April
April brings two certainties: the time to file our US tax returns and a rapid change in the seasons. But April is capricious. Although winter is in retreat, the timing of its definitive downfall is far from certain. A warm, sunny day can be followed by a snowstorm, and overnight frosts are a persistent threat. As we progress through the month, the pendulum between winter and summer continues to swing but with an ever-increasing bias toward summer.
One cannot help but admire the plants and animals that invest in growing and reproducing during April, despite frequently unfavorable and occasionally atrocious weather conditions. Pride of place must go to the skunk cabbage, one of the first native flowers of the year (“The Skunk Cabbage Classic”). These remarkable plants are usually evident in late March, and the skunk cabbage show is at its peak in early April. A further sure sign of early spring is the mating call of small tree frogs informally known as the spring peepers. The chorus of these frogs at favored ponds can be deafening (“Spring Peepers”). By April, American robins have returned to backyards all over town from their overwintering haunts, either in the local woodlands or in the south of the state and beyond. When the male robins join the dawn chorus, we know that winter is losing the fight (“Robins”). This chapter rounds off with a second plant that flowers in the early spring (“Wild Ginger”). Although less celebrated than the skunk cabbage, wild ginger has a story to tell.
The Skunk Cabbage Classic
Today is a very special day for every runner in the district. The first Sunday of April is the day of the Skunk Cabbage Classic, the first race of the year for the Finger Lakes Runners Club and named to celebrate the first flower of spring. I don’t mean the snowdrops, which are getting past their prime, or the crocuses, now in great profusion. Both of these plants come from Europe. No, the first native flower of our region is the skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, which is found in damp, boggy places and in shallow standing water.
The skunk cabbage is an arum and, as with other arums, its flower business is complicated. It has lots of tiny flowers borne on a central spike, which is surrounded by a modified leaf. Botanists have special names for the flower spike, the spadix, and for the modified leaf, the spathe.
The spadix of the skunk cabbage is rather short, like a knob, and studded with the mass of tiny, green petalless flowers. The spathe (that’s the modified leaf, remember) is deep purple, mottled with green or gray, and folded over the spadix like a hood. The skunk cabbage wouldn’t win against the snowdrop or crocus in a beauty parade, but it wins big time in the special interest category.
The skunk cabbage is the first flower of spring because it has its own central heating system. This is thanks to the mitochondria, the so-called powerhouses of the cells; they break down sugar derivatives to make chemical energy that fuels growth. It’s all a bit different for many of the mitochondria in the skunk cabbage spadix (the flower knob). These mitochondria are modified to make heat, not chemical energy. The spadix is like a red-hot poker that melts snow and ice. In the late winter world, where an air temperature of 39°F (4°C) is considered warm, the spadix can reach 95°F (35°C). The thick, fleshy spathe that grows around the spadix is insulating, so the spadix and its flowers are nestled in a warm, dark cavity.
That’s not all. The spadix produces volatiles—not the sweet scent of some spring flowers but the stink of rotting meat. The volatiles waft out of the cavity in the warm air that escapes from the gap in the spathe. If you or I get downwind of this, we’d likely wrinkle our nose and move on. But the first flesh flies and carrion beetles of the year respond very differently. They fly with great enthusiasm up the plume of warm, stinky air to find food and a place to lay their eggs. In the warm cavity of the flower head, the insects scrabble about, becoming dusted in pollen, but find no rotting dead bodies. The pollen-laden insects leave and at least some of them come across another inviting plume of skunk cabbage odor . . . and deposit the pollen onto the flowers of the second plant. Pity the hungry blowfly (the females may also be feeling egg-bound) as their hopes of a juicy, partly decayed mouse or sparrow carcass are dashed, again and again. An even more unfortunate fate awaits some flies that fall prey to one of the spiders that often lie in wait within the warm cavity of the skunk cabbage.
So the skunk cabbage of today, last week, and next week is all about spadix and spathe. Then everything changes. The pollinated flowers swell up and turn into little balls. These are the fruit. They start green and then turn black or blue. By late summer, the entire spadix starts to disintegrate, and the berries separate out. It’s all very yummy for the creatures in damp woodlands, from the squirrels and muskrats to the wood ducks. The tiny seeds go through the guts of these animals and, with luck, end up in a perfect, soggy spot to germinate.
That’s not all that happens. As the pollinated flowers turn into berries, the spathe (the first leaf) disintegrates and disappears, only to be replaced by lots of bright green leaves. In May and June, our local wetlands are dominated by enormous skunk cabbage leaves that are easily two feet long by a foot or more wide. Then, usually in the space of a few weeks, these gigantic leaves die and disappear. They aren’t at all fibrous, and they leave nothing behind.
You’d imagine that these lush green leaves would be breakfast, lunch, and dinner for every passing herbivore. Not at all. You rarely see a hole or bite mark. That’s because the leaves indulge in some serious chemistry. They are chock-full of calcium oxalate crystals, the same poison as in rhubarb leaves. On top of that, the leaves emit a fetid (hence Symplocarpus foetidus) mix of nasty chemicals when damaged, telling the world that they are not good to eat. Apparently, a single mouthful of raw skunk cabbage leaf makes the tongue, gums, and throat burn and sting for about two weeks. It would be far worse if you swallow the mouthful instead of spitting it out.
I’ve been a little economical with the truth. I’ve been writing about the chemical protection of the summer leaves. I should add that the same applies to the spathe and spadix of early spring. Every year, we marvel that these first flowers of spring are always perfect, untouched by hungry woodchucks, deer, and rabbits.
Except this year. Last weekend, we made our annual skunk cabbage pilgrimage to Sapsucker Woods. We walked along the boardwalk above the wetlands, confident that we were in prime skunk cabbage season. True. There they were in their thousands. Surprisingly, though, many of them were damaged with part of the spathe eaten away and with the spadix dislodged or consumed. According to my friend Google, some animals are so desperately hungry in the early spring that they tolerate the nasty side effects of a skunk cabbage meal. Deer, beavers, black bears, and snapping turtles could be the culprit. I suspect beavers.
Getting back to the life cycle of the skunk cabbage plant, the next step is what happens after the leaves have died and the berries are eaten. Aboveground, the answer is an emphatic nothing. Underground is a very different story. The root system of every plant is enormous and keeps on growing. Furthermore, it is contractile, meaning the roots flex their proverbial muscles, pulling the root mass farther down, down, down into the goo of the bog. This protects the plant from being washed away during storms or snowmelt,. Skunk cabbages live for a good twenty years, digging themselves in more strongly year by year.
In other words, every time the runners in the Skunk Cabbage Classic flex their muscles, they are doing no more than mimicking the roots of the skunk cabbage.
Spring Peepers
The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that a peeper is something that peeps and that to peep is either “to look quickly and furtively” or “to make a weak or brief high-pitched sound.” Peeping Toms and Easter chicks come to mind, but neither is correct. Spring peepers are frogs. Around here, spring peepers are the ultimate spring animals. The peeping starts in late March, some years at about the time of the salamander migrations (see March, “Mole Salamanders”), but the peepers come into their own during the opening weeks of April.
This year, an evening in the second week of April provided the perfect conditions for spring peepers. The wind had switched from bitter northerlies to balmy southerlies on the previous morning, giving us a warm sunny day. Then it rained with the wind direction barely altered. Just before 7 p.m., we bundled into the car and drove to Ringwood Ponds, a wonderful old-growth forest site with several deep kettle holes scoured out by glaciers, lots of swamp, and some vernal pools. Vernal pools are important habitats here. They are shallow depressions that fill with snowmelt water in the spring and then dry out, usually by midsummer. The big deal is that they are temporary, so they don’t harbor hungry fish.
Our plan was to arrive at Ringwood Ponds about thirty minutes before sunset. That would mean we’d be able to enjoy the spring peepers as they gathered force from pianissimo in daylight to fortissimo after nightfall. We had come armed with flashlights and a map, determined not to get lost in the dark. We had decided to park in a pull-out on Ringwood Road near the entrance to the site. (This is an important detail.)
Before we reached the site, it was evident that our plan was in tatters. In full daylight, the spring peepers were calling, full blast. Hundreds and hundreds of male frogs were in position at the base of grass tussocks and bushes surrounding the pond nearest to the road. Each frog was belting out peep-peep-peep. . . . His only ambition in life is for his peeps to be louder and longer than the peeps of the neighboring frogs. That’s the surest way to attract the attention of the females cruising around in the water or along the boggy edge. People say that the unsynchronized cacophony of peeps from so many frogs sounds like sleigh bells. I don’t know about that. To me, they sound like spring peepers.
We had a second plan: walk cautiously toward the pond and watch the male peepers as they peeped. The loose skin around their throat blows out like a balloon . . . peep . . . and then slackens in preparation for the next peep. That plan crumbled, just like the first plan. The noise was deafening, and we would have damaged our ears if we had walked up close. So we didn’t see a single spring peeper, which was a shame because they are very pretty, little frogs, a mere inch long and brown, with a dark X on their backs. Their Linnean name is Pseudacris crucifer: carrying the cross on their backs.
We ventured a little farther into the woodland, glad to put some distance between ourselves and the mega-decibel sleigh bells. Then we became aware of another sound, like quacking ducks. That was the wood frogs, Rana sylvatica. About double the size of spring peepers and another early breeder, the wood frog is routinely cited as the first frog of the spring. We walked carefully down to the shallow pond. It was now about sunset and no longer raining. Every ripple on the surface of the pond was caused by a male frog in search of females, which remained motionless in the water. You could say that the females were waiting to be caught.
The wood frogs weren’t the only creatures in this pond. There were also lots of other salamander-like creatures, twisting and curling, their little legs flopping about as they moved. Even more of them were on the water’s edge, making their way through the damp leaf litter toward the pond. In the fading light, the entire area was alive with the marching animals. Look out where you step!
We could not identify the marchers with any confidence. They were all darkly pigmented without any distinctive features evident in the rapidly dwindling light, and they were all smaller than the mole salamanders we had admired in March. This will make an interesting ID task for another year, we told ourselves.
It turned out we had come on precisely the right evening, probably one of the few Big Nights of the season—when vast numbers of early spring amphibians travel from their overwintering haunts to the ponds, where they mate and the females deposit their eggs. These amphibians overwinter on higher ground: spring peepers in leaf litter and behind loose tree bark, wood frogs in shallow burrows under leaf litter, and salamanders even deeper in the soil. The salamanders dig down below the frost line of the soil because they die if frozen, whereas the spring peepers and wood frogs can tolerate much of their body fluids freezing. The wood frog is so cold-tolerant that its range extends to north of the Arctic Circle.
For these early spring amphibians, the imperative is to get to the ponds as soon as possible after snowmelt. All that lovely water for their eggs and tadpoles . . . but the ponds will dry out before too long, and any offspring that hasn’t metamorphosed into an adult in time will die. Despite this hazard, these vernal ponds are the right basket for the eggs because, as I mentioned earlier, they contain no hungry fish. Other species that come to breeding grounds later use persistent water bodies, and their offspring run the fishy gauntlet.
Ringwood Ponds would be the perfect place for these early spring amphibians, if it weren’t for one thing. Recall that I mentioned how we parked along Ringwood Road? Most of our marching frogs and salamanders come down the hillside from their overwintering sites . . . and across Ringwood Road. Some years ago, herpetologists at Cornell University estimated that, on a Big Night, 20 percent of the individuals don’t make it across the road. Alas, many frogs and salamanders stand stock still in the bright light of car headlights. The annual carnage is now much reduced, thanks to a “toad tunnel” constructed under the road. Unsightly but effective plastic fences extend from the tunnel entrance on each side of the road to guide the toads toward the tunnel. The animals use the tunnel to get to the ponds and, later, to return to the uplands. The toad tunnel is a welcome instance of ameliorating a problem that humans have made for other creatures.
We walked back to the car as night was falling and drove off along Ringwood Road—over the top of many more salamanders and frogs safely making their way through the tunnel to join the fun at the ponds.
Robins
A few years ago a small number of lesser celandine plants appeared under the maple tree in our backyard. We were delighted by the pretty, yellow flowers that attract lots of bees in the early spring sunshine. Since then, the lesser celandine has become the bane of our backyard lives. It has spread into all the flower beds, where it crowds out the emerging shoots of our herbaceous perennials, and onto the lawn where it threatens to choke the meadow violets.
The only way to stem the tide of the lesser celandine is to get out the trowel and dig it up. In this third week of April, I focused on the lawn. I started at the far end, treating every bright yellow flower as a flag for the trowel. I leave flowerless patches of leaves alone for fear that I might be targeting violets. (Although the leaves of the two species are very distinct in the flower book, the difference is much less clear cut in the real world.) The lawn is still wet and soggy, and every celandine excision results in a small divot. It’s as if there’s a third-rate golfer in the household. The damage is transient, though. The tangled bank of our back lawn soon covers the gap with a mix of bitter cress and chickweed, germinating from the seedbank, and the rapidly growing runners of white clover and wild strawberry. Every real gardener demanding a perfectly smooth velvet of green grass would be apoplectic about our lawn.
A character with a serious interest in our back lawn was scrutinizing—and applauding—my efforts. Throughout my celandine control session, he was dancing around just a few yards behind me. As we zigzagged across the lawn, I observed how he was checking out my last divot as I created the next one. I moved slowly and smoothly, watching from the corner of my eye. If my acknowledgment of his presence was too evident, he would fly off.
He is our backyard robin, and my divots disturbed small insects that provided him with one tasty snack after another. Such a familiar garden event conjures up the famous Beatrix Potter illustration of the robin perched on the handle of a spade, just next to Peter Rabbit munching radishes. But you need to de-conjure that image quickly because Erithacus rubecula melophilus, the much-loved and astonishingly tame robin redbreast of the UK, has never made it to the US. That’s despite many efforts to introduce the species, partly because of the great affection early colonists had for the European robin and partly because it is mentioned by Shakespeare: “You have learned, like Sir Proteus, to wreathe your arms, like a malcontent; to relish a love-song, like a robin redbreast” (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act II, scene 1, lines 18–20).
In case you think that this digression is pure indulgence, please recall the far greater indulgence, and arguably insanity, of Eugene Schieffelin (1827–1906) and friends who invested vast amounts of time and money on a project to introduce all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to North America. The most famous of the releases were made in New York City’s Central Park.
My backyard robin is an American robin, named because it sports a rusty red breast that is sort-of-maybe like the European robin. In many ways, the American robin (Turdus migratorius) matches the Eurasian blackbird (Turdus merula) of the UK backyard. He works the lawn systematically, stopping here and there to thrust his beak into the soil for a worm or to snatch at small insects flushed up by his movement . . . or by my celandine control routine. The robin also enjoys slugs, snails, and, later in the year, berries galore.
However, an American robin is not a Eurasian blackbird with an orange chest. There are many important differences. For starters, Eurasian blackbirds are usually paired for life, whereas American robins are decidedly cavalier in their love life. The male robin that defends our backyard from all comers has only recently paired up with his lady love, and their relationship will end once the two broods are raised this summer. In November, the two parents will go their separate ways, and each will start afresh with a different partner next spring.
Another important difference is in their songs. We are all agreed that the Eurasian blackbird song is beautiful—a glorious contribution to the dawn chorus. My fellow citizens rave about the simple whistle of the American robin, but that’s because they know no better. Biologists have noticed that the Eurasian blackbird song is what you would expect for a bird adapted to the high canopy of deep woodland. It is argued that blackbirds lived exclusively in wildwood of Britain until the latter part of the nineteenth century, when they exploded into suburban habitats. Consistent with this scenario, the blackbird became popular in British literature and poetry of the twentieth century (for example, Edward Thomas, R. S. Thomas), but earlier writers obsessed about the song thrush (for example, Thomas Hardy, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson). Shakespeare proves the point: the ousel cock (the blackbird) in Bottom’s song is deep in the Forest of Arden, not on a palace lawn (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 3, scene 1, line 127). Before you ask, the answer is yes. The Eurasian blackbird is another failed introduction to New York’s Central Park.
Although the American robin’s song is, in all honesty, rather boring, we welcome it as a sign of spring. It is special that, during April and into May, the robin is always the first to start singing in the morning, preceding the cardinal and well before sunrise. That is because the main job for the male American robin, for now, is to keep his territory intact. In our backyard, he sits around on the maple tree and the fence, he works the lawn, and he hoovers up the breadcrumbs we put on the deck for the juncos. He did little to help the missus as she built her nest in the box elder tree on the edge of our backyard, and now he is leaving her to incubate her eggs. Every now and again, she leaves the nest to get some food; she is reliably on the lawn with the male in the early evening. It’s only after the eggs hatch that parental responsibility kicks in for the male. In about two weeks’ time, we will see both birds foraging from dawn to dusk to feed their three to five offspring. Then the male will be on child-minding duty for the fledglings while the female sets up the next brood, usually in a new nest.
Provided a cat or blue jay doesn’t intervene, we have lots of robin fun ahead of us in the coming months.
Wild Ginger
Robert H. Treman State Park is a superb place for woodland spring flowers. The paths follow about four miles of Enfield Creek at the bottom of a steep-sided gorge that is covered in hemlock, red oak, maples (red, sugar, striped), tuliptree, cucumber magnolia, and more. When we visited in mid-April, the Hepatica, among the first of the spring flowers, were already blooming and the Trillium lilies were in bud. We said that we must come back in a week’s time for a wonderful Trillium show. We were true to our word, but, alas, the Trillium were no more advanced than in the previous week. Strong westerlies and northwesterlies had brought a deep chill and snow from the Great Plains and Winnipeg for most of the week, culminating in a winter storm alert for Monday night through midday Tuesday. Five to nine inches of snow were predicted. In the end, it was just a couple of inches for us, but Binghamton, just forty miles southeast of us, got fourteen inches.
Our Treman walk on April 20 was not only a Trillium disappointment but also an occasion to celebrate a plant that is too easily overlooked. Close to the path at one location, there were a few heart-shaped leaves, all decidedly hairy. Look more carefully. Beneath the he leaves of each plant was a single rusty-brown flower, lying on its side and shaped like a jester’s hat with three pointy extensions. This is the flower of the wild ginger. It is said in every guidebook that the flower looks and smells just like the thawing carcass of a wild animal that succumbed during the previous winter. Carrion flies are reported to scrabble about inside the jester’s hat and pick up pollen, which they carry to another flower and deposit the pollen. Don’t be too certain, though. The flowers are much less smelly than claimed (I can vouch for that), and these plants are mostly self-pollinated, with fly-mediated cross pollination a rare occurrence.
The Indigenous peoples of this area made good use of the wild ginger. They would dig up the swollen roots, dry them, and grind them to a powder—then add the powder to spice up a boring meal or boil freshly sliced roots in sugar water to make a spicy candy. The early colonists followed suit. During the twentieth century, chemists got to work, demonstrating that the roots contain aristolochic acid. “Great!” everyone said. Aristolochic acid, either synthetic or in wild ginger, was the perfect ingredient for various dietary supplements and a healthy flavoring for all sorts of medicines. But then the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said, “Not so fast! We’ve just discovered that aristolochic acid is a carcinogen and causes kidney disease.” The moral of this story is that wild ginger is best left undisturbed in the woodland. Keep your spade at home.
Let me quickly add that wild ginger is a very different plant from real ginger. Wild ginger, or more formally Asarum canadense, is a birthwort (family Aristolochiaceae) and related to magnolias. Real ginger is Zingiber officionale (in the family Zingiberaceae).
One more thing about birthworts: as well as wild ginger, there are various other birthworts native to North America, but, to my knowledge, there are no native birthworts in Britain. The one member of the birthwort family in British flower books is Aristolochia clematitits, informally referred to as birthwort and an ancient escape from the herb gardens of monasteries and abbeys. It was brought from its native range in southern Europe and prized for its medicinal properties (definitely pre-FDA ruling). In particular, birthwort tea induced abortions. Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica (1996) tells us that a prime site for finding it is among the nettles around the ruins of Godstow Nunnery near Oxford. He alludes to its particular value for the good ladies in the nunnery.
Real ginger is much more of a globe-trotter than birthwort. It has never been described in the wild, meaning that it is only known as a cultivated plant. Written records indicate that the Romans imported it from northeast India or southern China, where it is believed to have originated. The Romans didn’t use ginger for cooking; they used it as a medicine to alleviate nausea. Apparently, the ginger trade was largely unaffected by the rise and fall of empires, Roman or otherwise. By medieval times, ginger was super-big business and increasingly used to flavor foods, especially breads, hence gingerbread. Over the last two millennia, India has been the main producer of ginger, but other countries got in on the act, including Thailand, Nigeria, and Jamaica. Ah, the sticky Jamaican ginger cake of my childhood in the UK! Now, one of my standards for afternoon tea is broonie, a US adaptation of Orkney gingerbread. The emphasis is on adaptation because it is sweetened with molasses, which would hardly figure large in the cuisine of the islands of Orkney, off the northern coast of Scotland.
Until very recently, it was far from clear where the real ginger plant came from in an evolutionary sense. The only certainty was that the first ginger lovers cultivated a wild plant, repeatedly selecting for the most fleshy and spicy rhizome. Perhaps they were like wine tasters, favoring the most luxuriant bouquet of ginger oils, including zingiberene, together with the lemon flavor of citral and a pungent mix of gingerols. Perhaps they loved the way that slices of the rhizome became sweeter and spicier when cooked—and more pungent when dried and powdered.
Recent molecular studies have given us some clues about the origins of culinary ginger. Its closest relative is the so-called beehive ginger Zingiber spectabile, a Malaysian species that is used as a medicinal herb and grown as an ornamental plant for its large red and yellow flower heads. The earliest ginger lovers’ fixation on big rhizomes must have disfavored flowers because the ginger plant rarely flowers, and its flowers are small, pale yellow, and decidedly forgettable.
In the fascinating but complex world of gingers, two facts are indisputable: wild ginger isn’t a real ginger, and real ginger isn’t wild.