the swamp

Winter is the perfect time to explore Minnesota swamps — no bugs, firm footing, lots of nooks and crannies to explore.  In fact, it’s the perfect time to get close to what one can only see with binoculars the rest of the year, and did I mention freedom from annoying mosquitoes? Muskrat houses, beaver lodges, footprints of unknown animals crossing the snow and ice, all signs of life going on as usual in the frozen swampland.

And if you’re lucky, you find eagle and osprey nests that you would like to come back and revisit when the birds have returned to breed near the swamp.

But today, there weren’t any critters around, so I took time to examine the omnipresent cattails and marvel at the construction of that enormous seedhead.

The compact sausage-shaped seedhead develops from fertilized female flowers. Male flowers are present only in the early spring and sit above the female flowers on the spike, but fall off after they have released their pollen.  That’s why the top of the cattail always looks bare in the winter.

There must be billions of those tiny seeds in one cattail head.  Is it any wonder this plant spreads so quickly at the margin of shallow lakes and slow-moving streams? It doesn’t depend just on establishment by seed either; cattails propagate quite nicely from their underground root stalk (rhizome) and can spread where ever the water, light, and temperatures are conducive to their growth, unfortunately choking out many of our native wetland species.

Because they are so successful, we tend to think of them as nuisance plants (the common Narrowleaf Cattail is introduced from Europe actually).  But they are one of the most versatile of the wild, edible plants, if harvested at the appropriate times. For example: (information from Voyaguer Country)

• In late spring the young shoots can be eaten raw or cooked as we would asparagus,
• later the green immature spikes can be cooked and eaten like corn on the cob.
• In early summer the yellow pollen produced by the yellow male spike, can be collected, sifted and mixed with other flours creating a protein rich flour. (Apparently the pollen is also flammable and makes a nice explosive combustion for fireworks.)
• Late summer the horn shaped sprouts at the top of the root stalks can be eaten raw or cooked. These sprouts may contain up to 30% starch and sugars.
• The starchy core at the base of the sprouts can be prepared like a potato. In the winter the root stocks fill with starch which can be retrieved and dried into a good quality white flour, or cooked like a potato.
• Once the flower spikes have gone to seed they have been used as insulation, padding, and wound dressing, and the leaves can be used to weave together for a mat.

And of course, numerous avian species seek out the protection that cattail vegetation provides for nesting habitat.

They aren’t around yet, but the cattail swamp will be filled with noisy Red-winged Blackbirds in a few months.

Yellow-headed Blackbirds like cattails too, along with several warbler, rail, wren, bittern, heron, and sparrow species.

Yellow-headed screechers

One of the reasons I went to Pelican Lake the other day was to see Yellow-headed Blackbirds. There were only a few males there, recent arrivals from their winter stay in Mexico or the southwestern U.S.  Perched on tree tops or hanging on to last year’s cattails, they screeched (instead of sang) to proclaim their territory.

Larger than a Red-winged Blackbird, and much, much less melodic, they light up the dull vegetation with their bright yellow head and black and white bodies.

This is the screech.  Sometimes they put so much energy into the screech, they have to flap their wings to stay on their perch.

Here’s a good example of what I mean about “song”, a noise that has been likened to the swinging of a rusty gate. (YouTube video by Dan Sorochan).  A  great comment on the YouTube video by Earbirding  below:

A song that… uh… turns heads
“After premonitory gulps and gasps, he succeeds in pressing out a wail of despairing agony which would do credit to a dying catamount.” That’s how W. L. Dawson described the song of the Yellow-headed Blackbird in 1934. Here’s the cool fact about this song: every time a male Yellow-head makes that awful groan, he turns his head to the left. Never to the right. That’s what the scientific literature says, and YouTube videos don’t disprove it as far as I can tell. Why would this be?

YHBB nest in the same cattail marshes as RWBB, but being larger, they dominate the smaller birds and drive them away from the best nest habitat.  Like RWBB, one male YHBB might mate with several females (up to 8 of them!) that build their nests in his territory, although he doesn’t defend their nests and may only help feed the chicks in the first nest that hatches.  He’s pretty much all show.

It was a cold,windy morning, and in between his screeches, this bird huddled up for warmth.

Oh, the joy of spring —- sqaaawwwwkkkk.   You can see he’s putting everything into it, and there are no females here yet.  So this is just for other males’ benefits.

In flight, the white wing patches are a striking contrast to his all-black body.

In a month or two the vegetation will be so tall, we won’t be able to see these bright spots of color in the marsh.