Earth Almanac: January/February 2009

Some Tough Cranes 

At favored sites across the southern tier, from California to Florida, sandhill cranes are displaying or staging for northward migration. Watch and listen for them as they spiral down onto moist grasslands or grain fields, legs trailing like Air Force tanker hoses, long tracheae (looped around breastbones like French horns) blasting out their rattling calls. Ungainly on the ground as they are graceful in the air, courting partners face each other, heads thrown back and beaks lifted (the male’s higher than the female’s). Loudly vocalizing, they hop, hover, flap, bow, jab, and circle. It is the resolute or starving predator that takes on a sandhill crane. Raptors are flown at and kicked. Mammals are approached menacingly in swanlike attack posture, wings outstretched, beak cocked and pointed. If this fails to intimidate, the crane charges, hissing, stabbing, and kicking.

Delicious Medicine

Dead flowers can have their own subtle beauty, as you’ll discover most anywhere in the contiguous states, if you go on a winter hunt for common evening primrose. Check fields and open woodlands where the soil isn’t too wet. Now the bright-yellow blooms that opened on spring, summer, and fall evenings have given way to inch-long, four-chambered pods that pop open, exposing tiny red seeds to wind and hungry birds.

Evening primrose, a biennial and neither a true primrose or a true rose, is easily cultivated. Harvest mature seeds and plant them 12 inches apart in rows separated by at least two feet.

Every part of the plant, from seeds to root, is edible—in fact, according to most reports, they’re delicious. The leaves can be cooked like spinach, the flowers used in salads, the seeds roasted and sprinkled on any food as a seasoning, and the roots boiled like parsnips (which they are said to resemble in flavor). The species has been widely introduced as food in Europe, where it goes by such names as night candle and German rampion.

Unlike so many great-tasting food items, evening primrose isn’t bad for you. “There is evidence that primrose oil, in combination with thyme, may have some benefits in the treatment of acute bronchitis,” reports the Mayo Clinic. The clinic, however, is reserving judgment on the plant’s alleged efficacy in easing PMS, breast pain, hypertension, schizophrenia, chronic stress, irritable bowel syndrome, and hemorrhoids. Nor has the clinic substantiated the claim that evening primrose cures hangovers, though this would be an especially expedient attribute in light of the fact that it has also been said to increase one’s appetite for wine.