The dead meat flower

Skunk Cabbage in full bloom

This is the season when we search the yard for snowdrops and crocuses, popping through the melt. Yesteryear’s farmers, however, looked not for these elegant garden imports, but for a reeking native to find signs-of-spring comfort.

Skunk Cabbage is by far our earliest wildflower, often appearing even before all the snow has disappeared. Well supplied with antifreeze, Skunk Cabbage also generates heat by a process called thermogenesis. Inside the cabbage hood, which protects a ball of flowers, the temperature can be as high as 70 degrees when the outside air is freezing.

That heat, plus plenty of pollen, makes the Skunk Cabbage very user-friendly to some of the season’s first insects, which may gain not only food, but warmth, on an early spring day. Many of those insects were attracted by the plant’s stink, which is reminiscent of rotting flesh – just what a hungry fly loves!

Skunk Cabbage is clever in other ways, including its flavoring. The plant is rich in blistering oxalates that “burn” the tongue and discourage browsers. It’s a defense that has prevented deer from decimating its wetland colonies.

The nose knows

The next time your cat rubs its head against your leg, it may be more communication than affection. Kitty is probably marking you with its scent.

Cats rub against people and places to deposit saliva and secretions from three glands on the head. These deposits send a message to other cats: You are part of their territory. It may be like posting a “no trespassing” sign.

In the wild, creatures from lowly mice to lumbering bears and fleet-footed deer mark the trees and ground with semiochemicals. “Semio” is from Greek, meaning a “sign,” and mammalian signs are read with considerable interest. They often define territories, but their particular mixture of 50 or more compounds may even identify an individual animal, as a name or Social Security number identifies us.

In the case of deer, the meaning of scents can be quite complex, advertising a buck’s status in the herd, triggering the reproductive cycle in females and perhaps even stemming the sexual drive in bucks of lower status.

Most mammals have much better olfaction than humans – dogs and their wild kin have up to a million times more scent receptors than we do.

So remember when you take Fido for a walk: Those leaves and twigs he spends so much time sniffing could be his version of reading the local newspaper.

Acorn Rain

On an early morning walk in late August, you are bound to hear the click-clacking of the oak trees. High in their branches gray squirrels are picking and dropping acorns that fall through the leaves and twigs like so many giant raindrops.

Squirrels learned long ago that, rather than pick and carry each acorn or hickory nut to the ground to bury, it’s a lot easier to drop a bunch at a time, then climb down to collect and cache them.

But they have to be quick about it sometimes.

One day a few years ago, we came across one of the drawbacks of the squirrels’ efficient operation. Under a bountiful oak raining with acorns from a half dozen squirrels stood a herd of a five deer, eating these gifts from above as quickly as they landed.

Even in nature, no system is perfect – unless you’re a deer that likes good service.

Sound of the Veery

I heard a Veery on Sunday. That may not sound like a big deal, but it’s the first one I’ve heard locally in more than five years.

And hearing them is often all you do, for these brown thrushes are somewhat secretive and stick to woodlands where they can be hard to spot.

However, their song is one of the most distinctive and easy to recognize of any of our migrants. It’s a flutelike cascade of notes, seeming to echo as if they were sung through a long open pipe. Once you’ve heard the song, you never forget it.

Time was when the song of the Veery was a sure sign that spring had settled in. It was something to listen for. But Veeries are in what the Cornell Lab of Ornithology calls a “slow decline” throughout their range.

In winter, that range includes a large area of central and northern South America, much of it rain forest, which, as we all know by now, is being cut down. Ornithologists suspect that this “rapid habitat conversion” is reducing the Veery population.

Up north, these birds may also be suffering from the deer overpopulation. Veeries nest on or near the ground and thus prefer woods with dense understory that provides a degree of camouflage and protection. Overpopulating deer have stripped so much of the understory of our woods that Veeries may be having difficulty finding suitable nesting sites. (However, the latest statistics from the state of Connecticut indicate the state’s deer population may be in decline from a peak of 75,000 a few years ago to a current estimate of 62,000.)

Veeries have also suffered from nest parasitism by Brown-headed Cowbirds, but the latest studies on cowbirds are finding that these birds may also in decline. So it’s likely that the habitat destruction, in both winter and summer ranges, have been affecting the Veery numbers in our neighborhood.

Are deer down?

Connecticut’ deer population has been stabilizing, maybe even declining. So says the Wildlife Division of the Connecticut Department of Environmental, which in February completed its latest aerial population survey.

Officials put many qualifiers on their numbers, including the fact that the aerial survey looks at only one percent of the state’s total deer habitat. Nonetheless, from 1993 to 2003, the estimated winter deer population rose from 49,472 to 75,771. Last winter, the estimate was 62,163. If the state’s system of surveying is reasonably accurate, that would be a noteworthy decline.

We are still in the most deer dense part of the state. Fairfield County has an estimated 29.4 deer per square mile, the highest density of any of the 12 state zones. The statewide average is 17.

Wildlife officials also watch data on hunter kills, deer-vehicle collisions, and even “homeowner concerns,” and all also seem to indicate the population is at least stabilizing.

Why? The state has “adjusted deer seasons, modified bag limits, and encouraged the harvest of antlerless deer in high deer density areas,” DEP said. “Wise deer management results in healthy deer populations and productive wildlife habitat.”

In a word, the state seems to be saying, hunting.

The Big Stink

There’s been a big stink at the University of Connecticut lately. No, it’s not some scandal or controversy, but the blooming of a Titan Arum – two, in fact – at a university greenhouse. Only twice since the 1930s has this species flowered in the Northeast, and UConn has two in one season.

Natives of Sumatra, Titan Arums bear huge blooms that literally reek. Both in their foul odor and reddish color, the flowers mimic carrion, all in an effort to draw flesh-eating flies to pollinate them.

However, you don’t have to go to UConn or Sumatra to see the same technique in action in our own woods. Early each spring, our wetlands are bursting with Skunk Cabbage flowers, another Arum that uses exactly the same technique – carrion color and scent – to attract flies.

Still another spring stinker is Purple Trillium, a fly-baiter that may qualify as the worst-smelling wildflower in North America. But its odor is not a defense and unlike an Arum, the trillium is not bitter-tasting. Unfortunately, hungry deer won’t turn their noses up at a bad smell, and have been eating our trilliums into oblivion.

Cowslip season

April offered old-time farmers a free treat that could warm their stomachs, brighten their rooms, and even line their pockets. We call them marsh marigolds, but New Englanders knew them as cowslips.

Their yellow flowers filled wetlands, offering the first big blooms of the season and a chance to decorate winter-weary homes.

They were also popular as a spinach-like dish. William Hamilton Gibson wrote in 1880: “The eager farmer’s wife fills her basket with the succulent leaves she has been waiting for so long; for they’ll tell you in New England that ‘they ain’t noth’n’ like cowslips for a mess o’ greens.’” Being bitter like most buttercups, they had to be well-boiled first. That bitterness, incidentally, is protection from today’s voracious deer.

There was gold in those yellow flowers, too. Enterprising farmers picked bunches of cowslips to send to nearby cities where boys would sell them on street corners to people eager for spring blossoms.

The plant’s name sounds romantically agrarian, but isn’t quite. Cowslip, named for a European barnyard weed, is from the Old English, meaning “cow slop” – that is to say, cow crap.

Spring ephemerals

Ah, spring, the season of new and renewed life! It’s a time when many nature lovers turn their eyes skyward to spot migrating birds as signs of the season. Others, however, head for the woods and look to the ground. They seek the “spring ephemerals,” March and April wildflowers that pop up, bloom, fruit, and disappear before most of the trees have unfurled their leaves.

Ephemerals like bloodroot, trout-lily, trillium, anemone, and spring-beauty have to deal with wintry winds, frosty nights, even snow and ice. But there are benefits to their lifestyle. The ground is wet with snow melt and the trees have not yet begun to compete for the water. Plenty of nutrients from last year’s dead leaves have leached into the soil. And there’s much light because tree leaves have yet to shade the forest floor.

Unfortunately, overpopulating deer, ravenous after a long winter, find most ephemerals irresistible. And a plant eaten soon after it sprouts cannot make and store food in its roots so it can reappear next year, and cannot produce seeds for future generations.

Thus, in many woods, ephemerals have become invisibles.

They’re coming…

It’s tough being a commuter, traveling winding back roads and crowded expressways at dawn and dusk. Visibility is often poor as headlights shine in your eyes and perhaps rain, snow or fog blur your vision. Through all this, you must constantly keep alert for deer, which seem suicidally bent on throwing their 200-pound bodies at you.

Now come warnings that moose on the move, extending their territory well into Connecticut and southeastern New York. And the difference between a moose and a deer is like the difference between a Doberman and a Chihuahua.

In September, a car struck and killed a 700-pound bull moose at Barkhamstead in upstate Connecticut. A month early, a crash killed a 500-pound moose in Goshen. These weren’t even “big” ones – moose can reach 1,100 pounds.

Connecticut wildlife experts estimate more than 100 moose are now in the state and their numbers are growing as their range extends southward toward metropolitan New York City.

What’s a motorist to do? The best advice is: Slow down! Be it deer or moose, or maybe even a 400-pound bear, the slower you’re going, the less the impact. You may even be able to avoid an impact altogether.

Dead meat

Some of our simplest-looking wildflowers offer some of the most sophisticated tricks for survival. Take the Red Trillium, for instance.

A handsome plant found in our open woods, Red Trillium bears big, three-petaled purple flowers in spring. The flowers are pretty, but they don’t mean to be. In fact, they mimic dead meat. The petals wear the color of carrion and the flower itself reeks with an odor among the most foul in nature.

The fakery is the trillium’s way of drawing flies. Unlike the many bee-oriented flowers, trillium uses flies for pollination. These are the same flies that explore the recently thawed forest floor, feeding on the carcasses of creatures that died over the winter. To a fly, a trillium looks and smells just like another spring corpse.

Unfortunately for trillium, the burgeoning numbers of White-tailed Deer have significantly cut its numbers in many areas.

It takes more than bad breath to offend a hungry deer.

Nature's Way

Overpopulation can be a problem in nature. And while humans often cause the problem, only nature seems capable of solving it.

Take the Gypsy Moth caterpillar. Imported because they spin silk-like threads that man hoped to exploit, the caterpillars eventually exploded in population to the point where they were defoliating vast forests. However, in the late 1980s, a virus, a fungus and predatory insects combined to kill millions of caterpillars and halt the plague in our area.

Back in the early 1990s, raccoons were overpopulating – they were almost as common as squirrels. Suburban man had eliminated their enemies and created a comfortable habitat. Then a southern strain of rabies appeared and almost annihilated the raccoons.

Nature took charge. It might do the same with deer, also overpopulating thanks to us. However, it’s one thing to have a lot of dead insects hanging from trees or raccoon corpses off in the woods. It might be quite another to have hundreds of 150-pound deer carcasses dotting the landscape.

Barberry Dilemma

For some years environmental groups have been attacking the Japanese barberry, scheduling “pull ’em up” parties and conducting anti-barberry education programs. The prickly import that has been spreading through woodlands can push out native species.

However, the folks at the Highstead Arboretum in Redding, Connecticut, have been noticing an unusual phenomenon: Barberry bushes are sheltering native wildflowers.

Probably because the shrub is covered with thorns, deer that have been decimating many woodland plants do not eat barberry. In fact, they tend to keep away from it. As a result, arboretum staff have been finding native wildflowers that the deer normally consume, including Trout Lilies and Bloodroot, blooming away under and around barberries while the plants out in the open have been mostly eaten.

It presents a dilemma. Should we spare some of these alien invaders to protect the native flowers from the native deer?