Pennsylvania Game News - August 2012 - 64

Biding Time
T
HE TRIO of lanky bronze-backed turkeys froze for an instant before vacating the tram road and sprinting off through the August woods. As I neared where they had been scratching and pecking, I realized what they were feeding on. The fruits lay like rubies in the tan leaf duff. I picked one up: rounded, a quarter-inch in diameter, with a thin skin covering juicy flesh. When I tasted the fruit, my mouth puckered. Beneath the sour flesh lay a tiny oblong stone. I looked up to where pin cherry trees arched their slender limbs above the old road. A mature pin cherry is a smallish tree that does not yield much fruit — about two thirds of a quart per year — but taken together, all of the pin cherries in a forest stand can provide a late-summer bounty. Birds alight in the trees’ crowns to feed. Bears pull down branches and gobble leaves, twigs and fruit all together. Cherries that fall to the ground are picked up by rodents and ground-foraging birds, such as turkeys and grouse. Pin cherry trees line the roads that vein our forested acres. They are the remnants of a much younger woods that temporarily claimed the site following heavy logging in the 1980s. Pin cherries are short-lived trees, and many of them are now dying. I probably remove more fallen pin cherry trees from our road system than any other species. The droppings of wildlife spread pin cherry seeds far and wide. (I don’t know about turkeys: Maybe their muscular gizzards grind up the seeds and destroy them.) The seeds are miraculous packets of life. Botanists believe they can stay viable for 50 to as many as 150 years, lying buried in the thin skin of humus that covers the forest floor; as the years pass the seeds’ tough outer coats become more permeable to water and oxygen. Then comes a fire, or hurricane winds, or chainsaws and skidders, to suddenly topple the mature oaks, ashes, birches or maples whose crowns cast shade on the earth. Soil temperatures rise, and somehow the pin cherry seeds detect the change and respond. When exposed to full sunlight, pin cherry seedlings grow quickly. After clear-cut logging removed most of Pennsylvania’s forests in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in some places pin cherries formed thickets with as many as 5,000 saplings per acre. Pin cherries play an important role in forest development: They stabilize newly exposed soil and provide cover and light shade for the seedlings of other species destined to become the next generation of forest trees. In time, those trees rise above the pin cherries and shade them out: Pin cherries need direct sunlight to survive. But survive they do — as seeds, if not individual trees. I find it thought-provoking and reassuring to ponder on seeds that may have fallen to earth during the Civil War; seeds that bide their time, carrying within their husks the germ of a new forest. 
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Pennsylvania Game News - August 2012

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