Earth Almanac: January/February 2009

Winter Fruit

Having ripened since summer, the white, marble-size fruits of various species of snowberry now brighten the winter scene throughout most of North America. Unlike thick-clustered, branch-bending berries such as those of mountain ash, snowberries tend to be sparse and seem to float magically in the air. The berries, which taste like soap, are an important though rarely relished food source for many species of birds and mammals, and because they’re not a first choice, they persist late into the season. (“The thrashers will eat them when everything else is eaten,” reports Las Pilitas Nursery of Santa Margarita, California, “but they have a silly, gagged look as they choke the berries down.”) The plant, which spreads by rhizomes, flourishes after such disturbances as logging and is resistant to browsing and fire. Meriweather Lewis so delighted Thomas Jefferson with snowberry he’d collected that the president sent his friend the Comtesse de Tesse (Lafayette’s aunt) a cutting. Soon the plant was being cultivated in Europe, and because birds spread the seeds in their droppings, it quickly naturalized. 

Megaduck 

Pity not the common eider, largest of all North American ducks, as it sculls through freezing spindrift blown by the winter tempest. It will spend the season in the inshore coastal waters of southern Alaska, Hudson Bay, and the North Atlantic to New Jersey (and in similar latitudes around the pole) until spring drives it from these relatively balmy refuges to its northern breeding grounds. Only the eider’s feet are exposed to the cold, and these, mostly bone and sinew, have a miserly blood flow. The rest of the body is sheathed in thick fat and wrapped in the down with which the best parkas and sleeping bags are stuffed. In periods of extreme cold, presumably to conserve body heat, eiders will gather in rafts so dense that individuals cannot be counted.