The apples will be fermenting for the birds in early April.
The hips will be ready in March.
The haws (Columbia) will be ready in February…
The rowan berries will be ready at the end of January…
These are for the birds. It’s not about us.
Categories: Nature Photography
Okanagan Okanogan 
I don’t understand why some rowan (mountain ash) trees are stripped already by mid-October and others keep their berries until the pine grosbeaks, starlings, and wintering robins (even here in Smithers area) eat them. There must be a wide genetic variety in even the native and introduced varieties that make some ferment earlier or soften earlier.
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Quite the variation, for sure. Those little ones, two metres tall at best, that grow around 5 or 6,000 feet in the Bonaparte, get picked early, but then the snow comes early, too. Surely, a mystery. And the waxwings! They make their rounds. Perhaps it’s a function of what else is out there? Or what birds are out there, able to take them at what stage? Or needing to? What do you think?
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Oops, I forgot the waxwings which we see in the spring eating fruit tree blossoms and in the fall cleaning off the mountain ash berries.
I know that with the “crabs” of domesticated ornamental fruit, the whiskey jacks will sometimes take them in the early fall, but they cache them. In the Lower Mainland, the few remaining hawthorn hedges (like along the Savage farm on Hwy 10) bear lots of fruit (haws) which the birds–robins, and the last two surviving pheasants not poisoned or mowed out of existence–will eat after several freezes and thaws soften the haws, so to speak.
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