November

It is all too easy to decide that November is grim. This is the time of year when the warmth and much of the color are stamped out of our world. The days are shortening, and we are at the mercy of northerly winds and cold rain, perhaps mixed with wet snow, and of gray frosts and fog. The fainthearted have retreated. Many birds and the monarch butterflies have migrated south; other creatures, including the chipmunks and many insects, are lying low in a secluded spot, often in a dormant state. For the rest of us, it is time to start the business of embracing the winter. We keep on going outside to see and hear what is still happening, and we pay attention to the skies. On some November days, the clouds on the horizon are drenched in the most splendid pink and red, yellow and purple, marking the sun’s daily arrival in the east or departure in the west.

The essays for November are a celebration of the wonders that remain after summer has definitively ended. The first essay concerns the Canada geese that live in our region, other parts of the US, and, thanks to the whims of a king, in Britain (“Wild Geese”). Then I consider the remarkable flowers of one of the very few late-flowering plants in our area (“Witch Hazel”). The lives of the cardinals in our backyard are a story of endless intrigue, and I share the story of the time when the male who owns our backyard replaced his partner with a new, more docile mate (“All Change”). The last essay explores the diverse perceptions of one plant, a mullein: a valued medicinal plant, an invasive, and a food resource that supports weevils and woodpeckers in search of a weevil snack (“The Greatness of the Great Mullein”).

Wild Geese

The grounds of most English stately homes have been landscaped to include a large lake. Many of these lakes are now a refuge for wildlife and great places for birdwatching. Everything is worth a mention except for one ubiquitous bird, the Canada goose. There are always rafts of Canadas, large birds with long black necks, a broad white stripe running under the chin from cheek to cheek, white fronts merging into light brown on the belly, and brown wings. “Handsome birds, really, but as common as muck and they shouldn’t be there anyway,” we would say.

Please blame King Charles II. Some specimens from the Atlantic seaboard (that’s important for later in the story) were transported to his burgeoning wildfowl collection in London’s St. James’s Park. I wouldn’t fancy the ten-week transatlantic crossing while caring for a gaggle of endlessly hungry, endlessly pooping, and endlessly ill-tempered Canadas cooped up in a pen on the deck of a seventeenth century sailing ship. I am sure that Charles was pleased because the newly arrived Canadas let loose in St. James’s Park were bigger than any native goose and, as I’ve already mentioned, decidedly handsome. Before long, everyone who was anyone, meaning the owner of a country estate, had to have some Canadas, too. Over the years, the Canadas prospered and went down-market, as it were, to every available habitat that combines standing water and nearby grassland—including the manicured lawns of city parks, university campuses, golf courses, and so on.

But Canadas are like gray squirrels. They are much, much more interesting on their home turf of North America than in their adopted land of the UK. At one time or another during the year, almost everyone on this continent shares their life with Canadas. Go to Canada, and the Canadas are summer visitors. Go to Texas, Louisiana, or New Mexico, and they are winter visitors. Here in New York State, we have the pleasure of their company all year round.

One of this week’s encounters with Canada geese was during an early morning walk along the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake. The mist was still clearing from the steep hillsides, blanketed in forests of naked trunks and branches; a storm earlier in the week had ripped the few remaining leaves from the trees. The lake was a placid, gray millpond. Close to the shoreline, a raft of Canadas was drifting, apparently aimlessly, with the occasional companionable honk. We could see additional rafts up and down the lake, along with many ring-billed gulls and a few mergansers. Another goose meeting was at Sapsucker Woods at the northern edge of Ithaca. The woodland there includes a large pond; the stumps of recently felled trees chewed to a sharp point remind us that it is an active beaver pond. As we approached, a pair of wood ducks took off explosively from the water. The other birds, though, were not perturbed. The red-winged blackbirds continued to call from the branches of trees drowned in the beaver-engineered flood, and two separate rafts of gently honking Canadas glided by.

At this time of year, the local population of Canada geese balloons. The birds that breed locally stay put, and they are joined by large numbers that spend the summer farther north. Some of these migratory birds stay with us through the winter. Others are just passing through, always flying south. A skein of Canadas could be an extended family commuting a few miles between sleeping quarters on the water and daytime feeding in agricultural fields or at the local golf course, or it could be a group from Baffin Island on a journey of thousands of miles southward to the Everglades of Florida or the swamps of Mississippi.

Canada geese on their home turf in North America lead more interesting and wilder lives than they do in the UK, and they are also much more diverse. There are a total of seven recognized subspecies, differing mainly in size. The subspecies in the UK (canadensis) is the same as in Ithaca, and it can weigh up to 11 lb (5 kg). Two other subspecies are certainly worth a mention. There’s the giant, known formally as subspecies maxima, which weighs up to 22 lb (10 kg). Maxima is very special because it was declared extinct in the 1950s but was then rediscovered a decade later in Minnesota. (The traders who supplied King Charles II wouldn’t have known about maxima.) Then there’s the lesser Canada goose (parvipes), maxing out at just 6 lb (2.7 kg), which breeds in western Canada and overwinters in Oregon, specifically in the Willamette Valley, just south of Portland. If I had written this piece at any time before 2004, I would have added an even smaller Canada goose that breeds in the far north, a Canada that is barely larger than a mallard duck—but the taxonomists have been at work and decided that these duck-sized Canadas are a different species altogether, the cackling goose.

Just imagine if King Charles II had acquired cackling geese instead of canadensis. Feeding the ducks in the UK would have been a much less exciting experience. The mallard-size geese might hiss and bite, but somehow a 2–4 lb goose doesn’t have the oomph as a 11 lb goose. Charles would probably have gone for maxima if he had the choice. That would have been like feeding pelicans.

Witch Hazel

It was John Keats (1820) who claimed that autumn is the time for “budding more, and still more, / later flowers for the bees.” But not indefinitely. As October progresses, the goldenrod flowers turn to gray seed capsules, the brilliant yellow petals of the black-eyed Susans shrivel and fall, and even the purple flowers of the New York aster fade out. The small white flowers of calico aster and daisy fleabane make it to the opening days of November, but then time is up for them, too.

But there is one magnificent end-of-year bloomer: the American witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana). Don’t be taken in by the virginiana. American witch hazel is an east-coaster with a far greater range than the state of Virginia. It extends from Nova Scotia in Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico. For most of the year, our witch hazel is the underdog of the tree world. It cowers in the understory beneath the big, serious trees, such as maples and beeches, its several thin trunks and even thinner crooked branches spreading out, as if the tree were in perpetual danger of losing its balance. The summer leaves are unremarkable. The dull green ovals with lightly indented margins are nothing to write home about, except that they are a bit like the leaves of hazel trees found in Britain—so much so that the first English colonists decided this new tree was a hazel tree, like the common European hazel Corylus avellana. They were hopelessly wrong: the American witch hazel (of the family Hamamelidaceae) is a very different beast from the hazels, which are birches (family Betulaceae).

In early November, the American witch hazel comes into its own. As everything else is closing down for the winter, the witch hazel starts to flower. The four petals of each flower are a wonderful buttercup yellow, but they are thin and twisted. On a sunny autumnal day, the petals extend, sticking out like spikes, and the flowers become fragrant—unmistakably the same smell as witch hazel water in the medicine cabinet (more on that later). It is all amazingly exciting for small pollinating moths, as well as for winter gnats and possibly the last of the bees. Then, when it’s cold and frosty, the petals curl up, as if battening down the hatches at a time when pollinators are too sluggish to function. Come another dash of warm sunshine and the petals unfurl to advertise their wares to pollinators.

It is not only the flowers of the witch hazel that refuse to be in any seasonal hurry. The fruits play it long, too. By the end of the year, the flowers will be done, each replaced by a small capsule containing either one or two seeds. Initially green, the capsule gradually turns brown and woody and remains attached to the branch for a full year. This means that last year’s seeds are being dispersed at the same time as this year’s flowers are on show. Seed dispersal, witch hazel style, is best described as blast-off. The woody capsule snaps open and the seed is discharged with great force, sometimes up to thirty feet away. Then the seeds wait for at least another year before germinating. The witch hazel is in no hurry.

It is most unusual to see both flowers and fruits on a tree at the same time. The great Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus was very impressed by this trick, and that’s why he coined the name Hamamelis, meaning “together” and “fruit.” I have not discovered whether Linnaeus made his formal description of Hamamelis virginiana during one of his visits to North America or if he depended on specimens collected for him during one of the many expeditions of his students. Either way, finding these small trees bearing flowers and fruits simultaneously must have been very special. There are no native witch hazels in Europe.

Let’s now turn our attention to the witch of witch hazel. The consensus view is that this has nothing to do with witches. The “witch” is a derived spelling that started with wiche, a Middle English term for “bendy” or “flexible.” By most accounts, witch hazel started off as wych hazel, as also used for wych elm, the only bona fide native elm in Britain. The early American colonists must have been delighted to find a hazel-like tree with super-bendy branches that could be twisted, bent, and split without breaking—and could be used for wattle, fencing, and basketmaking. By chance, the spelling gravitated toward witch hazel, while wich hazel, which hazel, and wych hazel slowly fell out of use.

The Indigenous people of North America knew something else about witch hazel: its leaves and bark could be used to alleviate skin inflammations, from bruises to insect bites and poison ivy rash. Once they learned this, European settlers enthusiastically added witch hazel to their pharmacopeia. Then, in the nineteenth century, a missionary by the name of Dr. Charles Hawes discovered that he could make a fragrant extract by collecting the steam released from a boiling pan of witch hazel twigs. Before long, Hawes’s extract became a commercial enterprise, and the rest is history . . . except that it sold better with a more generic label: witch hazel extract.

I have vivid childhood memories of the near-miraculous power of witch hazel to eliminate the pain of every bump and bruise. Disconcertingly, there is no persuasive scientific evidence that witch hazel extract has any efficacy at all.

All Change

By the third week of November, winter had definitively arrived. That was when we had our first winter weather advisory, informing us of several inches of snow, followed by freezing rain, in the coming twenty-four hours. Woolly hats, scarves, and gloves are now an essential part of our outdoors wear, and we have set up the bird feeder in the backyard. The birds will be glad for the extra calories in the nuts and seeds in the bird food to survive the increasingly long and cold nights.

Within hours of attaching the feeder to the nail on the branch of the maple tree, the usual suspects arrived. The alpha male gray squirrel was the first visitor, but he failed to get past the outer wire cage to the cylinder of food. Then a junco settled in beside one of the holes in the cylinder and munched stolidly for several minutes before being disturbed by a party of chickadees and tufted titmice. Our local pair of cardinals then came to check out what was going on. The bright red male perched on the maple tree for a minute or so, then flew down to the ground under the feeder in search of any pickings. Perhaps he sized up the dimensions of the wire cage and realized that he was too big to squeeze through to the food—or perhaps he remembered from last year that his best bet is to feed on the waste below before the squirrels arrive and hoover it up.

The female cardinal was in attendance, too, perched primly on the branch of the maple tree. This was exactly as one would expect because cardinals remain paired up through the year. Last spring, our female, being smaller than her partner, discovered that she could get through the wire cage to the food. Would she remember? Before I go any further, I need to explain that our female cardinal has been quite a character. This became very apparent last spring when the woodpeckers were starting their courtship drumming. We noticed that some of the drum routines didn’t match any of the rhythms of our local woodpecker species and sounded strangely tinny, almost tinkly. Initially, we localized the sound to the backyard of our southerly neighbor, but then it started up just over the privet hedge along the west side of our backyard. It wasn’t a woodpecker. It was our female cardinal. She was attacking her reflection in the side window of our west neighbor’s garage. She would jump up from the window ledge, flapping her wings and thrusting her head forward until her stubby beak knocked into the glass. Her feet would briefly land back on the window ledge, and then she repeated the attack, again and again, for a several minutes. It must have been exhausting. We started to call this activity her Daily Hate, except that sometimes she was driven to a fury by the interloper in the garage window several times a day. Occasionally, her mate would join her at the window ledge, but his reflection was far less aggressive, and he usually left her to deal with her adversary on her own.

I think this is telling us that cardinals aren’t terribly bright. Our incensed female lacked the brainpower to recognize herself. I am reminded of the mirror test used by scientists who study animal behavior. Mark the animal’s forehead with a red spot and then give the animal a mirror. If the animal pokes at the red mark, then it is deemed to be sufficiently self-aware to understand that the image is itself. Chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, and magpies pass the red spot test, but dogs and octopuses fail. Babies are in the dog-octopus camp; most young children develop the capacity to recognize their reflection (and a red spot on their forehead) by their second birthday.

You’d imagine that all the time and energy that our female cardinal spent on her Daily Hate through the spring and summer would detract from her commitment to incubating her eggs and tending her young. You’d be wrong. Despite her obsession with the bird in the window, our cardinals had two clutches, and they successfully raised several offspring.

The incessant pecking at the window must have rattled her brains. Every time she slammed into the window, the front of her brain would be compressed, and the back would be stretched out. I wondered vaguely if the skull of a cardinal might have some spongy bone to absorb the shock, as has been reported for woodpecker skulls. Whatever way you look at it, the behavior of our female cardinal can’t have been doing her much good.

Back to the female eyeing the bird feeder from the branch of the maple tree. She looked different. She was perkier, more upright, and more attentive to what the male was doing than our familiar female. Goodness! The only explanation is that we have “all change” in our local cardinal world. Our male has acquired a new mate. Perhaps the previous female had been ousted because she failed to pay attention to her real adversaries, or she may have succumbed, overtaken by the combined rigors of parenthood and the Daily Hate.

The new Mrs. Cardinal dutifully followed the male to the ground to peck at the discards from the feeder. As we have watched the new pairing, we have observed that she trails her partner most decorously. She does not appear to have much of a mind of her own. Unlike her predecessor, she is unlikely to try squeezing through the squirrel-proofing mesh to access the food in the feeder anytime soon. Let’s hope she also doesn’t become obsessed with windows.

Getting back to the feeder, we noticed that the food level in the cylinder was declining precipitously. We sighed heavily and blamed the usual suspects: a gang of house sparrows. But we didn’t see any sparrows. It was very strange. A day later, the big guzzler was caught in the act. It was this year’s red squirrel, slipping easily through the mesh to enjoy a leisurely meal. Red squirrels are with us always, but this is only the second bird-feeder-savvy individual we have encountered (the first was in 2012).

Here’s a problem! Our red squirrel won’t be hibernating. I look at the sack of bird food in the basement and mentally rename it “the sack of red squirrel food.”

The Greatness of the Great Mullein

According to Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica (Mabey 1996), the great mullein has many names. Aaron’s rod, hagtapers, candlewick plant, and Our Lady’s candle remind us of the way its stalks used to be dipped in suet and then lit to make firebrands. Other traditional British names are Adam’s flannel and Our Lady’s flannel. As Mabey (1996, 329) comments discreetly, “Its leaves are used accordingly.”

I am still a long way from finishing with names. Great mullein, a native plant of Britain and temperate Eurasia, is also known as common mullein and has the Linnean name Verbascum thapsus. Acknowledging the big and decidedly hairy gray-green leaves, Verbascum comes from the Latin barbascum (“beard”), and mullein comes from the Latin mollis (“soft”). If you are curious about the thapsus, go to your atlas. You will find the tiny island of Thapsos off the coast of Sicily and renowned in certain circles for its distinctive Bronze Age artifacts of the Thapsos culture. So, when Linnaeus made the first formal description of great mullein in 1753, was he on holiday on Thapsos? No, the story is more ancient than that. It seems Linnaeus knew that an ancient Greek philosopher called Theophrastus (371–287 BCE) described the plant during a visit to Thapsos.

Altogether, the great mullein is anything but an any-old-plant. It was an essential ingredient in the repertoire of every herbalist from the most ancient times. Go anywhere and anytime in Europe over the last two thousand years or so, and mullein was used. Even today, in our world of marvelous modern medicine, from MRIs to monoclonal antibodies and mRNA vaccines, great mullein keeps on going. Health stores continue to sell bottles of dried leaves or flowers, often pounded to a fine powder, and easy-to-swallow capsules of mullein essential oils. The more restrained advocates recommend a cup of mullein tea to alleviate respiratory disorders, including a chesty cough and bronchitis, but be sure to filter the tea before drinking; otherwise, its beardy hairs will scratch your throat. A more expansive view is that mullein is anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anticancer, antimicrobial, antiviral, antihepatotoxic, and anti-hyperlipidemic, meaning that this plant can cure just about everything. No one knows the basis of this medicinal wonder plant. Mullein is packed full of various glycosides, flavonoids, and saponins that are highly toxic, designed to deter marauding munchers. In my opinion, caution is recommended.

One fact for sure is that the early European settlers in North America brought great mullein seeds with them for their medicine cupboard. Colloquial American names tell us about other uses: the flannel leaf plant for the restroom and Quaker’s rouge for the young women of this religious group who rubbed the leaf into their cheeks, causing a fetching maidenly blush of mild dermatitis. There are also historical records that show the leaves were used to pad shoes and clothes for extra insulation during the bitter North American winters.

The good news–bad news about great mullein is that it produces lots of seeds, often more than one hundred thousand per parental plant. The seeds are remarkably hardy, germinate freely in response to light and moisture, and can stay viable in the soil for more than a century. This means that the multipurpose savior of the early colonists is now a pernicious weed across much of the US, exploiting many habitats, from pasture fields to urban brown sites and backyards.

Except that great mullein is welcome in our backyard. It is the classic biennial plant (meaning that it lives for two years). We love its rosette of large, gray-green leaves in the first year and the tall spike of sulfur yellow flowers in the second year. At flowering, each elegant plant is at least four feet tall, and some plants reach six feet. We also enjoy the many pollinating insects, including bumblebees, halictid bees, and hoverflies, that visit the flowers.

So far, so good. But this year, our wonderful show of self-seeded mulleins has been infested with the mullein weevil (Gymnetron tetrum). We first spotted the adult weevils in June: lots of dull-brown beetles with the tell-tale long weevil snout, scrabbling around on the flower spikes. Once a flower is pollinated, the female weevil deposits a few eggs into the developing seedpod, and the larvae stay there, consuming the seed nutrients, until next summer. They will also eat one another if the mullein rations get low. Siblicide is fair game in the mullein weevil world.

Now, in late November, the great mullein flower show is long past. Our early summer mulleins are transformed into brown skeletons, something akin to those Alberto Giacometti sculptures of skinny people that endlessly “stand and wait.”

To our surprise, though, this year’s great mullein show is far from being over. Many of the seedpods are now enclosing weevils and not mullein seeds. And one thing has a habit of leading to another, especially in our backyard. The downy woodpeckers have cottoned onto these events, and they are having a grand time dining on the weevil babies. This has been a great surprise to us. We are astonished at the strength of the dead mullein stalks, holding up under the weight of the woodpeckers. Even more astonishing is how the woodpeckers are behaving. We are used to these birds hammering at the trunks and branches of trees with great gusto. Instead, the woodpeckers feeding from the mullein play it cool. As gently as a feeding chickadee, the woodpeckers pick at a mullein seedpod and, when in luck, tweak out a tasty weevil snack. I suspect that very few mullein weevils will be emerging next spring.