Cool sweets

If you have a sweet tooth, the cold snap is a boon. At least two weeks of freezing nights are needed for our maples to produce a good flow of late-winter sap, the source of America’s oldest breakfast condiment.

The warmth of first month of winter was beginning to make the sap tappers nervous. And there are plenty of maple harvesters around: little Connecticut ranks 10^th in the United States in its maple syrup production – some 11,000 gallons annually.

The American Indians were the first to recognize the treat offered by maple sap, boiled down to its syrupy or solid essences. But it is only recently that scientists have found that this sweetener is actually good for you. A single teaspoon contains nearly a quarter of your daily need of manganese and plus a good dose of zinc to boot. Both minerals are important ingredients in the body’s antioxidant defenses.

So our maples not only provide sweet treats, plus shade, oxygen, and terrific fall colors, they also contribute to our good health.

Squirrel sweets

Throughout New England, metal spigots are sticking out of tree trunks. It's sugaring season. When the sap flows, the buckets fill and the pots boil for hours to make maple syrup.

For unknown centuries humans have harvested this spring treat. But they weren't the first.

Since long before men rammed spiles into sugar maple bark, Red Squirrels have been making pre-spring rounds of these trees. They nip the bark, creating little grooves to start the sap dripping, and then move on to bite more bark. A day or two later, after the sap that flowed from the cuts has mostly evaporated, the rodents return to eat the sweet, sticky residue.

How do they know this cause-and-effect connection -- that a bite plus a wait yields food? The sap has barely any taste, yet these animals have learned to distill the watery fluid to its sweet essence -- squirrel-made maple syrup.

Will pancakes and butter be next?

Wondrous whirligigs

We may call them whirligigs. Botanists know them as samaras. Whatever the name, the whirling fruits of the maple are another wonder of nature, so common at this time of year that we may overlook how cleverly made they are.

Their aim is simple: To carry a fairly heavy seed a good distance from the parent. After all, what good would it do to plant your offspring right next to your spreading, shady self where they would lack the sun and space to survive very long? The samaras wait for a good breeze, let go and can twirl through the air long enough to land far from “mom.”

Pick one up and examine its design. Each is finely formed in a way that makes it spin and hang in the air instead of plummeting to the ground. That a tree could develop such an aerodynamic technique for dispatching its seeds is yet another miracle of evolution. Joyce Kilmer may have marveled at trees, but even their tiny offspring are amazing.