A Thanksgiving story to relish; everything you wanted to know about the cran(e)berry

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