Views and Vistas
• Subject: At Home in the Trees 11 — Elm Hostel
• When: Noon to 1 p.m., Nov. 13
• Where: Old Town Public Library, 200 Peterson St., Fort Collins
• Cost: Free and open to the public
• Overview: “Elm Hostel” will present details of the several elms that now grow in Colorado.
The droplets drifted downward through the night. Each by itself was a meager speck of moisture, but together they were an ever so fine mist. More than mere water falling from clouds, the droplets were liquid sugar falling from the tree itself.
Little scale insects prospered by sucking fluids from the twigs and branchlets on which they lived as tenants of the “Elm Hostel.’’ The fluid provided far more sugar than the scales needed, so they concentrated it and passed it.
By daylight and darkness the scales continued their work; and in the night a blue jay, another Elm Hostel tenant, was wetted by the gentle mist.
In the gloaming before sunrise, the jay roused for another day. Shaking its plumage scattered much of the sugary film, but some sugar had already dried onto the feathers. Daily bathing could not wash away all the dried sugar; some that remained became a growth medium.
A fungus known as “sooty mold” grows in the sugary film that collects on the tree’s bark. Though perfectly alive, the mold appears black as soot and often covers the bark of elms.
As a tenant of the Elm Hostel, the blue jay was constantly exposed to the sugar mist; and despite daily baths, the sugar had accumulated enough to allow a tiny bit of sooty mold to grow on the jay’s feathers.
No problem for the jay, the mold-bearing feathers would be sloughed at the bird’s next molt. The castoff feathers blotched with black would catch the eye of a birder who would study it without ever resolving whether the mold grew on the feather before or after it was molted.
Little stories though they be, the connection is profound.
When the elms came to Colorado, they created a life space for the insect, a life space for the fungus and a life space for the bird.
But the elms did not just come marching into Colorado like a horde of Tolkien’s ents. They came here through passion.
Common wild trees in the Midwest and the East, elms endeared themselves to people and became icons of yard and park, of curbside parkway and parking lot island. Unwilling to leave the elms behind, settlers determined to set roots in new landscapes brought the elms with them.
In the shade of a tree that is an old friend is a sense of home like no other.
So the settlers brought their friends the elms, and the elms brought their friends the wildlife. Blue jays and yellow-billed cuckoos; red bats and Virginia opossums; earthworms and moles. A raccoon or two. Some screech-owls.
Year by year and species by species, a whole new lifescape developed. And it’s still out there, going strong.
Write to Kevin J. Cook at the Coloradoan, 1300 Riverside Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80524.