The Whisper of Beech Trees
Further along the way, I heard the squeaky calls of Brown-headed Nuthatch, and the jidit-jidit of Ruby Crowned Kinglet. Two quiet Northern Flickers flushed up from a yard into the trees. Red-bellied Woodpeckers called their spring-time quuurrrr. And I passed another gathering of Goldfinches and Siskins in some treetops, mewing and calling zhreeeeeeee. With a much louder, richer, deeper mew, a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker flew to the trunk of a pecan tree and immediately began working its holes. Its crimson throat and crown glistened.
Two Field Sparrows flitted out of privet bushes in the same spot where I saw one a few days ago, scratching in the leaves there with White-throated Sparrows and Eastern Towhees.
Near the top of a hill in one heavily wooded area, the luminous coppery leaves of many young beech trees showed up particularly well among the bare limbs of the oaks, tulip poplars and other hardwoods and rustled in a light breeze. The beeches there are mostly young, scattered around a couple of homes there and deeper into the woods, where the land slopes down toward a creek. I don’t think I’d ever appreciated how many there were in this spot, and it looked like an abundance of riches to me, to have so many beech trees around.
In an eloquent column about beech trees in the Athens Banner-Herald only a couple of weeks ago (January 23), Holli Richey captured some of their partiular allure. “With snow still dotting the ground, and a light breeze in the air, I knew it was a perfect day to listen to the beech trees,” she wrote. “The American beech (Fagus grandifolia) is one of our most useful native trees. At the top of my list for its uses is the calming rustle the shivering, paper-thin, curled winter leaves make as the wind passes through the beech’s open and cascading branches.”