The Gulo in Nature Newsletter

Last week I took some family members to one of my favorite outdoor nature-spots to give them a taste of Georgia Spring, and was treated to two gorgeous sightings that always signal that Spring is really picking up steam. The fact that these two often “arrive” together is no coincidence, as I’ll explain later, and their matching colors make them linked in multiple ways, so I’ve taken the liberty of making them a WotW “double-feature”!

The first of these, the striking bloom of a Coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) stuck out beautifully as a cluster of little scarlet tubes nestled in the still-bare shrubs of the forest understory. Surrounded by the softly green, rounded leaves of the vine on which they grew, they were a vibrant image in the midst of an otherwise sleepy early-Spring forest. One of the few native honeysuckles that is common in North America, corals’ charming flowers have some distinct characteristics that make rather incriminating evidence for their connection to this week’s other focal wildlife: their bright color, elongated shape, and lack of scent.

Those are all traits of hummingbird-pollinated flowers, since hummingbirds don’t have a particularly sharp sense of smell, but are visual animals capable of seeing colors like red (bees, for example, cannot!). Longer flowers also help the honeysuckle exclude less choosy (generalist) pollinators that would be less likely to transfer their pollen to another honeysuckle, since few species have a tongue or beak long enough to get to the nectar.

As if on cue, by the time I was done babbling excitedly about our showy honeysuckle, one of my companions pointed out a small, hunched shape nearby. A ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris), the only widespread hummingbird in Eastern North America, was resting on a bare branch above the shrubland canopy. The patch of metallic, raspberry-colored feathers at his throat (known as a gorget) looked black in the poor light of the morning, but as he turned to look across the path there was a flash of rich color. I always eagerly await the coming of the first hummingbirds, and felt a surge of excitement to see the first one of this year, especially as I prepare to put out a new hummingbird feeder.

Sure enough, the blooming of native honeysuckles (not to mention a couple of other hummingbird early-season favorites) is part of why these tiny birds, which migrate to Mexico and Central America during Winter, can return weeks before many garden flowers are providing necessary food. A lovely, color-coded example of how nature’s interdependencies can lead to domino-effects in the outdoors.

For those North American readers at higher latitudes, this wave of blooming petals and feathers should be headed your way soon, too. Please share your experiences using the Contact Page or social media if you get a chance!

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