Who are the greatest defenders of pokeweed and other native plants? Catbirds! What would the world be like if we all heeded their calls?
It is the time of the catbirds. Their insistent squawks brighten my days, emanating from every pokeweed patch. Anxieties about their future disrupt my nights: Will they find more pokeberries wherever they land next? Will there be enough other fall fruits—dogwoods, viburnums, beautyberries, spicebush and Virginia creeper—to sustain them on their long journeys?
When I awaken from fitful dreams, the catbirds are already swooping down low past the ash snag, where the pokeweed has found a home among surrounding brush piles. Their colorful calls, mixed with those of the scratchy-throated tufted titmice, provide an amusing and incongruous refrain to the increasingly muted soundscape. If the raucous Carolina wrens own the spring and summer, claiming every branch and bramble, it’s the catbirds who usher in fall with the same ambitious energy. Migrating by moonlight and refueling under the cool white autumn sun, they don’t seem to be the resting types.
You only have to hear a catbird once to understand why they’re named after our favorite felines. But whereas cats rely on unpleasant odors to mark their territories, catbirds use their voices to deliver urgent complaints that occasionally rise to a plaintive, fevered pitch. They are especially loud when they land in the pokeberries, issuing “keep out” proclamations to all others who might dare to enter. A few years ago, I even saw one seeming to yell at an Eastern tiger swallowtail nectaring on ironweed nearby, as if the florivorous butterfly was going to morph into a frugivore and steal the pokeberry stash.
In spring and summer, catbirds are the ultimate party DJs, spinning mashups of all the places they’ve been and the sounds they’ve heard—songs of other birds, calls of frogs, even machinery. But come September, they are all cat-call, much louder than their melodious cousins, the mockingbirds. Though mockingbirds are also stalwart defenders of bright purple pokeberries, they’re more furtive about their intentions, quietly chasing each other away from the pokeweed by the front window.
Even when we don’t see the catbirds, we hear them, and they leave their mark. Almost every day at this time of year, I find the evidence of their bacchanalian feasting: purple blobs on the edges of the birdbaths, which pool with hot-pink pokeberry juice diffused from their droppings. Who knew poop could be so pretty? Certainly earlier humans on these lands understood the powerful beauty of pokeberry juices, using them in dyes and later as inks. The plants were longtime partners with people, providing food, medicine and art supplies.
Pokeweed was also part of the diet of passenger pigeons, so much so that one of the plant’s other names is pigeonberry. Before hunting and habitat destruction erased passenger pigeons from existence by the early 1900s, so many millions flew overhead during migration that they darkened the skies. But what did they sound like when they touched down? How would passenger pigeons greet us if they were alive today and visiting our pokeweed patches? No known recordings of these lost voices exist, but written descriptions invoke a cheekiness similar to that of our catbird friends. Sources quoted on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology “Birds of the World” site note that the calls were “unlike the sound of any other pigeon, apparently used to get attention, like a ‘loud shout’”—and that their signature vocalization was a combination of “scolding, chattering, and clucking.”
I probably get a little loud, too, when defending pokeberries against those who would banish them from the landscape. These plants are not ours to remove; they belong to the earth and to themselves. They’re partners with the many birds who spread their seeds—catbirds, mockingbirds, brown thrashers, bluebirds, red-bellied woodpeckers, cardinals, and, as we saw here in Maryland early last year, a hungry painted bunting who’d flown far north of his usual range to hang out at Great Falls. Photos highlighting his beauty blew up the Internet. But most intriguing to me was that in almost every scene, the rainbow-colored celebrity was perching on pokeweeds or eating their dried berries.
What did the continent look like when painting buntings and other birds were joined by billions of passenger pigeons dispersing pokeberry seeds across the landscape? How much more food might have been available to catbirds, opossums, foxes, hummingbirds, raccoons, coyotes, leopard moth caterpillars, and deer, who find pokeweed especially delicious? Though animals now forage on some nonnative shrubs as well, they’re not necessarily getting what they need. Higher nutritional content found in the fruits of many indigenous plants is especially important at a time when birds need extra energy; one study found that migrating catbirds eating invasives had lower body mass and poorer immune status than their counterparts who stopped in habitats filled with natives.
In celebration of my birthday, rather than ask people to swing into action and donate to a cause, I’m asking for inaction: a cessation of the needless interference of so many plants’ and animals’ lives. Leave the pokeweed and Virginia creeper for the migrating birds. Leave the leaves for the overwintering fireflies and butterflies. Stop cutting down trees where the woodpeckers roost in holes to escape the cold. Stop making noise that hurts all of our ears. Listen to the wind pass through the exposed branches. Hear the leaves flutter to the ground. Consider what it would be like to be a catbird, searching from memory for a pokeweed that is no longer there, and give him something to defend once again.
[Photos by Nancy Lawson]
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