Most of the colorful leaves have fallen off our deciduous trees. But that doesn’t mean the beauty of trees is gone. Now you can explore other interesting and colorful attributes of trees – the bark, its shape, its fruits, leaf scars and even buds already forming that promise green again next spring.
Walking around Lake County neighborhoods this week, I looked for trees whose bark gives away their identity. One of these species is the appropriately named shagbark hickory. Native to the eastern United States, this tree can grow 60 to 80 feet tall with a 2-to-3-foot wide trunk.
The volunteer shagbark hickory in my yard is roughly 4 years old and has smooth bark. But the older they get, the shaggier their bark gets. It appears to be peeling off the tree. The space between the peeling bark of the hickory provides a nesting spot for a bird called the brown creeper, whose mottled colors blend right in with the bark.
Hickories also provide nuts, falling off the trees this time of year, for foxes, rabbits and squirrels, including flying squirrels. While you’re asleep at night, a flying squirrel may be perched high atop a hickory tree munching on its dinner.
Another tree species easily identified by the bark is the birch. Several types of birches live here, including the paper birch, which has thin, white bark that looks like sheets of paper. The paper birch grows more commonly farther north, and is typically short-lived in northern Illinois.
The river birch, also native to the region, grows in wet areas. Young river birch bark is typically pink or brownish gray, which turns to a handsome reddish-brown as the tree grows. The young river birches have bark that appears to have loose, curling layers, which mature into deeply burrowed scales.
The dark gray to brown bark of the native bur oak tree is deeply ridged and rough to the touch. But a real clue to its identity is its characteristic stance when it gets big. The bur oak has wide, spreading horizontal limbs that look as if the tree has multiple arms extending from the bark. The native and fire-resistant bur oak can reach 70 to 100 feet tall and live 200 or more years.
If you can’t identify a bur oak by its bark and form, then look for its fruits and acorn laying on the ground. The acorns look like 2-inch cups, 3/4 of which are covered with fringe. Squirrels, blue jays, wild turkeys and other wildlife eat the acorns. When acorn production is low, blue jays leave, migrating elsewhere to find more nuts.
One tree that’s easy to identify by its fruits is the osage orange. It’s not an orange tree at all, but its 3-5-inches wide yellowish green fruits somewhat resemble an orange from a distance. Close inspection shows the fruits have extremely hard shells with ridges, and to my eyes resemble hundreds of worms intertwined. This time of year, the fruits drop like baseball-sized hail on the ground and can be a bit dangerous if you don’t watch where you’re walking.
This tree has a fascinating history in the United States, where it is native to small portions of Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas. It’s widely naturalized in most states today because European settlers planted the thorny tree as a hedge to keep livestock from getting into cornfields and gardens. When barbed wire was invented, farmers stopped planting osage orange to keep cows at bay, using fences with the wire instead.
I’ve never seen a wild animal try to eat this hard-shelled fruit, but supposedly white-tailed deer and squirrels eat them. Squirrels chew through the hard outer shell to get to the seeds inside. But as many folks know, squirrels are much more interested in black walnuts.
They’re busy burying them in yards and other places for later retrieval. Black walnuts, also native here, have dark, furrowed bark and grow 50 to 75 feet tall.
In winter, you can identify a black walnut by its leaf scar – the place where the autumn leaves fell off. The heart-shaped leaf scar of the black walnut looks like the smiling face of a monkey.
You can also identify trees in winter by the shape, size and color of their terminal buds found at the end of each branch. Terminal buds of shagbark hickories are a half-inch long, dark brown and have a blunt point at the end. A bitternut hickory, which also grows in our region, has distinct elongate, sulfur/yellow-colored, hairy terminal buds. Maple trees have egg-shaped terminal buds, while oak terminal buds are pointed.
Want to learn more? The book, “Winter Tree Finder,” was published in 1970 and remains one of the best for our region. It’s still available for purchase and was written by May Theilgaard Watts (1893-1975), a well-known poet, artist, gardener and teacher who grew up in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago and also lived in Highland Park. She worked as a full-time naturalist at the Morton Arboretum, and she has a park named after her: The May T. Watts Nature Park at 355 Roger Williams Ave., in Highland Park.
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One of her most famous books is “Reading the Landscape: An Adventure in Ecology.” It might make for good reading on a cold winter’s day after exploring the trees in your neighborhood. Someone young or old might enjoy it as a holiday gift.
Sheryl DeVore has worked as a full-time and freelance reporter, editor and photographer for the baiduhai and its subsidiaries. She’s the author of several books on nature and the environment. Send story ideas and thoughts to [email protected]