Julie Zickefoose: Nature Artist & Writer
The Cursed Tangle
This morning, for the first time, the air was heavy with the sweet scent of maple blossoms. Cloistered as we have been this winter, with both kids trying to get all their childhood illnesses over with in one two-month marathon of coughing, spewing, and sneezing, I have kept my head down, trying to ignore the coming of spring. Winter, with its limited, sad palette, seemed to better fit the mood in the house. Normally, I gather signs of spring like I do the first daffodils; for me, it arrives with the woodcocks in the second week of February.
A robin sang a long, intricate whisper song under my bedroom window, starting at 6:39. Huddled into the bones of a trumpet vine, it seemed to sing of placing its mud nest there, once the buds had burst and the sheltering leaves would hide it. I carefully tilted the blinds to look at the bird, which sat, head pulled in, bill closed, wings clamped to its sides, only the slight tremor of its back as evidence that it was singing. Drowsy from a long night of wakeups, I remembered that it was time for my yearly adjustment to the swelling chorus of birdsong. Since I've been a mother, my hearing is razor-sharp, and it never rests, even in slumber. The first song sparrow, tuning up at 5:30, awakens me, and I listen for the bluebird, then the cardinal, then the robin, and finally the house and goldfinches and the general rabble of later risers. Ironic as it seems for a bird lover, I must rely on earplugs and layers of pillows to get any sleep in the morning, until my brain finally learns to start tuning out the birdsong as unimportant, at least when compared to that extra hour of sleep.
Yes, I've been dragging my feet into spring, but today the redbuds were swelling, the color of Harvard beets, nubbins still, but full of promise. My walk through the old orchard raised the sharp scent of crushed wild onions, and I noted with pleasure the first blossoms on the small peach whips that sprout up around the carcasses of their elders, once heavy with fruit; now home to beetles, slugs, and the occasional titmouse nest. I walked the borders of the meadow and orchard, and noted how much had grown up since Bill and I, in our home-proud fervor eight years earlier, sliced and hacked away the vegetation beneath the ancient apples. It's almost all gone to multiflora rose now, a horrifying prospect to me. Only the heavy, dull blade of the tractor's mower deck keeps it from completely closing the meadow and orchard over.
Multiflora rose is probably the single biggest blob of egg on the tie of the Soil Conservation Service, which introduced it from Asia and sold it to farmers as a “living fence,” to be planted along fencelines, where it would form an impenetrable tangle that even the strongest Angus could not broach. It wouldn't spread, the SCS assured us, because its seeds had failed to germinate in extensive tests. Those tests failed, however, to include feeding the tiny red rosehips to birds. When scarified, or roughed up, in the gizzards of birds, and passed through, the seeds germinate successfully, wildly, scarily. Multiflora rose carpets the neglected old fields around here, and it is an unwelcome border to all of our open spaces.
Even after multiflora rose and Russian olive, the SCS's enthusiasm for aggressive exotics seems undimmed. A SCS consultant who was looking our farm over for its pond potential advised that we plant crown vetch, a carpetlike exotic legume, all around the borders of a potential pond, to keep any other vegetation at bay. I looked around at the native little bluestem grass, the pleasant mix of forbs and wildflowers that has come in since we stopped the aggressive mowing schedule kept by the former owners, and wondered at this suggestion. Considering the source, we nodded and changed the subject.
I gaze into the tangle of the biggest rose clump, which squats along the border of the meadow behind our house. It's taller than I am, and its branches form an intricate tangle that is the definition of impenetrability. Only a backhoe could root it out now. In the million cris-crosses of its canes are countless spangles of white, the droppings of all the birds that find shelter in this hedge. Each autumn, it produces a galaxy of hips, to be spread far and wide by the same birds. It's a monster factory.
And yet...when the sharp-shinned hawk zips through the yard, its talons ready for the slow and the sick, where do the birds dive? When the snows of winter come horizontally, where do the cardinals huddle? Where does the towhee and the song sparrow clamber and sing? Looking through the canes, I see the flat platforms of several old cardinal nests, trimmed in dried grape tendrils. A catbird nest is bulkier, woven of grape bark and twigs. Up higher, in the next clump, the cantaloupe-sized mass of sticks that sheltered our beloved brown thrashers hangs. Field sparrows hang their delicate, blond baskets in the smaller multiflora shrubs that have avoided the mower for a season or two. I know the yellowthroats and prairie warblers nest here, too, though I've never been able to find their constructs. And along the driveway, I heard the lusty calls of a near-fledging brood of yellow-breasted chats issuing from another monster clump.
If you could ask the birds about the merits of this noxious exotic, you would get a different answer than I would give. I have to grant multiflora rose , however grudgingly, a high mark for usefulness to wildlife, even as I know it crowds out the black raspberry and sumac that really belong here. Much as I would like to wish it away, I can't; I can't even begin to hack it away. The long canes retaliate, hooking into my back and neck, tearing my skin. It's like fighting a Ninja octopus. Like the European starling, the house sparrow, like Japanese honeysuckle and tree of heaven, it's here to stay, like it or not, and I have to look at it as the birds do. Multiflora rose is a permanent part of the picture on our farm, and we'll try to keep it in check as best we can. More importantly, we'll try to look at it through a cardinal's eyes, as a curse that is at least part blessing. 
