What to See This Week

Junipers in the Bird Watching Garden are loaded with “berries”. Keep in mind, junipers are conifers and don’t actually produce fruits but instead what we call juniper berries are fleshy modified cones. Juniper berries attract a wide range of birds including robins, mockingbirds, and hopefully even cedar waxwings. Occasionally, the juniper berries are wiped out in one pass by a large flock of European starlings. 

The Holly Collection is at its most colorful right now, with red, orange, yellow, white, and black fruits all on the trees and shrubs. Over the course of the winter, many of these fruits will be eaten by hungry robins, mockingbirds, and others so it is best to see them towards the beginning of the season while they are still there! Pictured here is a winterberry holly, a native species of holly that drops its leaves in the winter, unlike the evergreen hollies in the collection.

Sweetgums have distinctive fruits that take the shape of spiky balls. They have a bad reputation for being messy in yards and difficult to remove, but they certainly provide visual interest as well as wildlife value! Some species of birds like to pick the seeds out of the spiky balls, particularly finches and other small birds like chickadees.

The Witch-Hazel Collection has begun blooming, starting with our native witch-hazel the common witch-hazel. Witch-hazel flowers are a bright pop of color when not much else is popping as they have blooms throughout most of the winter. Be sure to check back around late February when the collection is at its peak to see flowers in yellow, orange, and red!

Oak trees are among the latest to change color and lose their leaves in the fall. While most other trees are completely bare at this point, some oak trees still have many green leaves! Pictured here is a pin oak with leaves still in the process of changing, creating a mosaic effect of fall colors over the tree. 

Resinous polypore is a common shelf fungus that is growing all over logs in the Deep Woods. They have a deep brownish-red upper surface and are white underneath. When first growing, they are quite squishy, setting them apart from some of the other shelf fungi that look similar. When fresh they can give off a sweet scent.

Poison ivy fruits are very valuable to wildlife throughout late fall and into winter. Compared to other fruits that persist into the winter, poison ivy fruits are very high in fat making them an important energy source. Pictured here is a downy woodpecker taking advantage of the abundance of poison ivy fruits. While the fruits do contain urushiol, the compound that can cause reactions, animals aside from humans and some other primates have no reaction at all!

The poison ivy fruits brought in more than just woodpeckers. If you are looking for a warbler in the Ohio winter, your best bet will be yellow-rumped warblers. Most warblers migrate south to tropical climates to wait out the nonbreeding season, but yellow-rumped warblers are able to adapt their diet to focus on waxy fruits like poison ivy as well as suet and other foods provided in birdfeeders.