Earth Almanac: July/August 2007

There are few places you can go in North America in high summer and not find huckleberries. Huckleberry plants, which unlike blueberries don’t bear their fruit in large clusters, represent many species with a confusing array of names. For instance, two distinct species—one that grows in the East, the other in the West—are both called “black huckleberry.” The same with two species called “dwarf huckleberry.” Eastern species include blue huckleberry, Confederate huckleberry, woolly huckleberry, and bear huckleberry; western species include red huckleberry and, perhaps best known of all, mountain huckleberry. Huckleberries are less popular for cooking, but their sweetness makes them ideal for eating on cereal or with milk. One of the great joys of summer is picking huckleberries with kids and dogs. The former will solemnly inform you, through black-stained lips, that all the berries are going into the bucket; the latter will pick them one at a time—gingerly, with their front teeth.

Pied Pipers

In shallow fresh water throughout most of North America, pied-billed grebes are incubating eggs or fledging young. “Pied,” meaning multicolored, as in “pied piper,” refers to the thick, bluish, black-banded beak of breeding adults. Flush a male or female from the nest, and in one quick motion it will cover the eggs with vegetation. Then it may try to decoy you with a broken-wing act. Warmth from the decomposition of nest coverings is thought to help with incubation. Immediately after the young break out of the eggs they seek another protective covering—the wings of their mother or father. A parent will even dive with them there. Undisturbed, pied-billed grebes ride buoyantly on the surface, but when danger threatens they may swim just below, revealing only their eyes and nostrils.

Brilliant Flashers

In virtually any North American woodlot, summer is the time to go “sugaring” for underwings, a genus of owlet moths long associated with death, misfortune, and love. Species include the dejected underwing, mourning underwing, forsaken underwing, widow underwing, betrothed underwing, sweetheart underwing, and bride underwing. Excepting the Saturnids (which include lunas and cecropias), few of our moths are larger or more striking. Unlike Saturnids, underwings feed as adults; also unlike Saturnids and most other moths, their forewings are drab, blending in with tree bark so well the insects are rarely seen unless disturbed.

Then they expose brilliant underwings, presumably to startle predators or offer nonvital targets. Mix brown or white sugar with beer, rum, or wine; add vinegar, malt, and molasses until you get a semi-fluid paste; then paint it onto tree trunks at dusk. If one side of a tree is artificially illuminated or buffeted by wind, paint the other side. Moths won’t stick to this cocktail, but you will be able to watch them feed. In the flashlight beam their eyes blaze, and the colors of their underwings appear almost electric.

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