ShareThisOn the Rhode Island coast our family communed with the berry crop.
Alongside an old garden path, thousands of navy-blue fruit formed the foreground of Virginia creeper vine, morphing five-leaved foliage from green to mauve, purple to red.
Poison ivy, turning orange, red and yellow, extended greenish-white waxy fruit. Tiny light-blue berries covered red cedar saplings, while bayberry shrubs displayed aromatic, gray fruit.
Rose hips, suggestive of small orange tomatoes, thrust from rosa rugosa, some of which still flowered pink or white.
This was a good year for porcelain-berry, too. The voracious invasive plant formed two concave-shaped walls of vegetation, festooned with multihued fruit, ranging in color from pale lilac to green to a deep shiny blue.
Intertwined with the porcelain-berry was another non-native vine, called Sweet Autumn clematis. Its star-shaped white blossoms produced a delicate fragrance that concentrated in the thick vegetation of the narrow path.
Bees, flies and other insects swarmed around the flowers of clematis, rosa rugosa and goldenrod, which grew abundantly in sunnier stretches of the trail.
Several years ago, Brown University researchers showed that many insect-eating songbirds switched from insects to berries during the fall migration to fuel their journeys.
More recently, scientists at the University of Rhode Island suggested that some migratory birds chose dark fruits rich in antioxidants, which may help the migrants battle stress and inflammation over the long voyage south.
Overhead, there was much to marvel at, as well.
About 300 migrating tree and barn swallows swirled over the beach and dunes. Small and slender, with long wings and small bills, swallows eat flying insects, as well as berries.
Six of the swallows broke free and swept over the beach. From the dunes, a small raptor isolated one of the birds. Just a few inches larger than its prey, the hawk featured long, pointed wings and an unmarked gray back. It was a merlin, a falcon that snares birds on the wing.
With the merlin gaining, the swallow twisted right, then left. The merlin turned away, vanishing to the southwest.
The four of us also shared space with another migrant -- the monarch butterfly. Singly, and in loose groups of up to six insects, the monarchs flew over the vegetation, the beach and the water, some coming within an inch or two of the ocean.
The butterflies seemed to dance above the garden path like tiny floats parading past the seascape. In two hours, we counted more than 100 monarchs.
Another migrant was the dragonfly. About 60 large dragonflies hovered over the path and beach. The brownish-green insects sometimes formed semicircles or loose figure eights before separating into individuals that hung in the humid air. The insects looked almost as big as hummingbirds!
Some 300 feet above us, an osprey floated past. From its perch, we may have looked like specks -- simply some more of the coastal foliage rustling in the breeze.
Two adults and two children -- we were just other ingredients of the eco-system, of the vegetation, sand, sea, swallows and fellow creatures.
We felt, in fact, like part of something bigger. That could explain why we stood in awe, rejoicing in the light, and the warmth and the life around us, including the cornucopia of berries that would fuel migrating birds now, during the rest of fall and through the upcoming winter.
(E-mail Scott Turner, a Providence, R.I.-based nature writer, at scottturnerster(at)gmail.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The Providence Journal
