The petals of the tulip poplar are strewn across the forest floor, their orange and tawny yellow hues mirroring the stormy sky I glimpse snatches of through openings in the now-full canopy. These magnificent columns of tree, the tallest hardwoods in Eastern North America, easily 125 feet, straight as an arrow, are known as mùxulhemënshi, “the trees from which canoes are made” in Lenape.
Echoing amongst them, all the way through the Musconetcong gorge where I am hiking, I hear the song of the wood thrush, whose flute-like call we wait for each year, as they migrate up from Central America. They are our much anticipated by my wife, both for their unmistakably beautiful call, as for the nostalgia they evoke, as her mother was a nature writer and these beautiful songs we first noticed ringing in from the forest during COVID, when she lost her beloved brother.
I can’t help but equate them with the sirens of ancient Greek mythology. The sirens were banished to an island in the Aegean, singing their beautiful, sad song, which lured sailors, whose ships were dashed on the rocks.
Like the sirens, the wood thrush is a solitary, shy bird, whose light brown upper half camouflages them as they scratch about in the leaf litter on the forest floor, feeding mainly on insects and bugs. They prefer a spot near a stream, staying hidden, only rarely lifting up into the skein of branches, to voice their piercing, haunting song. The males will take to the highest boughs at dawn and dusk, filling the understory with their three-part call, which is made distinct and almost otherworldly by its ability to sing two notes at once. Henry David Thoreau wrote of it:
Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring; wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of Heaven are not shut against him.
They are fat little things, with a round, white belly speckled with black dots. When we get the rare glimpse of them in the little theater of our forest, they are unmistakable, the prominent dark orbs of their eyes a delight, a mysterious, traveler with the voice of the angels.
Round about this same time, sitting on our deck, the little stream burbling, the morning light splays across the newly sprouted ostrich ferns on the opposite bank, lifting their elegant, ancient fans amongst the great bed of pachysandra which covers this small glade.
Then there is a buzzing. And the tiniest little gnawing. I turn, and a column of sawdust falls from the cedar eaves of my roof, and hovering in midair is the other sign of the warming season upon us: the carpenter bee. Good. I love these fat, funny, inquisitive things. Looking very much like a bumble bee, they are completely non-aggressive, even curious, towards humans.
My wife and daughters and I would sit on the deck and watch their entertaining mating dances and territorial jousts, punctuated by inquisitive hoverings right in front of our faces, never threatening, trying to figure out just what we were, before flying off to tangle with some interloper who had invaded their territory. They would clasp each other and like cartoon characters soar off, wrestling and buzzing so loud, squiggling in midair this way and that, over the stream and out into the space above the ferns until finally one gave up and flew off, and the victor returned back to hovering in the vicinity of the nest in the eave.
The kids loved them, and once we learned they do not sting, (males have no stingers, females do, but are docile unless literally caught) we just enjoyed their antics every spring.
Carpenter bees, the largest native bee in North America, are solitary creatures like the thrush, no great hives like honeybees. They bore perfectly round nesting holes in solid wood, vibrating their bodies as they rasp their mandibles against the surface, each nest having a single entrance which may have many adjacent tunnels. The tunnels are both nursery and nectar storage. The female does most of the work, laying in nectar and pollen then an egg and sealing the cell up with a plaster made of her saliva and the wood dust. Several cells will be found along the arms of the tunnel.
Carpenter bees are excellent pollinators of eggplant, tomato and other vegetables and for shallow flowers, their mouths specifically adapted for them. For the Maypop, a type of passion flower native to the American Southeast, they are the only pollinator. It has a gorgeous, complex purple blossom, and bears large fruits, the size of a hen’s egg, on which many species of butterfly lay their eggs, the larvae eating the fruit once hatched. They are the exclusive larval host plants for the Gulf fritillary and variegated fritillary butterflies. The passionflower is also an ancient medicinal and food plant, eaten and used by the Cherokee for thousands of years, and revered by them.
So without those fat bees, considered pests by many, a significant strand of the great web of life would be torn.
Michael Lynch lives in Upper Black Eddy.
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