With the
Thanksgiving Day celebration knocking on the door, here’s an
opportunity to look at a couple of the iconic food stuffs many of us
will be – well, stuffing ourselves with a few more days.
Each is wildlife
related. And I’ll toss in a third one for free that’s not
entirely wildlife related, but it works for me.
The first
installment is the cranberry; the basis for that tart, red-colored
blob that many people pop out of a can without paying much heed.
Actually, that jellied mash of cranberry sauce – or the
burgundy-colored cranberry juice some people will drink on
Thanksgiving Day – are a highly processed fruit that hearkens back
to Native American culture.
And though some
people may assume that cranberry plants live in shallow water
impoundments that is not true. They grow in natural and man-made
bogs; acidic environments which are seasonally flooded to about thigh
deep. A mechanical harvester than cultivates the flooded plants (an
evergreen dwarf shrub, to be exact, but I digress), scooping out the
berries - which rise to the surface, owing to the fact that each
berry has a “bubble” of air that causes it to float. The berries
are then raked to an awaiting drain where they are eventually washed
and processed.
About 95 percent of
all cranberries are harvested this way. The remaining five percent
are picked dry; these are the special berries that you see being sold
whole in stores and are used in baking and personalized cooking. In
the case of my wife, Bev, that is how she makes a delightfully
tart-sweet cranberry-orange relish for Thanksgiving.
Oh, the wildlife
part. The name, “cranberry” is a shortened version of the German
“kraanberre.” If you detect the word association “craneberry,”
you are spot on. Up until fairly recently craneberry was what some
people called them, in fact.
There are two
possibilities for this naming, too. The first is pretty pedestrian in
a science sort of way. The plant’s flower, neck, stem, calyx, and
petals are said to resemble the curved neck, the head and the bill of
a crane. Boring, perhaps, but somewhat scientifically logical in
assigning a name.
I like the other,
lesser well known, possible christening. It appears that when the
Pilgrims began settling in Massachusetts they observed cranes – no
doubt, sandhill cranes – feasting in craneberry bogs. These people
thought the birds were eating the fruit, which the cranes were not.
Or at least not to a large extent. Cranes eat insects, snails,
amphibians and such high-fat/high-protein food stuffs as much as they
do waste grain and craneberries. Even more so.
Which is why you
often view cranes feasting throughout plowed fields; something you
can see each spring along the Platt River in Nebraska where cranes
gather by the tens of thousands to pick their the earth to pluck
whatever bugs with help replenish their fat reserves to help get them
to the breeding grounds in Arctic. To see and hear thousands upon
thousands of cranes lifting off from the shallow-water Platt River to
feed in fields is a life-memorable experience.
The same is
increasingly being observed here in Ohio as the sandhill crane
species is making a remarkable, on-its-own, recovery in the state.
And though Ohio does
have some craneberry bogs – notably the 12-acre Cranberry Bog State
Nature Preserve at Buckeye Lake in Licking County – there are no
commercial operations in the state. It is known, however, that Native
Americans living around that region did way back when harvest the
berries.
There you have it.
Maybe more than you really ever wanted to know about cranberries. Or
craneberries, if you want to start an interesting conversation at
your family’s Thanksgiving Day dinner table.
Next up: The turkey
– a Western Hemisphere native with a Middle East moniker...
With the
Thanksgiving Day celebration knocking on the door, here’s an
opportunity to look at a couple of the iconic food stuffs many of us
will be – well, stuffing ourselves with a few more days.
Each is wildlife
related. And I’ll toss in a third one for free that’s not
entirely wildlife related, but it works for me.
The first
installment is the cranberry; the basis for that tart, red-colored
blob that many people pop out of a can without paying much heed.
Actually, that jellied mash of cranberry sauce – or the
burgundy-colored cranberry juice some people will drink on
Thanksgiving Day – are a highly processed fruit that hearkens back
to Native American culture.
And though some
people may assume that cranberry plants live in shallow water
impoundments that is not true. They grow in natural and man-made
bogs; acidic environments which are seasonally flooded to about thigh
deep. A mechanical harvester than cultivates the flooded plants (an
evergreen dwarf shrub, to be exact, but I disgress), scooping out the
berries - which rise to the surface, owing to the fact that each
berry has a “bubble” of air that causes it to float. The berries
are then raked to an awaiting drain where they are eventually washed
and processed.
About 95 percent of
all cranberries are harvested this way. The remaining five percent
are picked dry; these are the special berries that you see being sold
whole in stores and are used in baking and personalized cooking. In
the case of my wife, Bev, that is how she makes a delightfully
tart-sweet cranberry-orange relish for Thanskgiving.
Oh, the wildlife
part. The name, “cranberry” is a shortened version of the German
“kraanberre.” If you detect the word association “craneberry,”
you are spot on. Up until fairly recently craneberry was what some
people called them, in fact.
There are two
possibilities for this naming, too. The first is pretty pedestrian in
a science sort of way. The plant’s flower, neck, stem, calyx, and
petals are said to resemble the curved neck, the head and the bill of
a crane. Boring, perhaps, but somewhat scientifically logical in
assigning a name.
I like the other,
lesser well known, possible christening. It appears that when the
Pilgrims began settling in Massachusetts they observed cranes – no
doubt, sandhill cranes – feasting in craneberry bogs. These people
thought the birds were eating the fruit, which the cranes were not.
Or at least not to a large extent. Cranes eat insects, snails,
amphibians and such high-fat/high-protein food stuffs as much as they
do waste grain and craneberries. Even more so.
Which is why you
often view cranes feasting throughout plowed fields; something you
can see each spring along the Platt River in Nebraska where cranes
gather by the tens of thousands to pick their the earth to pluck
whatever bugs with help replenish their fat reserves to help get them
to the breeding grounds in Arctic. To see and hear thousands upon
thousands of cranes lifting off from the shallow-water Platt River to
feed in fields is a life-memorable experience.
The same is
increasingly being observed here in Ohio as the sandhill crane
species is making a remarkable, on-its-own, recovery in the state.
And though Ohio does
have some craneberry bogs – notably the 12-acre Cranberry Bog State
Nature Preserve at Buckeye Lake in Licking County – there are no
commercial operations in the state. It is known, however, that Native
Americans living around that region did way back when harvest the
berries.
There you have it.
Maybe more than you really ever wanted to know about cranberries. Or
craneberries, if you want to start an interesting conversation at
your family’s Thanksgiving Day dinner table.
Next up: The turkey
– a Western Hemisphere native with a Middle East moniker...
- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn
JFrischk@Ameritech.net
