Clusters of white-pine pollen cones release wind-dispersed pollen grains.
Jerry Davis For Agri-View
Seeing a pine pollen cone, oak catkin or sower gall once each year is enough to continue to marvel at their beauty, unique shapes and purposes. Some extraordinary formations appear to be foreign, out-of-place or even unreal. Most are not.
An oak sower gall is indeed one of those, as is a cedar-apple rust gall. A cluster of white-pine pollen cones is what it takes to ignite an egg to become an embryo inside a seed cone, which then takes more than two years to produce pine nuts that grow 100 or more years - to eventually frame a barn or garage.
Pines don't develop flowers but the two types of pine cones - seed and pollen - together, do what many single flowers do. A new seed cone, colored and miniature, is sometimes called cute, a term often reserved for deer fawns and human babies.
Plant galls, often initiated by insects releasing hormones, causes a host plant to grow in unusual ways while providing a nursery for more wasps that do the same. Inside the wooly sower oak gall are harmless wasps that do all of that without harming the plant or later stinging other animals when they hatch.
What would late spring be without tree dust - endless supplies of pollen grains - each carrying two sperm cells. Most land harmlessly on flat surfaces - or are inhaled to cause numerous reactions of frustration. Those sperms are the other half of fertilization in a pine, birch, oak, walnut, chestnut or kernel of corn.
Turkey hunters are still sitting quietly, sometimes breathing in 1,000 pollen grains with every breath. After five hunting periods, records show 45,119 turkeys have been registered. Check the final turkey-registration number; this spring may be a record season.
Caleb Howton flew and drove with his shotgun all the way from Birmingham, Alabama, to continue his quest of taking a spring gobbler in each of the 49 states with wild turkeys. Alaska has no turkeys but Hawaii does; Howton's been there so that turkey's gizzard's volcanic stones are in a jar.
The bird Howton shot during Period E in Iowa County, Wisconsin, had tiny limestone fragments in its gizzard. Return flights from hunting destinations usually mean leaving the turkey meat with landowners, he said, as was the case with turkey No. 35. The bird's 1.5-inch spurs went south, as did two spurs from Caledonia, Minnesota, from bird No. 36. That bird's spurs were 1.125 inches long.
Wisconsin is clearly a destination location for spring turkey hunting. Landowners are usually friendly toward nonresidents, as are Wisconsin's hunting and authorization systems.
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But most nonresidents, even when surprised by a whitetail fawn, understand gun-deer hunting is an entirely different animal. Wisconsinites talk and brag about the state wildlife animal, the white-tailed deer, but are less likely to share the venison.
May 25 tends to be the peak of fawn birthing in Wisconsin, but is usually happening for two weeks either side of that date. Many photographs of days-old fawns show the cute, coiled baby, with white spots and dappled with sunlight.
In spite of ample exercise following mom deer, fawns gain weight quickly and lose their spotted coat by early September. On average, like humans, about half the fawns are male and half female. Some males develop noticeable short spike antlers. A few female fawns will breed in November 2025. The recent rain will provide a great crop of soybean leaves and developing corn ears for those young deer.
Ginseng plants are about to flower, with a cluster of tiny blooms in the center where the three or four leaves attach to the single stem. That continues the plant's interesting growth stages before the red berries and yellow leaves greet admiring eyes and cameras in early September. Like some deer hunters, more and more ginseng diggers speak of "let it go, let it grow" and leave even mature plants to produce more progeny and conserve the uncommon rare plant.
What's all that white out there? White blooms are now appearing on prickly ash, Russian olive, black locust, black cherry, and catalpa trees and shrubs.
Bret Schultz of Black Earth, Wisconsin, said before the recent rains the streams were extremely low, even on Black Earth Creek. It usually has a substantial flow but the stream was low and clear, making fishing quite difficult or almost impossible.
"Trout fishing in the afternoon with a sunny sky forced me to spend my time in the ripples to hope not to be seen," he said. "Evening fishing helps, too, if the temperatures are higher and there's a bug hatch."
It's been a slower May than usual, he said, but the recent rains will help.
This is an original article written for Agri-View, a Lee Enterprises agricultural publication based in Madison, Wisconsin. Visit AgriView.com for more information.
Jerry Davis is a freelance outdoors writer. Contact him at [email protected] or 608-924-1112 for more information.
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