Pennsylvania Game News - January 2010 - 52

mountain. The 4- to 7inch-long drooping cones they produce, their thin, rounded scales festive with resin-frosted tips, make ideal Christmas tree and wreath decorations. Our three sons, when they were young, even tried to improve them with paint before hanging them on our tree. A mature eastern white pine, and we have several along our road and trails, produces from 200 to 300 cones a year, but it takes two years for a cone to develop. Both male and female flowers grow on the same tree, the bright pinkish-purple female flowers at the top of the tree while the yellow, oval, male flowers are lower down at the base of the season’s new growth of needles. When the male flowers release their pollen in May, in Pennsylvania, the wind carries it in all directions. Peattie claimed that “When the male flowers bloomed in these illimitable pineries, thousands of miles of forest aisle were swept with the golden smoke of this reckless fertility, and great storms of pollen were swept from the primeval shores far out to sea and to the superstitious sailor seemed to be ‘raining brimstone’ on the deck.” At first, the cones are green and tightly closed, but during their second season, they ripen to a light chestnut-brown and open to release their ¼-inch long, winged, winddispersed seeds. The seeds can travel 200 feet within a stand of trees but more than 700 feet in the open. White-footed mice and red-backed voles also grow new trees by burying their caches of seeds beneath leaf litter, but on top of the mineral soil, which encourages the seeds to sprout. For more information: Both books mentioned are still in print. You can also consult the website nativetreesociety.org to learn more about their work with big trees. Eastern white pine sprouts well after a fire or logging, but it will also sprout in shade, although it will only thrive and grow if there is a break in the canopy. A seedling grows slowly at first, taking as long as ten years before reaching five feet in height. But then it speeds up, and a 30-year-old tree can be 60 feet tall with a two-foot diameter trunk. I’ve been watching a seedling tree grow inside our 3-acre deer exclosure and another that we fenced in our front yard. The former is six years old and only two-and-a-half feet tall. The front yard tree is 14-years-old and 11-feet tall. We would have many more eastern white pine trees if it weren’t for the deer. Our son Dave planted 50 seedlings from the Game Commission a decade ago, and all were browsed to the ground by whitetails. Porcupines, squirrels and snowshoe hares eat eastern white pine bark. Mice, voles, chipmunks, squirrels, and a bevy of songbirds — nuthatches, chickadees, pine siskins, grosbeaks and crossbills — relish their seeds. Red squirrels, for instance, can strip 45 seeds from a cone in two minutes. They also use white pine branch crotches as pantries, according to Charles Fergus, who wrote in his excellent book Trees of Pennsylvania and the Northeast, “I have watched red squirrels carry mushrooms — the red-and-white fruiting bodies of Russula emetica — into white pines and hang them in branch crotches for storing.” Many bird species nest in eastern white GAME NEWS

http://www.nativetreesociety.org

Pennsylvania Game News - January 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pennsylvania Game News - January 2010