On Our Mountains

Fruits of the Season

by Jan D. Axtell

One of the best kept secrets here at Trapp Family Lodge is early morning mountain bike rides. It’s a great way to start the day (better than coffee), and you normally have the trail system to yourself. Typically, I ride alone, but on occasion I get to follow Dana Jourdan from the TFL bike shop down the trail. It’s not an easy task for someone of my woefull skill level, but I do my best. Occasionally he stops, usually to let me catch up, but other times it’s to enjoy the fruits of the season. This morning it was a trail side blackberry patch along the Greenway that was laden with the dark fruits. When I finally arrived he had a handful of berries. So I ditched my bike trailside and jumped in before they were all gone.
Summer is the realization of all the hard work of spring.

Blackberry flowers are pollinated by any one of a number of insects, birds, and even - in some cases - small mammals. The fruit begins to swell, and over time ripens to perfection until they either become fodder for a multitude of animals or, as it may be, a mountain biker. Those fruits that aren’t consumed fall to the ground, rot, and deposit its seed to grow a new generation of blackberries. The berries eaten by the birds, rodents, and bears eventually find their way to the ground after working their way through the digestive track of the ingesting animal. These seeds are dispersed by the animal far and wide and also become next year’s plants.

Late summer fruits like blackberries, apples, wild rosehips, cherries, beech nuts, filbert nuts, and ripening seeds of sunflowers provide a huge source of calories for animals gearing up for the winter months. These late season calories are essential to putting on layers of fat necessary for winter survival. In addition, for those birds who migrate to warmer climes these late season fruits put on the larder needed to complete the journey to their wintering grounds.

Ecologically speaking, the fruit of the season are very important to life in the northern forest and has ramifications far beyond my morning trail side snack. The local fauna takes advantage to gain whatever foothold it can in tipping the balance toward survival, and the fruits, seeds, and nuts of late summer and early autumn provide leverage at a time when the arrival of lean times is not too far off in the distant future.

An animal’s ability to adapt to a foods source’s (like seasonal fruits) availability and compete for use and/or station within those food plots figures dramatically in their continued success as an individual within a species as well as a species place within a community. The less time an animal spends seeking out food, expending energy the entire time, the more it can store in terms of fat. The longer an animal has to look for food, the more it has to eat once it locates the food cache to make up for the energetic deficit incurred while searching. So the abundance of berries as well as the fruit bearing plants distribution across the landscape has a significant impact on the time/energy budget that ultimately dictates the survival of all living organisms on planet earth.

I am not going to lie to you. The trailside rest and snack in the berry patch may have very well contributed to my own survival during the morning ride with Dana. They were quite good, and I left a few for the birds as well. But as I sat there pushing handfuls of berries into my mouth I couldn’t help but think how even a small berry has a big influence on the ebb and flow of life here in the northern hardwood/coniferous forest.