Autumn Sweetness

A rainbow of fall colors provides the backdrop for October. Bundle up against the chilly breeze, and you can take a walk through the woods at a slow enough pace to really notice the texture of the season. Almost everywhere is pretty in autumn, but Door County, Wisconsin is especially nice.

Witch hazel flowers sprout from the fall foliage or bare twigs of their shrubs like durable little sunbursts. Each blossom only has four slender, yellow petals, but the flowers band together and really twinkle on the tree. These late-blooming flowers waft sweet scents into the breeze to attract moths—moths who might be more active now that most of the bats and birds have gone south. On the same tree I find the small round seed pods initiated by last fall’s flowers. They’ll ripen soon, and once they do, the capsule will explode and fling the seeds a good 30 feet!

Witch hazel flowers are the last to bloom and often persist into December.

PHOTO CREDIT EMILY STONE.

A brown creeper gives a series of short whistles and then flings themself through the forest from the top of one sugar maple tree to the base of the next. These brown stripey birds hop up tree trunks while using their downward-curved beaks to scoop spiders out of the nooks and crannies. When they get to the top where there are fewer bark furrows, they swoop down to start at the bottom again. I’ve seen brown creepers year-round in the Northwoods, and some of them expand southward in the winter, too, where they are visitors to the prairie states outside of breeding season. Spiders can hide in a lot of places, but brown creepers need big pieces of loose bark to hide their nests behind, so they inhabit old forests with large trees in the summer.

American beech trees, with their smooth gray bark, are not great habitat for brown creepers, but their nutrient-rich beech nuts provide food to many other little critters. A species of Eastern forests, Door County is about as far west as they live. They’ve had a long, slow migration back from refugia in the deep South after the glaciers came and went. Although not rough enough to hide a brown creeper nest, the bark is also not as smooth as it used to be. The European beech scale insect was accidentally introduced in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1890 and has been creeping westward ever since. After the scale insect pierces the thin bark, a native fungus invades the wound, causes unsightly cankers, and then kills the tree.

Script lichen on the bark of one tree proves that not all black marks are harmful. Nosing up close to get a better look, I can see that the dusty gray background is not part of the beech bark. Etched into the surface are raised black lines, as if a very detail-oriented doodler took a Sharpie to the patch. This crust on the tree bark is a symbiotic organism where a fungus has built a structure and then algae live inside and manufacture sugar for both of them. The dark lines are apothecia, or the fruiting body of the fungus. Essentially, they are tiny mushrooms. They don’t harm the tree.

Northern white cedar trees are known for continuing to grow once they’ve fallen over. This sometimes makes a good place to rest.

PHOTO CREDIT EMILY STONE.

The plaintive cry of a herring gull floats over the sound of crashing waves. Their voices aren’t pretty, but they do make the coast feel wild. Landing lightly next to some friends, the gull bobs contentedly on the water. For all their reputation of being French-fry thieves, I rarely see gulls eating. Their feeding, it seems, is done in efficient bursts when shellfish, invertebrates, small fish, or trash heaps are plentiful. The rest of the time they spend loafing, a technical term used by ornithologists to describe when a bird isn’t doing much of anything at all. While they seem plentiful, herring gulls are listed as a “common bird in steep decline,” due to overfishing, oil pollution, pesticide contamination, and many other challenges.

The horizontal trunk of a Northern white cedar tree is a wonderful place for humans to loaf, too. On the east side of the Door Peninsula, where winds can howl from clear across Lake Michigan, many of the cedar trees have been bent landward. Their roots anchor into cracks and crevices in the bedrock as their trunks play limbo under the breeze. Each root—with its fungal extensions that help soak up water and nutrients—funnels water only to a certain section of the tree along a dedicated hydraulic pathway; meanwhile, scaly green foliage scrapes fog and nutrients directly from the air. Even so, growing slowly is part of their plan. This trunk is sturdy and thick, but much scrawnier individuals nearby were discovered to be hundreds of years old.

The dolomite bedrock is rough under my hands as I scramble down a cliff toward the water. Around 425 million years ago, coral reefs thrived in a tropical sea near the Equator. After the abundant life in that sea went to their watery graves, their calcium-rich bodies built up on the seafloor and eventually turned into rock. Glaciers exposed the rock, and the waves of Lake Michigan sculpt it. The roots of cedar trees cling to the edge.

After the walk, a cup of hot apple cider procured from one of the peninsula’s many orchard stores warms my chilly hands. We must savor every drop of autumn sweetness before the chilly winds whisk it away.