Outdoors: Autumn beauty bursts beyond the foliage

Yes, orange-berried bittersweet is beautifully strangling our trees, and poisonous purple pokeweed is prettily populating pastures now. But for all who aren’t colorblind, late September is the time to see red in New England.

Autumn olive berries are hanging heavy, silver-spotted and cranberry-red this week. Sweet and tart, they’ll astringently pucker your mouth when eaten raw. But boiled, de-seeded, and sweetened, they make a delicious, high-in vitamins A, C, and E sauce or jam.

Our winged-euonymus shrubs are turning deep red now, too, making a good argument for their other name: burning bush.

Staghorn sumac berries have ripened red as well, decorating sunny edges of roads and fields. Colonists made their fuzzy clusters into a juice they called Indian lemonade. You can enjoy them, too, by simply washing and then soaking the berries for a few hours in cold water. Strain and sweeten them to taste. Their high-tannin fruit is loaded with vitamin C.

Flowering dogwood berries have also turned shiny red, attracting many species of birds. But our most spectacular champion of color right now is indisputably the magnificent red maple, which is turning wetland edges scarlet on a grand scale. Enjoy this beauty now because it will be one of the first trees to shed its leaves.

Late September is also the time for red spots to brilliantly adorn our spawning native brook trout. If you have the privilege of catching one now, you’ll see a vibrant sprinkling of red dots surrounded by blue halos along its flanks. Most won’t spawn this year, though, as drought has turned off the flow of some of our local brooks. The pathetic trickles of July have in all too many cases degenerated into dried-up, rocky pathways.

The celebration colors of our changing foliage belie a worrisome drought that has been more frequently weakening our region’s natural vegetation. Soils are dryer. Water tables are lower. This very week, severe weather alerts warned of elevated fire concerns across southern New England as live trees and dead wood held abnormally low levels of moisture in them.

As our swamps and marshes shrivel, herons and egrets are opportunistically feeding heavily on exposed frogs and snakes that have lost much of their protective cover. Some small ponds have shrunk, vulnerably concentrating their fish populations, too. It’s all too easy now to throw out a worm and catch voraciously hungry horned pout.

The massive wildfires out west that are turning much of our country into an annual inferno and recently reddened our local sunsets could one day impact our own New England forests — if we don’t begin to address fossil fuel emissions and human-caused climate change.

At least there’s joy in our last wildflower displays. With nectar fast disappearing, most of our hummingbirds made their great exit last week, missing this floral show. Most of the hummingbirds at our nectar feeders now will be newcomers from the north just briefly passing through on their migration south.

Enjoy now our uncut fields and meadows that are brilliant with splashy yellow goldenrods, white turtleheads, and pink smartweed. Clematis is vibrantly splashing white, too, just as our last hibiscus show off their blue, white, purple, or pink petals.

Among the many edible forest treats to harvest now are honey mushrooms, clumps of which present themselves in open areas, sometimes even on lawns. Noted mushroom gatherer, Russ Cohen, compares their flavor to Mrs. Butterworth’s artificial maple flavor.

One problem with eating this species, though, is that a small number of people can’t digest them well. The reason for their idiosyncratic reactions is not clear, but numerous wild mushrooms are palatable for some and not palatable

Low and slow

Anglers heading west to Lake Ontario are finding tributaries providing some of autumn’s first salmon and steelhead opportunities, though low water is still a problem. Numbers of fish are correspondingly low. The Farmington River in Connecticut is also low and slow. Fishing there has been tougher than normal for all but anglers who know how to fish tiny size No. 22 nymphs and emergers. The Housatonic has been no better off as it too continues to be low and slow.

Watching worth it

Faithful hawk watchers on Mount Wachusett were finally rewarded. The big cold front on Sept. 18 brought with it a spectacular flight of 3,898 broad-wingeds, kettling upward in feathered tornadoes on their long journey to South America. Observers at Mount Watatic ecstatically celebrated the passage of 2,988 broad-wingeds on that same north-winded day.

Missing songbirds

The precipitous decline in our hemisphere’s songbirds is tragically more evident every year. Much of the responsibility for their decline has been conclusively linked to our use of pesticides. Check what you put on your lawns and gardens. Try to go organic whenever possible.

As for other collateral damage from our human behavior, literally 100% of examined red-tailed hawks have been found to have rodenticides in their systems. Out in California, 80% of all the dead or injured mountain lions that are examined show rodenticides in them. We’ve got to come up with less deadly solutions to our rodent problems.

Stock on seeds

Stock up on plenty sunflower and thistle seeds. It looks like it’s going to be a big winter for northern birds to migrate south to our feeders. Every year, serious bird feeders look forward to the annual winter finch forecast. Will the seed crop up north be poor enough to force the likes of redpolls, crossbills, siskins and grosbeaks to desperately evacuate and find the hospitality of our feeders?

Eastern Canada’s spruce cone crops, on the whole, weren’t very productive this year. However, western Canadian white and black spruce cone supplies appear to be much better. The question is: will white-winged crossbills and siskins migrate west or south?

Those two particular finch species apparently prefer the former option if it’s available. So, we might expect them to concentrate heavily from Ontario to western Canada. However, just as the human species is seldom of one mind, neither are birds. We’re likely to get scattered reports of small numbers of the latter two species as a wild Christmas present this year.

Since the white pine cone crop is good up north, species dependent on it, like the red crossbill, are likely to stay north, until those supplies are depleted.

As for redpolls, which rely heavily on birch seeds, we may well see a good number of them at our feeders. Canadian birches produced poor seed crops this year. Migrating redpolls will be attracted to our thistle and shelled sunflower feeders as well as our wild birch trees.

Recent outbreaks of the spruce budworm have been tremendously beneficial to many species that breed in the boreal forest. We’ve consequently seen more Cape May, Tennessee, and bay-breasted warblers during spring migration. But that increased protein supply has also benefited evening grosbeaks and purple finches on the Canadian breeding grounds. The latter appear to have also greatly benefited from the spruce budworm outbreak to increase their nesting success.

Local birders are already reporting purple finches at their feeders, and the likelihood of those wildly colored evening grosbeaks coming down to entertain us has significantly increased. While the grosbeaks will be looking for any still-hanging ash and maple keys, they’ll readily come in to our sunflower seed feeders.

The Finch Research Network doesn’t, however, expect a flight of pine grosbeaks this winter. The critical supply of mountain ash seeds across the boreal forest is just too abundant. In pockets where the crop is poor, there will be small movements, and some of those could result in a number of birds coming down to our region, being particularly attracted to plantings of European mountain ash and ornamental crab apples, both of which are nutritionally attractive to them.

The FRN is also speculating on the movements of three other irruptive species, blue jays, red-breasted nuthatches, and Bohemian waxwings. We don’t think of blue jays as being very migratory, but they do indeed have shifts in their population concentrations depending on food availability, too. The poor beechnut and hazelnut crops around the Great Lakes will consequently coerce many jays south to us. In areas where acorn crops are abundant, jays will be more likely to stay north of us.

As for red-breasted nuthatches, significant numbers of them have been reported moving south since August. They’re responding to the poor cone crops in eastern Canada.

Lastly, the beautiful Bohemian waxwings, according to the FRN will mostly stay north to feed on a decent supply of mountain ash berries there.

—Contact Mark Blazis at markblazissafaris@gmail.com.