For seven days this week the temperature stayed above freezing and hit 71 degrees F on Thursday. At 26 degrees above normal, flowers opened on plants and trees.
My favorites were the early crocuses. Native to Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania and the former Yugoslavia, these woodland crocuses (Crocus tommasinianus) are often seen in gardens but someone in my neighborhood planted them in a grassy front yard. Because the flowers bloom before the grass grows they are in no danger of being mowed.
On Pitt’s campus Cornelian cherry trees (Cornus mas) produced yellow flowers.
Red maples (Acer rubrum) bloomed next to Carnegie Museum …
… and at Frick Park the maple branches looked thick with tiny flowers, including yellowish pollen-bearing ones.
This week, tiny leaves opened on jetbead (Rhodotypos scandens) and a few honeysuckle bushes. Unfortunately invasive plants are first to leaf out.
The coming week will be like a wet blanket: above freezing, gusty wind, lots of rain.
In Ecuador I ate yuca, not yucca. The names sound the same and are nearly spelled the same but they are not the same plant at all.
Yuccas are members of the asparagus family (Asparagaceae) that grow in hot, dry places in the Americas and Caribbean. Ranging from ground-based rosettes of sword-shaped evergreen leaves to the Joshua tree (Yucca brevifolia) of the Mojave Desert only their flower petals are eaten and then only in Central America. The yucca’s main cultivated use is as an ornamental plant.
But back in the 1700s when Europeans were renaming everything they found in the Americas, “early reports of the [Yucca] species were confused with cassava (Manihot esculenta).Consequently, Linnaeus mistakenly derived the generic name for yucca from the Taíno word for the cassava, yuca.” — quoted from Wikipedia yucca account
It’s hard to imagine how the mix up occurred. Their leaves and growing patterns are not at all the same.
The taste ranges from sweet to bitter but the roots contain cyanide so they must be peeled, soaked and boiled or else cut or ground and sun-dried before eating.
After the root is prepared for eating it can be made into flour, tapioca, chips, noodles, fries etc. I ate fried yuca in Ecuador. It tastes like French fries.
Mmmm good!
(photos from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals)
Since a low temperature of 6°F two weeks ago, this month’s weather barely dipped below freezing (until this morning) and twice reached more than 70°F. This week I found signs of an early spring, some of which will survive today’s low of 22°F.
The swelling buds of daffodils, above, and tulip leaves, below, were evident six days ago. Both will probably survive today’s frost.
Yesterday I found early flowers that won’t fare so well.
A few early blossoms of Cornelian cherry (Cornus mas)
On our first day in Ecuador, 30 Jan 2023, we traveled to Yanacocha Biological Reserve 11,500 feet up on the Pichincha Volcano. We were wowed by the huge passionflowers (Passiflora sp.) dangling from vines along the trail but on close examination found a hole in this flower tube. It was made by a bird.
These passionflowers evolved long tubes in an arms race against hummingbirds who developed ever-longer beaks to reach the nectar. However members of the Tanager family eat nectar, too, even though that have short beaks and cannot hover at the flower opening. Flowerpiercers (Diglossa sp.) land on the flower and bypass the flower’s defenses by poking a hole in the tube.
Masked flowerpiercers (Diglossa cyanea) and glossy flowerpiercers (Diglossa lafresnayii) were abundant at Yanacocha. We could hear them chattering in the forest …
… and see them at the nectar dishes. (The glossy flowerpiercer is black with a white shoulder at left below.)
Flowerpiercers are specially equipped for piercing flowers with a hook at the tip of their beaks. This photo from Wikimedia Commons shows the hooked tip.
In Pennsylvania it’s the hummingbirds that eat nectar and insects that make holes in flowers. It’s amazing to think there is so much nectar in Ecuador that birds bother to pierce the flowers.
(photos by Kate St. John, Mary Eyman and Wikimedia Commons)
After five days of extremely cold weather the temperature is rising into the 40s today and will stay above freezing in the week ahead. Hard fruits that were softened by the freeze are now poised to ferment in warmer weather. Soon we may see drunken birds.
Birds leave crabapples and Callery pears on the trees in November because they’re too hard to eat. Freezing breaks down the starches into sugars and when the fruit thaws it is soft and yummy. However yeast gets into the fruit and ferments it. Birds gobble up the soft tasty fruit. If they eat too much they get drunk.
When abundant rowan berries fermented in Gilbert, Minnesota in October 2018, waxwings gorged on them and became quite drunk.
This black-billed magpie didn’t care that he was eating fermented apples until he could barely walk. He staggers among the apples and is only slightly more agile by the end of the video.
On Tuesday morning, 15 November, I found beautiful fruits on my walk in the neighborhood: Red berries on invasive burning bush (Euonymus alatus), purple berries on native American Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana), and dusty blue fruit on invasive English ivy (Hedera helix).
It began to snow so I hurried home and was glad I was indoors when it came down fast. It looks peaceful in slow motion at the end of this video.
The snow stuck to the grass, parked cars, and the Pitt peregrine nest …
… then melted overnight as the temperature rose and low clouds moved in.
By Friday most leaves were gone and the only green shrubs in Schenley Park were invasive plants: Bush honeysuckle in this view …
… and bamboo near the railroad tracks.
Tonight the temperature will drop to 19 degrees for a very cold start to the new week. Brrrrr!
In 1994 dozens of bald eagles were found convulsing, dead or paralyzed near Arkansas’ DeGray Lake. Autopsies revealed the eagles died of a new disease called avian vacuolar myelinopathy (VM) that manifests as brain lesions. The dying spread to Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Texas (hashed areas on the map below) and continues to this day. In 2021 scientists discovered what causes VM. It’s a chain of events that begins when we use an aquatic weed killer to control an invasive weed.
The invasive weed is hydrilla (Hydrilla verticillata) that spreads easily and clogs waterways. It’s a huge problem in many southeastern states, especially in Florida.
Integrated chemical plant management plans to control H. verticillata should avoid the use of bromide-containing chemicals (e.g., diquat dibromide). [The neurotoxin] AETX is lipophilic with the potential for bioaccumulation during transfer through food webs, so mammals may also be at risk.
(photos and diagram from Wikimedia Commons, map embedded from NIH; click on the captions to see the originals)
(*) The mystery was solved when scientists discovered that the toxin came from bromides that did not occur naturally. From NIH, Hunting the eagle killer: A cyanobacterial neurotoxin causes vacuolar myelinopathy: “Laboratory cultures of the cyanobacterium, however, did not elicit VM. A. hydrillicola growing on H. verticillata collected at VM-positive reservoirs was then analyzed by mass spectrometry imaging, which revealed that cyanobacterial colonies were colocalized with a brominated metabolite. Supplementation of an A. hydrillicola laboratory culture with potassium bromide resulted in pronounced biosynthesis of this metabolite. H. verticillata hyperaccumulates bromide from the environment, potentially supplying the cyanobacterium with this biosynthesis precursor.”
Earth will be a different sort of place — soon, in just five or six human generations. My label for that place, that time, that apparently unavoidable prospect, is the Planet of Weeds.
The plants pictured here are some of those weeds, all of them non-native invasives that happen to provide food for birds and small mammals.
Last week in Frick Park large flocks of American robins gobbled up oriental bittersweet, honeysuckle and porcelain berry fruits. As they continue their migration they’ll deposit the seeds along the way.
Animals that aren’t afraid of thorns eat the fruits of Japanese barberry.
After the frost softens the Callery pears robins and starlings strip the fruit from these invasive trees.
Even though the fruits are “weeds” they can be beautiful.