Right now maple sap is on our minds, and other times food, fuel, furniture, fire, shade, egg-container support, and batting average play into the picture.
Sap time? Watch the birds, squirrels, broken limbs, and the sun’s sky. They’ll all give us a signal, sometimes as directly as a fox squirrel licking a sapcicle in the morning sun.
In Wisconsin, several maple tree species thrive and are there to greet spring with inconspicuous flowers of several sorts. Anthers and stigma-producing pollen and seeds, then fruit, appear on some trees or parts of trees. Other flowers help out, too. They’re getting ready to open; watch for them before the leaves. Squirrels find the edible.
Animals of all varieties know sugary sap water freezes into sapcicles overnight. Deer and squirrels lick it, birds drink the sap. And kids and adults snap the icicle for a vanilla-like popsicle.
Bees and other insects are ready when the pollen and nectar appear, giving bees an important early source to take to colonies.
Fox squirrels and grays, likely flying types, too, visit at night. These buds, then flowers, and eventually seeds and developing helicopter-like fruits continue to feed animals. Even when the dry fruits fall, animals remove a single seed to tide them over until bigger nuts become available.
All the while large, simple leaves, except those of boxelder, shade animals, keep the sun from light-starved understories, including maples’ own offspring. Only the spring ephemeral flowers know enough to appear before the maple’s shade dominates.
Who could forget the autumn foliage of sugar maples when the tree is finished manufacturing carbohydrates, fighting diseases, providing shelves for birds as small as ruby-throated hummingbirds, red robins, and a cardinal or two.
When the fluids no longer flow, and sooner, flooring, baseball bats, cabinetry, and furniture owe a debt to maples. If the sawyer waits several hundred years, firewood’s ample. Spent sap-providing trees continue to “live” on as seats for stools, faces for clocks, and bowls carefully turned, all show fine figure in the wood. An added feature developed from disrupted, darkened growth resulting from tapping miraculously healed by an everlasting meristem in the living tree.
One of these maples, the sugar, was selected as Wisconsin’s state tree during a time when state symbols made sense as a flower (wood violet), wildlife animal (white-tailed deer) and game fish (muskie).
We owe the maple, even compound-leafed boxelders, silvers, reds and their hybrids, a debt of gratitude for being there from spring to following springs.
— Jerry Davis is an Argyle native and a freelance writer who lives in Barneveld. He can be reached at sivadjam@mhtc.net or at 608-924-1112.
