It is February and purple henbit is once again blooming in the fallow fields of south Georgia. Interesting plant, henbit. A member of the mint family native to Europe, western Asia, and north Africa, the plant is edible and has been used for centuries to heal various ailments like fever and body aches. A pre-industrial Tylenol, so to speak. It is full of iron, vitamins A,K, and C. Perhaps most interestingly, you can pluck the tiny flowers and blow on them like a trumpet, which is where the plant gets strange monikers like “fairy horn” and “nature’s kazoo”.
Here in south Georgia, henbit is one of the first signs of spring or I should say, false spring, turning the fields to a lavender hue and breaking up the monotonous grey of winter. In this part of the world, the normal 4 seasons of the year are further subdivided into at least six more. There is summer, the gates of hell, false fall, second summer, fall, winter, false spring, second winter, pine pollen season, and then, our one true week of spring. We are currently well into false spring. It is a season further marked by the weeping of fresh-drilled sapsucker holes in the pecan trees. These shallow craters drilled in symmetrical rows encircling the trunks of certain trees are the work of the woodecker known as the yellow-bellied sapsucker, a winter and early spring resident of our orchards.
Spend any length of time in the pecan orchards of south Georgia and you will notice that certain trees are covered with these orderly rows of sapsucker wells, while others remain unmarked. By far, the favorite pecan variety of sapsuckers appears to be the old ‘Stuart’ variety, a traditional favorite among southerners since pecans were first planted in the region in the early 1900s, and the most common variety found in older orchards throughout the south. I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think the sapsucker’s preference for Stuart is based on the content of its sap, as much as it is related to bark texture.
One noticeable characteristic of the Stuart pecan is that its bark is not flaky. Instead, it is tight and neat, smoother in texture than the flaky varieties. As a result, it doesn’t peel off in big chunks like the bark of many other varieties, and for some reason, sapsuckers seem to like that. Tree age seems to also play a role in the birds’ preference. Sapsuckers seem less discriminating about young trees. Even flaky-barked varieties have a smooth bark texture until they reach a certain age and sapsuckers seem to know it.
The yellow-bellied sapsucker is mostly black and white, with a little red coloring on its forehead (and chin in males). It technically has a yellow belly, but you have to look closely to see the faint yellowish hue of its underparts. Interestingly, most of those who spend the winter here in our part of the world are males, as many of the females tend to travel further south into Central America at a ratio of three females to one male. It is the only woodpecker in eastern North America that is completely migratory, flying south in winter to our milder climes where the sap in the trees doesn’t freeze. Late in the spring these busy syrup tappers will leave our orchards and head back to the northern half of North America and Canada where they will nest in hardwood and conifer forests up to 6500 ft in elevation.
It is a warm day and the trees sense the world’s turning. Pecan trees don’t need a lot of chill hours to set their clock for the beginning of spring. Its been a cold winter and as such, it won’t take much warmth to get the sap moving. This brings on the fear that they will leaf out too early and set themselves up for injury in an early spring (2nd winter) freeze event. As I walk past trees that I pruned only a day before, I can see the sap oozing from the pruning sites. This is nothing to worry about in itself, and sometimes brings the added bonus of an encounter with honeybees gathered on a pruning wound, lapping at the sap, themselves.
Honeybees can also be found sipping from flowing sapsucker wells. This is just one example of how sapsuckers also serve their fellow creatures, in that the sap from their wells is used by a variety of species, feathered, furred, and segmented. Squirrels, wasps, butterflies, and a host of 35 different birds, including warblers and hummingbirds all make use of the sapsucker’s handiwork. Hummingbirds in particular, benefit from the wells, finding the much needed, energy-rich sugar seeping from the tiny holes as they return north in the spring before many of their preferred nectar flowers are blooming. I have seen ruby crowned-kinglets and warblers driven from the sap wells by the miniature hummingbird, but they seem content in the presence of the sapsucker himself, allowing the architect to go at his work undisturbed.
The streaks of sap running from the ¼” circular holes of the sapsucker run clear down the trunk like tears, but if anything, these trees are weeping for joy. They’ve been well cared for and have energy to spare. For their syrup tapping, sapsuckers prefer trees with sap that has a high sugar content—maple, birch, and hickory, the botanical family to which pecan belongs. During the orchard’s winter, the birds drill circular wells into the tree’s xylem—the inner part of the trunk—to get at the first sweet sap moving up to the branches in early spring. In the fall, while the trees still have their foliage, sapsuckers make more shallow, rectangular wells that only penetrate just beneath the bark, into the phloem, which carries sap down from the leaves. The birds have to work harder in the fall to maintain the phloem wells with fresh drilling, so the sap will continue to flow.
While the sapsucker’s wells have been reported to cause damage to some tree species, pecan trees are pretty tough, and aside from the bark being more easily broken by grabbing a spot bearing a high concentration of wells with the tree shaking equipment at harvest, I have never noticed any problems that sapsuckers caused the tree. In fact, they may help it.
Sapsuckers do not drill these holes simply to feed on the sap. They use the sap to catch their insect prey, mostly ants, who are drawn to the sap’s sweetness. Ants tend to farm aphids like humans farm cattle, protecting them from predators and milking them for the honeydew the aphids secrete from their own sap feeding in the summer. The effect of the loss of the precious carbohydrates in the pecan tree’s sap is really all about timing. The collective siphoning of the trees by hundreds of thousands of aphids during nut development in summer can be taxing to the tree during that critical time. One aphid species, the black pecan aphid, also has a toxin in its saliva that leads to leaf yellowing and even leaf drop. The wells drilled by the sapsucker in winter are less problematic because they eventually stop up and heal over by the time the nuts begin to develop, much in the same way our blood clots and scabs cover a scratch or cut.
So, in a way sapsuckers don’t cause any significant long-term injury and actually help the trees to an extent by indirectly keeping the aphid population in check. Any minimal carbohydrate loss by the sapsucker’s well drilling is replenished annually with orchard fertilization and good orchard management before the critical times in which the sugars of the sap will be needed, en masse.
Observing the sap flow from these woodpecker wells put me in mind of folks up North who tap maple trees to make syrup from their sap. Can the same be done with pecan? I never really considered the sugar content of pecan as suitable for syrup-making but after looking into this, I found that in earlier times, this was not uncommon. The sap of hickories, in general, has a sugar content of 1.7%, compared to the 2% found in sugar maple. At a 40:1 sap to syrup yield, and with hickory species generally producing about 1/3 less sap than sugar maple, it would take a lot of sap to produce pecan syrup. Thankfully, I have access to a lot of pecan trees.
Commercial pecan prices have been declining for a number of years, just as the cost of inputs for pecan production rise. Though I haven’t committed to pecan syrup-making yet, I am intrigued by the idea. Desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures. The land can sometimes offer fortuitous solutions.
One hundred years ago we were in the middle of the prohibition era. Farm commodity prices were low. In an effort to survive, many farmers started turning their corn into grain alcohol to supplement the family income. I saw a news segment the other day, highlighting a maple syrup company that converted some of their maple sap to 80-100 proof liquor. If you want to “add value” to any farm product, just turn it into alcohol. There’s always a demand.
After winter has painted her muted, grey colors upon the land, even false spring is full of life and the promise that can be found if one pays attention. Here, it is found in the lavender blooms of henbit and the flowing sap of pecan trees from sapsucker wells. Such inspired promise has been known to turn the wheels of the human mind throughout the ages, and from that, who knows what can happen?
Thoughts From The Orchard 