Pickin' Up Pawpaws

We've been to Montana, but there is so much wonderful stuff happening right here in Appalachian Ohio I hardly know what to do with myself. If you want to know what makes me completely and utterly happy, read this post. It is hard to write as I have pawpaw processor's elbow from squooshing pawpaws through a colander all morning, getting that rich yellow pulp that makes my heart sing and my guts go OH!

Anyone who has visited our house knows that food is a huge part of our lives. Local food, so, so much the better. Local wild food found on our land: best best best. I found a new grove of young pawpaws blooming deep in our east valley last spring and tied some pink flagging along the oil well road so I could revisit in September. When I started seeing coon and coyote poop full of pawpaw seeds, I knew it was time to go shake some trees.

So on a fine Saturday morning the whole family, Chet Baker too, trooped down the briery slope to the new pawpaw patch. We were not disappointed. The very first thing Phoebe found was a muddy box turtle with blazing red eyes. He was muddy because he'd been soaking in the oil road puddles.
The very next thing she found was a bunch of pawpaws!
Pawpaw hunting is really more pawpaw rustling. You peer up into the canopy, see pawpaws, count them, and then shake the trees. Generally, the bigger the tree, the bigger the fruit. We get very excited when we see the fruit in clusters. We call the clusters "kittens." Um...because a good pawpaw is about the size of a newborn kitten, I guess. We have our own language when we're hunting pawpaws.

Five in this cluster. They fall all around you--ploop! ploop! ploop! ploop!--you hope not on your head. Because the big ones hurt like crazy. And you can't always tell how many pawpaws a tree has. Sometimes it's a big surprise how many plop out of it when you shake it.

See those huge ovoid leaves? There's nothing else like them. And they always grow in patches. Which is probably because there are so many seeds on the ground from all the dropped fruit. Or perhaps they propagate from root shoots. I do know that the pawpaw's dispersal mechanism is simple. Plop to the ground when you're ripe, and something furry snarfles you up right then and there. You hope it's something that's big enough to swallow some of your huge slick lima-bean sized seeds as it's snarfling your delicious yellow pulp. And then to poop them out at an undisclosed location, sometime later. Ow ow ow. That something would be a raccoon, an opossum, a deer, a coyote, even a fox...there are plenty of candidates. Humans are another decent prospect, even though we're too fussy to swallow the seeds. We spit them out as we walk, and that accomplishes about the same thing, minus the dollop of fertilizer.

In our woods, this constitutes a big pawpaw tree, a Daddyshaker. They do attain the size of normal trees, eventually, but being shade-grown, they grow very slowly. And our land has been abused--cut and grazed, cut and grazed, cut and grazed--for so many decades that the neat stuff is just now coming back into it. We've let it rest for 18 years, and it's starting to pay off.

Liam looves pawpaws. May I eat this one?
Yes, of course!
He polished off four that morning. To eat a pawpaw, you just bite right through the skin and you get a mouthful of big shiny brown seeds and sweet pulp. You suck the seeds and skin clean and ptoo them out. And your hands get really sticky.

Phoebe picked up the cluster of kittens.

Papaw got some, too. And Chet Baker ate his own pawpaw. By that time my hands were so sticky I couldn't touch my camera. You'll just have to imagine the cuteness.

Nothing makes the Science Chimp happier than a successful pawpaw hunt in our very own woods with her mate and young. It brings out the caveman in all of us.

monkeycam shot by BilloftheBirds

Did I say nothing makes the Chimp happier? Well, there is something...see the next post for The Science Chimp's Biggest Entomological Adventure.

Looking for Morels, Which We Didn't Find

Oh, the things you find when you go into the woods.

Looking for morels, which we didn't find

We found other things.
A whole new patch of pawpaws in a place I hadn't looked


Dangling bloody blossoms, calling flies to tickle and play



So that from this strange bell a fruit will form



Banana custard, pulp and seeds in a soft yellow skin.

We'll come back in September.

Looking for morels, which we didn't find

I stopped on a hillside to watch a cardinal build her nest

Followed her to a honeysuckle tangle
And there found a butterfly
never before seen on our land

The round rings on its wings rang a distant bell.
And there in the woods I combed the books of memory
Found the answer waiting, struggling up through the pages and the hard cover of time



A Harvester! Fenisecus tarquinius
Only the second seen in a life of looking for butterflies
And here! on our land, not one but two.


Its caterpillar, the only predaceous one, spurning leaves for aphids.

Number 73 for the property.

But I digress. Numbers are not poetry.

Walking a little farther along, the first turtle of spring
Frozen, watchful



I pretended not to see him. He never pulled in his head.
A victory, however small.

And farther along the same slope
I stop, become still
A crunch of leaves, almost inaudible
I focus like an owl on a spot yards away



Where the second turtle of spring
has drawn in its foot

That sound enough to betray its presence.



Its eye an angry garnet
Discovered but resolute.



Looking for morels, which we didn't find.



Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely. The word has been voted as one of the ten English words that were hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company--Wikipedia

"In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind." Louis Pasteur

Harvester, Fenisecus tarquinus, #73 for Indigo Hill, Whipple, Ohio, April 26, 2009

Duck Creek Idyll

It is that time of year, when the evenings are so fleeting and yet so lovely that it hurts. Why didn't I use the long summer evenings better? Why do these have to end so soon? We hurry down to Duck Creek for a wade before the light is all gone.

On the way, a creeper-strangled silo glows in the dying sunlight. How can it be this beautiful here, where we get to live? I want to roll in the sidelit grass.

On the path to the stream, a pawpaw hangs, still green and hard as a rock, giving no hint to the mushy tropical sweetness it soon will achieve. There is a small bowl brimming with pawpaws on my windowsill, and this morning in the dark of a power outage I smelled them ripening. Ahh. Soon I will bite into my first wild-gathered pawpaw.
Lower down in the tree, a pawpaw sphinx, Dolba hyloeus, eats, a pthalo blue spur springing from his hind end. He's done a number on that pawpaw leaf. That's his job. This is Joe Garris' photo of an adult, lifted from a wonderful silkmoth site.

It reminds me of a tabby cat.

Great lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica (so called because it was thought to cure the clap) glows at pathside.
We bring our friend Oona along, and she wades in to have a better look at a colony of whirligig beetles scudding madly on the water's surface.
The dwindling light renders her a Renoir painting. "Mommy all wet, Daddy all wet, Oona all wet," she says, flapping her hands. When and how did she learn to talk? It seems like yesterday she was getting her face washed by Chet, who was afraid she'd fall off the sofa.
Liam skips stones.
Why don't we just go wade in streams? There are so many things to be discovered.