December 16, 2018 - The Mighty White Pine

"From little acorns mighty oaks grow"

We have all heard that proverb.  But even more mighty than the oak is New England's White Pine which towers above even the largest oak in the forest.

While doing some boundary monitoring on a conservation easement I saw some of the largest pines I have come across.

A towering white pine

I expect some will recognize the location.  I went back to take some measurements and found the tree shown above has a circumference of over ten feet!

But have you ever seen the seed of the mighty pine that hides inside the cone up at the top of those trees?  I hadn't, but I know they're in there, not only because tiny pine trees sprout up everywhere, but also because red squirrels spend so much time tearing those cones apart.

Stripping a pine cone, staring at the stem end

Working its way down the spine

Just about empty

Hey, you watchin' me?

Scraps left underneath the kitchen table

Watching this diligent effort to extract those seeds motivated me to pick up a couple of cones and dissect them to learn about what lies inside.

The very beginning of three white pines - one seed is attached to the pointy end of each scale

I was surprised to find just how tiny they are.

The numbers indicate centimeters

At five millimeters in length they must pack a lot of energy to warrant the effort expended by so many animals to access them.

After extracting those seeds it took me quite a while to remove all the sap from my hands, which made me recall a video I had taken of a squirrel eating pine seeds.  At the time I wondered what it was doing after its meal, but now I realize it was cleaning its tiny paws of all that pine sap.  You can watch it here.  You'll also notice it was not happy with my presence in its territory.

If you want to see how it stripped the cone, you can watch a shorter video here.  It must peel off one scale at a time then extract the seed attached to it.  The scales are also called "wings" since they help distribute seeds away from the mother ship when the wind blows.  [Ref:  NC State University]  They perhaps aren't as sophisticated as the helicopter wings on a maple seed, but they certainly do the job to propagate pine trees, especially when aided by the squirrels caching cones away in various places for winter food.

It's a wonder of evolution that this tiny seed can take the nutrients provided by earth and atmosphere (and the symbiotic efforts of other life forms such as fungi) and grow into the enormous structure of a 150 foot tree.  It makes one wonder why the oak gets the proverb when the size ratio of seed-to-tree of the pine outshines the oak by orders of magnitude.

A massive white pine on the Magenta Trail in the Smyth Easement

And in an interesting coincidence, check out the white pine in this post that the Lakes Region Conservation Trust posted just yesterday.  The trees shown here pale in comparison to that monster.

A final note:  the ice did freeze up enough this week for some smooth skating on the entire lake.  Snow forecast for tonight might end it, but if there's only a little it might blow off again.