As March edges into southern and central Maine, daylight has increased about two hours since Dec. 21. Longer, warmer days settle snow and turn it crystalline, which leads to hiking and snowshoeing fun galore.

On frigid days, the crust stays hard enough to hold a big man. During unseasonable warmth, morning sunlight softens the white stuff for the day, creating superb snowshoeing.

Before April Fool’s Day, this region offers us a delightful period to wander the woods and think, look and smell, often with thawed soil under our feet, particularly in the last week or two of March.

Amateur naturalists are so lucky these days. We have access to more nature books than ever, which help us see and understand the world around us, thanks to meticulous observations explained in entertaining prose.

Bernd Heinrich ranks as one of the world’s top science-nature writers — a must read for Mainers. This perspicacious observer owns a second home in a forested area of Perkins Township northeast of Dixfield, where he finds inspiration for award-winning books, usually with a Maine setting.

In “Winter World,” published by Harper Perennial in 2003, Heinrich wrote a typical tidbit that makes us think:

“Only nine of the 38 local species of berries that I know of rot quickly. These are the summer berries such as strawberries, serviceberries, raspberries, black berries, blueberries and chokecherries.” (More on this last fruit later.)

From late summer through spring, according to Heinrich, hard winter berries are crucial wildlife forage in the season of scarcity. They endure varying temperatures, drought, flooding and most adversities in their path.

Whenever I walk in winter and spot, say, a staghorn-sumac stand, Heinrich’s info about hard versus soft fruit often pops to mind.

For example, as I poked down a steep, hardwood slope one morning last March, the rising sun shined harshly into my eyes. My path descended into an old, bowl-like field, crowded by poplars on the east side.

An ancient, weathered shed sat 50 yards away on the opposite side of the opening, an oddly remote place for a building. A backlit crow perching on the roof’s ridgeline cawed once, puffing out a tiny, cloud of condensation in the morning sunlight — a lifetime memory.

Unperturbed by my presence, the crow kept flipping a bright red cluster of sumac fruits into the air, trying to break the clump apart or thaw them on the sun-warmed cedar shakes, covered by lichen. Soon, other crows arrived and fed on the sumac too.

After watching the birds a while, I wandered off to another diversion a quarter-mile away, a very large viburnum bush laden with last fall’s crop. A flock of four dozen cedar waxwings arrived there at the same time and swarmed onto the shrub like a rioting mob ransacking a liquor store. Within 15 minutes, they had stripped the limbs bare.

The more I know, the more I know how much I don’t know. For instance, botanists classify staghorn-sumac and viburnum fruit as a drupe, not a berry, confusing me to the core.

It wasn’t always this way. During my high school biology class, the distinction between berries and drupes was straightforward enough before the world turned so much more technical. Berries included a single fruit such as a strawberry, raspberry or blueberry that contained multiple seeds. Drupes had a single pit or stone — like a peach, plum, cherry or so forth.

In short, back then, botanists classified chokecherries and black cherries as drupes, but in “Winter World,” a scientist called chokecherry a berry — not a criticism at all. Heinrich impresses me as a naturalist. As teenagers might say, “He’s the man.”

As I get older, though, bothering to define berry or drupe bores me stiff, reminding me of a point Steve Duren of Waterville told me years ago.

According to this college English teacher, liberal arts majors like me concentrated on details in our youth, but with advancing age, the big picture minus minutia interests us far more — unless we take up law or science.

Seeing the whole story instead of diminutive parts does make sense in a world growing increasingly complex — an idle thought in March before fishing or turkey hunting takes off later in the spring and robs us of leisure time to ponder such philosophical questions.

Ken Allen of Belgrade Lakes is a writer, editor and photographer. He can be contacted at:

KAllyn800@yahoo.com

 

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