The Longest Autumn
red oak in snow (all photos in this post by Dave Bonta except where indicated)
Every autumn the first hard frost comes later. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, when we were engaged in intensive gardening, we could expect a hard frost in the first week of October. Gradually, as the years passed, the hard frost date arrived in the second week. Then, in this century, it moved into the third week. And last October it finally came on October 28.
Just as the date for the first hard frost has advanced year by year, so too has mild autumn weather. Instead of several days of Indian summer weather at the beginning of November, we have stretches of Indian summer weather throughout November and, last autumn, well into December.
Final leaf fall is also later every year. In the seventies and even into the eighties, we could count on a brisk wind at the end of October shaking down every last leaf and leaving us with the bare branches of November. Yet despite last October’s heavy snowstorm, most of our red, black, white, chestnut and scarlet oaks held on to the majority of their leaves until the third week of November.
Remembering the previous year’s mid-October snowstorm that brought down so many trees and branches overburdened with leaves and snow, I was apprehensive when I woke to snow on October 29. As the snow piled up on leaves and branches, I walked down our road, dreading to hear the sound of breaking branches, but I heard only a few. Once I picked up an oak branch, its leaves heavy with snow, and marveled at its weight.
Later in the day, the thermometer slowly rose to 34 degrees. The trees dripped even as it continued snowing, but the warmth saved most of our leafy trees. The one casualty I found was a large, live, black oak along our road. But it was hollow throughout much of its trunk length and would have come down soon in any case.
bottom of the First Field in an October snowstorm
By November most of the snow had melted, and we finally had a couple weeks of what is normally “October’s bright, blue weather” and dazzling leaf color after a mostly soggy October. The sugar maples along the Far Field Road were still a blaze of red and gold. The coppery gold of American beeches lit up the hollow. And from Alan’s Bench, I gazed at the oaks of Laurel Ridge, which glowed reddish-gold and burnt orange.
Although I saw an occasional buck during my walks, squirrels, chipmunks, and turkeys were scarce. What few acorns the oaks had produced had been plucked from their branches by blue jays weeks before. I also saw little evidence of hickory nuts. Even our black walnut yard trees hadn’t produced many nuts. After the previous year’s feast, the wildlife was faced with famine. As soon as I put my bird feeders up, in early November, they were mobbed by gray squirrels and chipmunks.
The birds were not as affected even though our wild grape crop had also failed. Berry eaters, such as robins, cedar waxwings, and bluebirds still called most warm days. Carolina wrens caroled back and forth in our yard. The female tapping cardinal returned to our stairwell window. Winter wrens called and bounced up and down beside the stream. Golden-crowned kinglets foraged in the spruce grove. And, in Margaret’s Woods one day, I found dozens of singing, foraging white-throated sparrows, several dark-eyed juncos, a Carolina wren, and at least one fox sparrow in a large hedge of multiflora rose covered with bright red rose hips.
Raptors, too, were plentiful. A male American kestrel sat on his favorite power pole overlooking our First Field. On a hazy warm day in late November a male northern harrier flew silently past me as I sat on Coyote Bench. Driving down our hollow road, I flushed a sharp-shinned hawk. And on Thanksgiving Day our son Steve and his wife Pam watched a barred owl swoop down on a tree branch beside the Far Field Road. Steve also saw a golden eagle migrating along Sapsucker Ridge that day.
Hermit Thrush in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, November 9, 2011 (photo by Christopher Eliot, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial licence)
But I had the most unexpected sighting of Thanksgiving. As I circled the Far Field on Pennyroyal Trail, I flushed a hermit thrush. Never had I seen one so late in the season. When I checked McWilliams’s and Brauning’s The Birds of Pennsylvania, it reinforced my belief that hermit thrush migration peaks during October, which is when we usually see them. By the second week in November most hermit thrushes have moved south. A few winter over at low elevations in Pennsylvania, particularly in the Piedmont area. But more surprising than my sighting occurred three days later, on a warm November 27, when our son Dave heard a singing hermit thrush on Laurel Ridge. Since we rarely hear one singing here during spring migration, we were especially surprised to hear one so late in the autumn.
Whether it was the acorn failure or merely the lure of our birdseed, we had many excellent views of southern flying squirrels at our feeder area. Because it was still warm and some bears were no doubt still about, I brought in my feeders every night throughout November and December. On Thanksgiving evening I turned on the back porch light before going out to retrieve the feeders. A flying squirrel was busily scarfing up seeds on the porch floor. So intent was it that my husband Bruce was able to take several photos of the creature through the storm door. It only fled down the steps when I went out to get the feeders.
My next sighting was the first of December when I watched one flying squirrel chase off another on the birdseed-covered ground below the back step. The victor continued eating, even burying most of its body beneath the grass and seeds in its quest for food.
A full moon illuminated the sky on the tenth of December when Bruce startled a flying squirrel on the back porch. It zipped up the porch railing and sailed over near the juniper tree where it made a rough landing and disappeared down slope. The next evening I surprised the flying squirrel on the back porch steps, and it performed the same maneuver as it had for Bruce the previous night.
flying squirrel on a black locust tree in Plummer’s Hollow
We saw at least one flying squirrel at our feeder area throughout December, and we thought it was only fair that we should feed flying squirrels at night since we hosted at least 11 gray squirrels by day.
Whether or not the flying squirrels were affected by the unusual warmth, at least one woodchuck was. Below the back porch a fat male woodchuck continued to emerge from his hole every afternoon to eat the fresh greenery on the slope into December. The last time I saw him was mid afternoon on December 22, again a record breaker here for a woodchuck. Usually, they are tucked into their hibernation dens by mid-November and we don’t see any until the following February when the males are busy visiting female dens.
Plants also responded to the continual warmth. Several so-called green immigrant flowers, those that came from over seas, bloomed later than I could remember. On November 27 I found a pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea) blooming beside Alan’s Bench. A member of the Composite family, it was once dried and used in making memorial wreaths and for decorating vases and wall brackets. Today it still appears in dried flower arrangements. Its small, white, globular-shaped flowers grow in clusters atop a cottony stem with thin, toothless leaves that are sage-green above and woolly-white beneath. Other names for it are silverleaf, cottonweed, lady-never-fade, Indian posy and ladies’-tobacco. Since it came from Europe, Indian posy seems inappropriate and I doubt whether ladies smoked it. But they did use it for coughs and as a poultice for bruises in pioneer days. Its latest blooming month, according to Rhoads’s and Block’s The Plants of Pennsylvania, is October, which was why I was amazed to find it flowering in late November.
On that same day several forsythia flowers blossomed on a scattering of branches. Forsythia originated in South China where it grew wild. The Chinese called it golden bell. Robert Fortune, a young Scot, was sent into China to collect new plants for the Royal Horticultural Society of London in 1845, three years after the Opium War, when westerners were resented and mistrusted. So Fortune, disguised as a Chinese man, dressed in native garb and wearing a pigtail, explored the South China coast with a crew of Chinese workmen in springtime. There he found the countryside filled with forsythia. Although he later named it for the second curator of London’s Chelsea Gardens—William Forsyth—who was also a Scot, golden bell is a more evocative name that was quickly forgotten.
Dandelions also thrived in our driveway and during this longest autumn, I found a dandelion blooming on Butterfly Loop on December 5. It too came over with the colonists who used it as a cleansing herb and pot herb. It probably originated in Asia Minor long before anyone thought to notice it because both the Greeks and the Romans cultivated it. The Chinese called it earth nail and used its long taproot and green leaves for food and medicine while in Japan it was grown as a decorative plant. In Britain, the Celts used it for both food and wine and the Anglo-Saxon tribes that settled in the British Isles after the Romans left valued it as cure for scurvy and as a laxative and diuretic. Here in Pennsylvania, the Germans grew dandelion in their gardens and even today the Amish value and use the plant in early spring. Years ago, I too harvested the leaves every spring and served them with an Amish bacon dressing that I devised.
dandelion seedhead
As the warm weather persisted, so too did Lyme disease ticks and I continued to pick them off my pants throughout December. Even on December 15 it was 54 degrees late in the day.
It rained on the winter solstice and the following day. But it was back to Indian summer the next two days before winter weather finally settled in, at least for a short time. What changes I have seen during my 41 years here on our central Pennsylvania mountaintop. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined, back in the 1970s, when autumn began at the beginning of September and ended at the end of November that the seasons would shift and autumn would become the longest season of the year.
Red Maples: A Celebration of Red
red maples in blossom
Sometime in mid-March, after the eastern phoebes have returned, our red maple tree buds turn a deeper scarlet, adding welcome color to our forest. Shortly thereafter I catch the faint scent of their opening red and orange flowers.
The clusters of dangling, bell-shaped red flowers with red forked tongues (stigmas) are female while the orange blossoms fringed with long yellow stamens that resemble old-fashioned shaving brushes, are male. Seen through a hand lens, the blossoms are lovely. At a distance their orange, red, and yellow combination is a pale reflection of autumnal color. Whole hillsides, especially in northern Pennsylvania, glow with their spring tints and signal that once again spring has truly arrived, even though they blossom when night temperatures are still below freezing.
Some trees are male, some are female, and some are both male and female, although in the latter case the male and female flowers are on separate side branches. For the most part, red maples are wind-pollinated, but that faint odor I detect also attracts early pollinating insects.
Red maples, seemingly in a hurry to bloom ahead of other tree species, also flower before they leaf out so that the leaves won’t block the movement of pollen from male to female flowers. A month after pollination, the female flowers have matured into dark red, double samaras or winged fruits more popularly known as “keys,” “helicopters,” or “whirligigs.” Each wing contains a seed that our chipmunks, gray and fox squirrels seem eager to consume after a long, hard winter, especially if the previous fall’s acorn crop has been sparse.
red maple keys
The red maple Acer rubrum, which means “red maple,” was named by the Swedish taxonomist, Carl Linnaeus, back in the eighteenth century. His student, Peter Kalm, traveled to North America in 1748 and stayed until 1751, living mostly in southern New Jersey’s Swedish colony or in eastern Pennsylvania. During a visit to Chester, Pennsylvania and its environs in 1748, Kalm wrote about red maples. They were plentiful trees that grew mostly in swampy, wet places. From their wood the colonists made plates, spinning wheels, spools, and feet for chairs and beds. They used the bark to concoct a blue dye and a “good, black ink.”
Today, red maples grow from sea level to 3000 feet and from swamps and bogs to dry mountaintops. They average 50 feet in height but can reach 60 to 90 feet under good conditions with a trunk diameter of between 18 and 30 inches. They are found from Manitoba to southern Newfoundland in Canada, south to central Florida and west to east Texas—the widest ranging tree species in North America.
Their leaves, like all maples, grow opposite one another on their branches. They have three to five lobes and are coarsely toothed along their edges. Dark green and shiny above, “its leaves are white or silvery on the under sides, and, when agitated by the wind, they make the tree appear as if it were full of flowers,” Kalm wrote. That has led to two of their alternate names– “silver maple” and “white maple.” Their leaf stems are usually red and their branchlets green at first, but then they become smooth and red. They have V-shaped leaf scars (where last year’s previous leaves have fallen off) that do not encircle their stems, and each scar contains three bundle scars (tiny, raised spots inside a leaf scar where the leaf has broken off). Their pith, which occupies the central portion of their twigs, branchlets, and roots, is pinkish and rarely increases in size after a tree’s first year.
red maple leaves in snow
We have four good-sized red maples growing along our driveway. On the streamside below our house, one red maple is 19 inches diameter at breast height (dbh) and the other is 20 dbh. Both are hoary with whitish crustose lichens and patches of green moss. The 19-inch tree was the favorite climbing tree of our three sons because it has a short trunk and wide limbs within easy reach of the ground. Both trees have shed branches and woodpecker holes.
The third tree, outside the guesthouse, is 18 inches dbh and is almost dead. Branches and long pieces of bark lie on the ground, and it is riddled with woodpecker holes including a large, vertical, pileated woodpecker food excavation hole. Still, one large branch bears the buds for next season’s flowers and leaves.
The largest and healthiest yard red maple grows down next to an old corral area below the guesthouse. It is 23 inches dbh, and our son Dave claims it may be the largest red maple on our 648 acres.
Red maples are relatively short-lived, reaching maturity at 70 to 80 years. Their branches are easily injured by wind storms, ice storms, and heavy snows, and their thin bark doesn’t heal quickly when it is drilled by woodpeckers in search of insects or by yellow-bellied sapsuckers and squirrels after the sweet sap of red maple trees. These wounds allow fungi to invade, most notably Inonotus glomeratus, which infects branch stubs and stem wounds, Oxyporus populinus, which forms small, white fruit bodies often beneath patches of moss, and Phellinus igniaris, which causes heart rot that, in turn, leads to a wind-snapped tree trunk or whole tree. No doubt that is what has invaded our guesthouse tree.
Gnarled husk of a dying maple
In addition, the gallmaking maple borer, maple callus borer, and scale insects can damage red maples and the elm spanworm can defoliate it.
Still, red maples are incredibly successful trees. They are prolific and early seed producers. Trees as young as four years bear samaras, and a tree one foot in diameter has as many as one million seeds. Almost every year they produce seeds, and every two years they have a bumper crop.
Before Europeans arrived in eastern North America, red maples represented less than five percent of the forest. Today many forests consist of 30 to 40 percent red maples, and they are the most abundant forest trees in Pennsylvania. Two of their alternate names are “swamp maple” and “water maple” because they used to grow only in wetland conditions — swamps, bogs, and wet forests as Kalm reported. But when their competitors on higher, drier ground died of disease, namely the American chestnut and American elm, and loggers selectively removed yellow birch, sugar maple, and oaks, shade tolerant red maples moved right in.
Then too deer numbers increased, and although they do browse on red maple seedlings, they prefer oaks and other hardwoods. Besides, red maples are prolific sprouters and spring up faster than oaks so they quickly grow beyond deer range.
Fire suppression has also favored red maples because their thin bark is easily damaged by fire whereas oaks, with their thick bark, deep roots, and dormant buds near or below the soil line that quickly germinate, can survive and even thrive under low level fires.
red maple leaf fallen into a rhododendron in a bottomland forest in West Virginia
Acid rain has altered our forest soils, which is still another reason for the proliferation of red maples. They like acidic soil and oaks do not.
Red maples can withstand floods as long as 60 days because of their 80 feet of long woody roots that anchors them firmly to a sodden earth.
Drought doesn’t bother them much either. They merely stop growing until conditions improve and then produce a second growth flush.
Killing red maples isn’t easy as foresters and landowners have discovered because red maples are resistant to herbicides and girdling.
In our hundred-year-old forest, we have far more oaks than red maples, and in our three-acre deer exclosure, with its two-hundred-year-old trees, we have many more oak seedlings than red maple seedlings. But on our former neighbor’s 125-acre property that was logged before we bought it, they left some white, black and red oak seed trees, as well as a few tulip poplars and bitternut hickories. However, due to deer, there are few if any oak seedlings after 20 years, so in early spring I visit that portion of our land to savor red maple color.
For fall color, I hike over to a neighboring property that was also cut before it was sold more than 40 years ago. It is now a red maple forest that glows with a palette of colors almost as lovely as that of New England’s famed sugar maples.
While red maples may not be as useful to humans as oaks or sugar maples, their sap can be boiled for syrup and their wood used for furniture veneer, gun stocks, tool handles, pallets, plywood, oars, barrels, crates, flooring and railroad ties. But first and foremost, they are valuable ornamental and shade trees, although they are sensitive to ozone injury, which makes them less valuable as city street trees.
red maple blossoms in the fog
Native Americans too found red maples useful, especially infusions of their bark for treating hives, dysentery, women’s problems, and sore eyes. They used red maple wood to make baskets and for carving.
Some wild creatures also appreciate red maples. Porcupines eat their bark and flowers, and songbirds, squirrels, and mice eat their seeds. Along with deer, snowshoe hares also like their sprouts. Eastern screech owls, wood ducks, pileated, downy, and hairy woodpeckers and common flickers nest in their cavities. Prairie warblers like to build their open nests in red maples three to six feet high.
Cattle and horses aren’t so fond of red maples because their leaves, particularly if they are wilted or dead, are toxic to them especially in summer and late fall.
But why are they called “red” maples? Nancy Ross Hugo in her delightful book Seeing Trees: Discover the Extraordinary Secrets of Everyday Trees says that they were probably named for their flowers.
Donald Culross Peattie in A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America gives a more nuanced and poetic explanation, mentioning their red leaf stems in summer and their color in fall.
Even the burl on a young red maple is reddish-orange
“In winter,” he writes, “the buds are red, growing a brilliant scarlet as winter ends, the snow begins to creep away, and the ponds to brim with chill water and trilling frog music… no other tree quite equals them at this season in quality or intensity of color… The flowers too are generally red, sometimes yellow, and, minute though they are, they stand out brilliantly.” Even their early leaves, when still small, are scarlet “as they unfold from their fanwise crumpling in the bud.” So too, are those deep red samaras dangling from the trees in May.
All in all, red maples celebrate the color red throughout the year.
*
All photos in this column are by Dave Bonta. Click on them to see larger versions on Flickr.
Marcia with golden eagle (photo by Todd Katzner)
Marcia Bonta is the author of nine books and over 300 magazine articles. The blog portion of this website includes her popular “Naturalist’s Eye” column from Pennsylvania Game News, reprinted here on the 1st of each month. Unlike typical blog entries, these columns are written months in advance, usually about things that happened during the previous year. Read more…
