there’s one other type of mimid—tremblers, restricted to the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean, from Saint Kitts to Grenada. Why are they called tremblers? When they wing flash, their entire body trembles.
The astonishingly musical songs of the mimids have been studied by researchers who have discovered that these birds have strict rules for how they put their songs together, and the rules are much the same as those used by human composers. Whether you are a mockingbird or a catbird, Mozart or Debussy, you organize notes into groups that go well together, change pitch and tempo gradually, and put notes of different timbre next to each other.
Various composers have been inspired by birdsong. For one composer, this inspiration was very personal. On May 27, 1784, Mozart bought a starling from a pet shop up the road from his house in Vienna. He was enthralled by one of the starling’s songs, which included a seventeen-note melody—so much so that he used it as the theme for the final movement of the piano concerto he was composing at the time (Piano Concerto No. 17 in G, K. 453). Actually, Mozart changed one note, the ninth note, from G sharp to G natural. To my ear, his modification is more melodious and less starling.
It appears that Mozart was very fond of his pet starling. Alas, the starling died three years later, on June 4, 1787. Mozart’s very next composition, completed on June 14, was . . . weird. The twenty-minute piece for strings and two horns is called Ein musikalischer Spass (K. 522), which means “a musical joke.” It is full of strange discords and, in places, a mocking bass line that recalls Shostakovich. Some people say it is a parody of bad composing, others say it is a memorial for his beloved starling, and a few say it is a perfect demonstration of polytonality (music that uses two or more keys at the same time) long before its time.
My digression to Mozart and his starling is not as unrelated to mockingbirds as it may appear. The sister group of the Mimidae is the Sturnidae, meaning that the mockingbirds and starlings are cousins. Just imagine what Mozart might have composed if he had lived alongside mockingbirds, catbirds, and thrashers.
The Osprey
The osprey is a magnificent bird whose story is inextricably bound up with humans. In short, the osprey has been at the receiving end of the best and worst of human behavior, and its tale is one of survival, often against the odds.
Ospreys are one of the greatest pleasures of summer in the Finger Lakes. They are a regular, almost routine, sighting near Cayuga Lake. You can see them flying steadily over the water, great birds, nearly two feet long and with a wingspan approaching six feet, and almost entirely white from below, apart from a dark patch near the wrist of the wing. Keep your eyes open, and you may also see the massive hulk of an osprey surveying the world from the branch of a dead tree near the water’s edge. In this posture, the dark brown upper side of the folded wings obscures much of the white underparts, although the white head with its broad brown eye stripe is obvious. Check out one of the many osprey nests and you’ll see the naked heads of the youngsters bobbing up and down, especially when a parent returns with food. There’s only fish on the menu because that’s all ospreys eat. Every meal is delivered by foot, not by beak, because ospreys capture fish in their talons. When an osprey spots a fish from a considerable height, courtesy of its superb eyesight, it dives, free fall at breakneck speed, and plunges feet first into the water. There’s no way the unsuspecting fish will slip away, thanks to spiky pads on the bottom of the osprey’s feet and the double-jointed outer toes for extra maneuverability of the fearsome talons.
You don’t have to go to an out-of-the-way place and sit huddled in a dark, claustrophobic bird hide to watch ospreys. These birds are not much bothered by human activity. One of the most accessible places to see ospreys in Ithaca is the Allan H. Treman State Marine Park (marine means water, including freshwater, here), which boasts a dog exercise area, a marina with picnic areas, tennis courts, an outdoor swimming pool, a playground, and a skating rink in the adjoining Cass Park. As I said, ospreys are not fussed by proximity to people.
All the same, we are lucky that the ospreys are here. We are at the southern limit of their summer range. If you look at a distribution map, you see that ospreys breed in the Finger Lakes and Adirondacks, around the Great Lakes, and northward through much of Canada. The osprey is resident in Florida and along the coast of Alabama and Mississippi and up the eastern seaboard to Virginia, but our birds don’t come from there. No, our birds spend the winter in Central and South America. All this means that, for most of the US, ospreys are only seen during the spring and fall migrations. Yes, we are very lucky.
The osprey is found on every continent except Antarctica. In the Old World, most of the populations overwinter in Sub-Saharan Africa and eastward to India and Malaysia, and the birds migrate north to Russia, Scandinavia, and a few spots in Western Europe for the summer. There are also resident populations in the Mediterranean and around Australia. Most birdy people say that all ospreys are a single species, but there are gainsayers who want to split the osprey into two, maybe even four, species that look the same and do the same thing but in different places. Everyone agrees that the osprey has no close relatives and that it is a distant cousin to eagles and hawks. No surprise there! However, the common-place reference of the osprey as a fish eagle or fish hawk is simply wrong.
I was surprised to read that the global conservation status of the osprey is least concern, with an estimated half-million individuals worldwide, although it remains a protected bird in New York State. It hasn’t always been like this, especially in North America, where for many years the osprey population was tiny. This was thanks to DDT and related persistent organochlorine pesticides that were sprayed indiscriminately in the 1950s and 60s (see January, “With Fear and Trembling”). As we all know, these chemicals became progressively more concentrated going up the food chain, reaching dangerously high levels in top predator species, such as eagles, hawks, and ospreys. The North American osprey population has increased more than tenfold since DDT was banned in the 1970s, and the European populations tell a similar story.
The osprey has had a tough time in North America, but it was far worse in Europe. Long before DDT, the osprey was driven to extinction in the British Isles by a combination of trophy hunting and egg collecting. In Victorian Britain, no one would say no to a stuffed osprey in a glass case in their living room or to an osprey egg displayed in a specially constructed cabinet. There was much the same stupidity in North America, but fewer people and more ospreys meant this fashion had less awful consequences.
Today, the osprey population is increasing, thanks to greater environmental awareness and protection. We should never forget that routine sightings of ospreys throughout the summer are very special.
Spongy Trouble
Earlier this month, I went to the local garden supplies store for my annual purchase of a pheromone trap to control the Japanese beetles that infest our backyard. As always, I checked the store’s whiteboard of seasonal tips. This time, it was all about the moth Lymantria dispar, recently given the name spongy moth (replacing the name gypsy moth and its derogatory connotations for the Romani people) (Entomological Society of America n.d.). Spongy moth was chosen because its egg masses look like a sponge and the moth is called spongieuse in French-speaking Canada and in France. The caterpillars of the spongy moth are avid munchers of the leaves of trees, and, in some years, they can cause serious damage—especially to their favorite, oak trees.
The following weekend, we visited Sweedler Nature Preserve, a steep gorge in mixed deciduous-hemlock woodland just beyond the northern end of Ithaca. It was a glorious sunny day, the sky a perfect bowl of blue, but as we stepped into the woodland, we could hear the steady patter of rain. How strange, especially as the canopy leaves were dappled in sunshine with clear blue above. It was also odd that the leaves of the high canopy were feathered, with some twigs completely leafless. Then we realized that it was raining caterpillar frass. An endless thrum of little black balls was falling to the ground all around us. The caterpillar rain accompanied us for the entire walk. What’s more, the path was littered with leaf fragments, like green confetti. That’s because the larger spongy moth caterpillars are not tidy eaters. Although these caterpillars prefer oak leaves, more than three hundred tree and shrub species can be on their menu.
Most of the trees at Sweedler Nature Preserve will survive the defoliation, and they will probably produce a flush of late-summer leaves after the caterpillars pupate, sometime in August. They will be weakened, though, making them more susceptible to disease or drought.
It was a few days later, while we were eating our breakfast on the deck under the maple tree, that we realized the caterpillar rain had come to us. Very quickly, we discovered that it is not a good idea to have cereal bowls or cups of coffee underneath a horde of pooping caterpillars. We solved the problem by migrating to the middle of the lawn for our meals. The more difficult issue was how to protect our trees from the spongy moth caterpillar.
I am undecided about whom to blame for this. Perhaps I should be holding Étienne Léopold Trouvelot to account—or Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. It was in 1851 that this particular Bonaparte decided he was fed up with being the president of France and turned himself into Emperor Napoleon III. This caused a spot of bother for Trouvelot, who wasn’t just a proficient artist, an amateur astronomer, and an entomologist. He was also a vociferous republican, meaning that he abhorred any notion of emperors. It would be prudent to leave France until things cooled down a bit, so Trouvelot and his family went to the US and, by all reports, settled contentedly in Medford, Massachusetts, near Boston.
Trouvelot had a brilliant idea: develop a silk production business from silk-producing caterpillars. He focused mainly on native US silk moths, but there were two problems. The US species don’t make much silk, and they are susceptible to bacterial infections when caged together in large numbers, as required for a silk factory. Trouvelot’s big idea was to generate hybrids between wild silk moths and the naturally resistant spongy moth from France. His idea was crazy because wild silk moths are in the family Saturniidae, and the spongy moth is in the family Erebidae. You’d have more luck mating a lion and an elephant. Of course, it all came to nothing, and Trouvelot soon lost interest. Subsequently, he got a job as an astronomer at Harvard University, and he didn’t look back. He authored many publications, especially on sunspots, and craters on both the moon and Mars have been named in his honor.
There is, however, a legacy to Trouvelot’s silk project. Some of his spongy moths escaped into the woodlands of Massachusetts. Within ten years, the first defoliating outbreak was recorded, and there have been outbreaks every ten to fifteen years ever since. The spongy moth is now found throughout the northeast, south to North Carolina and west to Minnesota. Ecologists have studied the species intensively. It has a simple life cycle: the insects overwinter as eggs, which hatch into caterpillars in the spring. By August, the caterpillars are ready to develop into pupae, and the adult moths live for just a few weeks in late summer.
There remains the pressing issue of what to do about our spongy moth caterpillars. I thought about the seasonal tips whiteboard of the garden supplies store. At first sight, a sticky trap around the base of the tree sounded good. The larger caterpillars feed only during the night, and they descend to a protected spot near or at the bottom of the tree during the day. A sticky trap would get every passing caterpillar on its daily commute, but it would also catch everything else that crawled up and down the tree. The collateral damage would be enormous! The other two options on the whiteboard were organic insecticides, meaning that the products come from an organism and have not been synthesized by chemists. Both suggested insecticides come from bacteria: one a type of Bt toxin that kills any butterfly or moth and the other Spinosad, which kills any insect. That sounds like more killing fields.
I needed something specific. I turned to the internet and discovered the burlap trap. Burlap, also known as hessian sacking, is available in thirty-foot rolls from our garden supplies store. The technology of the burlap trap is child’s play. Wrap a length of burlap around the tree trunk and tie it around the middle with a piece of string. Then flip the top half over. This creates a snug, dark place for insects to hide between the two layers of burlap. Finally, visit the burlap traps once a day with a bucket of soapy water and pick off every foul, wretched spongy moth caterpillar that is sheltering there. Leave the ants, beetles, earwigs, and other beasts that are making use of the burlap shelter.
Within a week, we had our backyard spongy moth infestation under control, and we created new daily entertainment of seeing all manner of other creatures making a home in the burlap. If only low-tech strategies were available for managing all invasive insect pests.