(Editors Note: George Ellison is on leave this week. But he says that his pawpaw trees have even more fruit on them this year than they did when he wrote this about them last year.)

Way Down Yonder in the Paw Paw Patch

Where, oh where, is dear little Nellie?

Where, oh where, is dear little Nellie?

Where, oh where, is dear little Nellie?

Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.

Come on, boys, let’s go find her.

Come on, boys, let’s go find her.

Come on, boys, let’s go find her.

Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.

Picking up pawpaws, puttin’ `em in your pocket.

Picking up pawpaws, puttin’ `em in your pocket.

Picking up pawpaws, puttin’ `em in your pocket.

Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.

Have you ever happened upon pawpaw growing in the wild? One fine spring day many years ago I was exploring a steep ridge above our house. As I was pulling myself up with the aid of overhanging saplings, I was suddenly face-to-face with a cluster of some of the most curious and lovely flowers I’ve even seen. Although my only previous exposure had been via picture books, I knew for sure that these were pawpaw flowers. I’ve traversed that ridge many times since looking for that pawpaw with no luck.

The small tree or shrub known as common pawpaw, American pawpaw, tall pawpaw, or wild banana tree (Asimina triloba), has been reported from numerous counties throughout Western North Carolina. It is of interest that it was first recorded by the Hernando De Soto expedition in 1540.

Found in rich soils at elevations up to about 2,500 feet, a pawpaw tree rarely exceeds 25 feet in height and is normally more like a shrub. A smaller species known as dwarf pawpaw (A. parviflora) grows primarily to the east and south of WNC.

From early April into early May, the plant displays distinctive purple-brown flowers that have two circles of three petals which are arranged one inside the other. The broad lustrous green leaves are frequently a foot in length, somewhat resembling those of an umbrella-leaf magnolia. The greenish-gray fruits (which turn yellow and then black with ripening) develop in late summer.

The pawpaw is the largest edible fruit native to America. Individual fruits weigh five to 16 ounces and are 3 to 6 inches in length. The larger sizes will appear plump, similar to the mango. The fruit usually has 10 to 14 seeds in two rows. These brownish to blackish seeds are shaped like lima beans. Pawpaw fruits often occur as clusters of up to nine individual fruits. When ripe they are soft and thin-skinned.

About eight years ago Elizabeth planted two pawpaws about 20 feet apart on our property. Pawpaw flowers are “perfect,” in that they have both male and female reproduction parts. But they are not self-pollinating because the female stigma matures and is no longer receptive when the male pollen is shed. Accordingly, they require cross-pollination from another unrelated pawpaw tree.

For several years, we had no pawpaw fruits at all. After about four years, we started harvesting several pawpaw fruits per season — just enough for a taste. This year we have pawpaws galore! Every morning for the past week, we’ve been eating pawpaw slices for breakfast.

The sweet pulp is custard-like with a strawberry-banana taste. You can cut a fruit in half, scoop out the flesh with a spoon, and then eat it like you would watermelon; that is, you simply spit out the seeds as you go. The flesh is also used to make pies and other desserts. It was once rated by a panel of connoisseurs as the sixth most delicious fruit in the world.

Container grown pawpaws obtained from commercial nurseries provide the best opportunity for success. It can also be propagated from seeds or seedlings (not root suckers). Be forewarned, however, that the root suckers and seedlings can form dense thickets if not periodically controlled.

The natural history of a region consists of the plants, animals, and landscapes we can see and explore any given day. But no full comprehension of any region can be had without coming to some understanding of its spiritual terrain. When we consider this aspect here in the Smokies region, we necessarily enter the realm of Cherokee sensibility.

There are various examples. My favorite is the uktena, a monstrous serpent, because it persists as an informing presence in Cherokee lore. When anthropologist James Mooney visited the Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in Western North Carolina during the late 1880s, he collected uktena data subsequently published as part of his classic study Myths of the Cherokee (1900). In the 1960s, Indian historians Jack and Anna Kilpatrick found that the Cherokees removed to Oklahoma in 1838 vividly retained in their collective memory stories of the serpent, which they called the uk’ten. To this day, in my experience, a conversation about them can be conducted with many traditional Cherokees.

According to Mooney’s informants, the uktena — born of envy and anger — was a representative of the Under World: the realm of darkness and decay. They were, he was advised, “as large around as a tree trunk, with horns on its head, a bright blazing crest like a diamond upon its forehead, and scales glittering like sparks of fire. It has rings or spots of color along its whole length and cannot be wounded except by shooting in the seventh spot from the head, because under this spot are its heart and life.”

Aside from the horns that resembled those of a buck deer, the most compelling feature of the uktena was the diamond-shaped crest on its forehead (the ulunsuti) that emitted flashes of light like a blazing star. Those encountering the serpent — especially little children — were doomed, moth-like, to become so dazzled by this light that they ran toward it and sure death.

But in Cherokee spiritual life there was always a balance between good and evil. The danger of the uktena was counterbalanced by the potential power of the burning stone. If an individual was brave enough to confront the serpent, he could evoke the Mythic Hawk, which represented the forces of the Upper World: peace and light. Together, they would be able to venture into the recesses of the Under World, slay the serpent, and bring the ulunsuti crystal back to the Middle World: the mundane realm of human existence.

University of Georgia anthropologist Charles Hudson has made these observations in an essay titled “Uktena: A Cherokee Anomalous Monster” published in the Journal of Cherokee Studies (Spring 1978):

“The Cherokees believed that their priests or medicine men were able to gaze into certain crystals and thereby foresee the future ... The Cherokees told James Mooney that according to their traditions only one man — Groundhog’s mother, a Shawnee medicine man and a great worker of wonders — was able to get possession of an ulunsunti. A great hunter among the eastern Cherokees still had possession of it in 1890, but he kept it hidden in a cave and would not show it to Mooney, but he did describe it in this manner: ‘It is like a large transparent crystal, nearly the shape of a cartridge bullet, with a blood-red streak running through the center from top to bottom. The owner keeps it wrapped in a whole deer skin, inside an earthen jar hidden away in a secret cave in the mountains.’

From this description Mooney concluded that the ulunsuti might be an unusual crystal of rutile quartz with metallic streaks running through it ... Of all the anomalous monsters of the old world, the one that comes closest to the uketna is the dragon, a monster which existed at one time in the belief of people in most parts of Europe and Asia ... The dragon had no ulunsuti on its forehead, but it did have a lump on its head, called by the Chinese chi’h muh, which enabled the dragon to fly, and it had a pearl of great value and power which dangled from its neck. Also, the traditional Chinese used ‘dragon bones,’ the fossilized bones of extinct animals, for all sorts of religious purposes ... We are reasonably sure that the Cherokees, and other American Indians, are descended from people who came from Siberia, across the Bering Strait land bridge at the close of the Pleistocene. Therefore it is probable that these ancestors of the American Indians categorized the universe in a way similar to that of the Asian people who were ancestors of the Chinese. It is possible, in fact, that the people who came across the land bridge 15,000 years ago believed in the existence of a dragon-like monster.”

According to ancient sources, uktenas lived in caves, gorges, or lonely passes in the high mountains. Such places were carefully designated as “where the uktena stays” from generation to generation. They resided on the margins of the Cherokee universe like dark shadows in a dream.

Such places were obviously touchstones for the collective imagination of the Cherokees from one generation to the next for hundreds of years. They were constant reminders of the angry and envious serpents in their lives and hearts. To ignore these reminders was to follow the pathway into chaos and darkness; to come to terms with them was the pathway into a bright future.

I enjoy leading natural history workshops, but I no longer derive much pleasure from herding people along a trail while naming things right and left. What continues to motivate me is helping participants learn to use specific source and identification materials (the birding CDs, Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide, The Fern Finder, etc.) so they will then have the skills to more fully explore the natural world on their own.

I must admit, however, that my favorite outings take place before scheduled workshops. I generally go out a day or two before the actual event to refresh myself regarding specific wildflowers, trees, shrubs, ferns, birds, etc., that might be encountered. I try to plan a route that will be varied in regard to habitats explored and safe in regard to potential parking areas or trail issues.

These pre-event outings give me time to immerse myself in the natural world without having to constantly respond to the query “What is that?” — which is, of course, exactly what I’m obligated (and paid) to do during a workshop. I have gone whole days scouting a trip without saying a single word.

Nevertheless, the only thing better than scouting by myself is when my wife, Elizabeth, is free and inclined to accompany me. We both enjoy the natural world. After nearly five decades of being together we communicate fairly well — both verbally and non-verbally. She doesn’t mind telling me when she thinks I’ve identified something incorrectly. We argue a lot. We laugh a lot. We get along.

Elizabeth is an artist. She “sees” the world somewhat differently from most of us. She is intuitive rather than analytical. She is also a human bloodhound. All I have to do is mention a rare plant or bird that I’d like to find and before long I’ll hear her say, “Why, there it is.” In this regard, she has some sort of sixth sense that’s hard to beat when you’re scouting a field trip.

Last Saturday, for instance, I had a “Wildflower and Fern Identification” workshop for the Smoky Mountain Field School. After starting out at the Sugarlands Visitor Center near Gatlinburg that morning, we finished up the day in the high elevation spruce-fir forests along the North Carolina-Tennessee state line. Along the way, we located and identified lots of plants — including the beautiful small purple-fringed orchid — using Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide.

At one of the last stops along the Clingmans Dome road, I told the group that one of the flowers we’d see there wouldn’t be in Newcomb’s because it’s so rare it is found only in a few high-elevation sites in the Great Smokies and no other place in the world.

So, we strolled into the nearby forest and, sure enough, there was a stand of Rugel’s ragwort (Rugelia nudicaulis), an inconspicuous plant in the Aster family that stands about 18 inches high and displays large heart-shaped basal leaves. The flower buds on this stand had not yet opened. In Wildflowers of the Smokies (1996), they are described as having “long, pointed bracts” surrounding the blossom, which forms “an urn from which the yellow or straw-colored disk flowers protrude.”

Because of a scouting trip Elizabeth and I had made Friday — during which we located Rugel’s ragwort for the first time — I’d known that the workshop group would be stopping to see the plant. This gave me a chance to conduct a little research the night before and uncover some information regarding the plant’s namesake that I was able to share with the group on Saturday.

In 1840, Ferdinand Rugel (1806-1879) came to the United States to collect biological specimens in the Southern Appalachians, though he supported himself as a pharmacist. He settled in Dandridge, Tenn., in 1842. After 1849 he moved to Knoxville, where he worked for a wholesale drug firm. His botanical companion, Samuel Botsford Buckley, described the super-eccentric Rugel as being “the best prepared and equipped for collecting and preserving specimens of any person” he had ever met.

According to Buckley, Rugel rode his horse Fox with “a large, square tin strapped to his shoulder and a straw hat tied beneath his chin.” One of their journeys into the Smokies region was uneventful until there was “a clattering of hoofs, and Fox dashed by, with Rugel crying ‘Whoa, Fox! Whoa, Fox!’ his hair streaming in the wind, with tin box and hat dashing up and down at every jump the horse made.” Buckley relocated Rugel a mile or so down the road at a steep hill where Fox had finally come to a stop.

For years, I had been reading about and looking for Rugel’s ragwort. On Friday, when Elizabeth and I were getting ready to scout out the area around the Newfound Gap parking area, I told her this was likely habitat for the plant and showed her a photo and the botanical description. We didn’t find Rugel’s ragwort at Newfound Gap but at our next stop in the high country, while I was examining some ferns, I heard her say, “Why, there it is.”

Sure enough, there it was — not five feet from where I was kneeling. Within 60 minutes of learning of a rare plant’s existence, she had tracked it down.

Is this going to be a bumper year for wild mushrooms? Maybe so, if the rainfall we have been experiencing in recent weeks continues to any significant extent into late summer and fall.

My wife, Elizabeth, and our youngest daughter, Quintin, went on a mushroom foray in Swain County this past Sunday. It was a Father’s Day event of sorts. I’m not sure how many fathers got to go (or wanted to go) mushrooming as a gift, but I did. And I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

It’s still very early in the mushroom season, which will peak from mid-August into early November. But we found mushrooms. One woodland area yielded perhaps 25 beautiful “Lactarius volemus” (one of various species in the “Lactarius” genus, all of which exude a white fluid when cut) that we call “milkys.” These are choice edibles.

Back in the late 1980s, Elizabeth and I took a Smoky Mountain Field School course conducted by Ron Peterson, then the mycologist at the University of Tennessee. This gave us the rudimentary skills required to make accurate identifications. There are about 15 species that we now confidently harvest for the table.

Anyone interested in the natural history of this region should be aware of the Smoky Mountain Field School, which is administered by the University Outreach & Continuing Education Department of the University of Tennessee. SMFS offers courses (usually one-day Saturday outings from late March into early November) on every natural history topic one could think of: orienteering, photography, edible and medicinal plants, wildflower and fern identification, fly fishing, salamanders, mosses and liverworts, geology, elk, bears, nature sketching, stream life, and much more.

A SMFS program listing is available online at: www.outreach.utk.edu/smoky. Or call 865.974.0150 to request a printed catalog.

S. Coleman McCleneghan will be instructing two courses this summer that she has designed for beginners interested in learning to identify “Edible and Poisonous Fungi.” One will be taught in the Great Smoky Mountains Nation Park on Saturday, Aug. 29, 9-4 p.m.; the other at Roan Mountain on Saturday, Oct. 3, 9-4 p.m. The fee is $49 per participant. Consult the sources cited above for additional information.

Elizabeth and I never consider ingesting any species that’s in a genus where poisonous species are found. Misidentifying a bird or a wildflower isn’t a big deal, but misidentifying a mushroom that you’re going to eat can be a really big deal.

When I was growing up in piedmont Virginia, my folks never made reference to “mushrooms”; instead, they invariably called them “toadstools” — a negative label that implied they were suspect and not to be fooled with any more than true toads were to be handled because they supposedly gave you warts.

But all of the earliest European settlers in North America (including my ancestors) had come to this continent with a long-standing tradition of harvesting and ingesting mushrooms. And they immediately began harvesting and ingesting North American species that resembled the ones they had been fond of in the Old World. Trouble was that not a few of these proved to be deadly “look-a-likes.”

That situation pretty much cured most of our early ancestors from fooling around with “toadstools.” On the west coasts of the United States and Canada, this “look-a-like” scenario continues to be replayed into this century as modern immigrants from Asia make deadly mistakes when they harvest and ingest species that closely resemble ones that had been choice edibles in their homelands.

Interesting from a cultural viewpoint is the fact that the Native American peoples of both North and South America brought with them to the New World a great tradition of harvesting and ingesting mushrooms which has been continued to this day. One supposes that they have done so by trial and error; that is, the Native Americans no doubt made deadly identification errors, as did the Europeans, but they apparently recorded those errors in their oral traditions and tended not to repeat them.

If you took a basketful of recently harvested mushrooms into a barbershop in Cherokee, a lively discussion as to their identification and where they were found would commence. The Cherokees have their own names for each species and they often know the exact type of habitat in which each was harvested.

“Armillariella mella” is known to the Cherokees as “slicks” and to whites as the “honey” mushroom. The Cherokees call them “slicks” because they “just slide right down your throat.” This is true. Once the cap of a “slick” is heated a little, it becomes viscous, like an oyster, and slides right down, one after the other.

The Cherokees have also traditionally collected “milkys,” “wishys” (apparently the species known to whites as “hen of the woods”), and others.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Elevations above 4,000 feet in the Blue Ridge Province can be thought of as a peninsula of northern terrain extending into the southeastern United States, where typical flora and fauna of northeastern and southeastern North America intermingle.

Many plants and animals find their southernmost range extensions in the Blue Ridge, which extends from southern Pennsylvania (just south of Harrisburg) into north Georgia (just north of Atlanta), inclusive of portions of central Maryland, western Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and northwestern South Carolina. These include Blue Ridge St. John’s-wort, blue-bead lily, pink-shell azalea, witch-hobble, rosebay and purple rhododendron, mountain wood fern, narrow beech fern, mountain ash, table mountain pine, mountain and striped maples, fire cherry, Fraser magnolia, red spruce, northern flying squirrel, least weasel, woodland jumping mouse, rock vole, New England cottontail, bog turtle, brook trout, muskellunge, saw-whet owl, ruffed grouse, common raven, and numerous salamander species.

Not a few of these high-elevation species are endemic to the province, being found no place else in the world. Some are only encountered in a few counties and no place else in the world. But most are “northerners” who have discovered there is suitable habitat down south.

No wildflower outing into the upper elevations of the mountains would be complete without an observation of Canada mayflower (Maianthemum canadense). Rather inconspicuous in regard to individual plants, this member of the Lily Family often forms dense colonies that carpet the forest floor.

It flourishes in the high-elevation, cool, moist, spruce-fir region above 6,000 feet, as well as, less frequently, in northern hardwood forests between 6,000 and 4,000 feet. From May into June the plant displays dense clusters of small, white flowers described by botanist Peter White in Wildflowers of the Smokies (1996) as “having a starburst appearance.”

White also noted that Canada mayflower “is a rather unusual member of the Lily Family in that the flower parts are in twos and fours instead of the usual threes and sixes.” Flowering colonies are quite fragrant, producing a sweetish odor that can be detected along a high trail during the moist morning hours.

The spreading, underground stems of the plant produce erect stems from two to eight inches tall that are zigzagged in appearance. Each stem usually has two heart-shaped shiny leaves with lobed bases that clasp the stem. Those producing but one leaf will not bear flowers.

The generic designation Maianthemum means May-flower, while the species tag canadense is also appropriate in that the plant is primarily northern in distribution, ranging throughout Canada, the northeastern United States, and southward in the mountains.

A good place to look for Canada mayflower is the picnic area at the Balsam Mountain Campground in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This location in the park is accessed via a spur road off the Blue Ridge Parkway above Cherokee. Also look for a dense stand at the trailhead adjacent to the Bear Pen Gap parking area alongside the Blue Ridge Parkway at milepost 427.6.

Any place that you encounter this glistening little “northern” groundcover will be a fine place to be.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Spiders are one of the most interesting — and sometimes disconcerting — critters to observe. Especially fascinating, to me, are the various webs they create to capture prey and provide themselves with protection.

Spiders are often confused with insects, which are related to crabs and lobsters and have a skeleton of sorts on the outside of their bodies. Unlike insects — which normally have three distinct body parts (head, thorax, and abdomen) and six legs — spiders have only two body parts and four pairs of legs.

Spiders live mostly on insects, which they subdue with poisonous fangs. Two leg-like structures behind the fangs are often held out like antennae. These probably serve as sense organs. Unlike insects, spiders have several simple eyes (sometimes as many as eight) rather than compound eyes.

The success of spiders as a group can be attributed to their ingenious use of silk, which is made as a viscous plastic in special glands located in the lower abdomen. The liquid silk is gathered in nipple-like organs called spinnerets. It solidifies when drawn through the small spigots on the spinnerets — a process similar to that used in the production of synthetic fibers. Authorities maintain that spider silk is actually stronger than steel of comparable thickness!

From this elastic “steel” spiders weave complex webs that appear in almost every design imaginable. The most complex spider webs are created by the garden species known as orb weavers. These consist of a series of radiating lines that support a spiral thread covered with highly sticky droplets, which attract and ensnare insects.

Every few days the orb weaver creates a new spiral thread so as to keep it fresh and sticky. While waiting for insects to come along, the spider resides in a silken retreat of rolled up leaves off to the side of the web. Vibrations along a special silk line leading from this retreat to the sticky spiral thread let the orb weaver know that dinner’s ready.

In the early morning after a heavy dew, beads of moisture collect on the spider webs constructed in grassy meadows, making them easy to spot. After the sun dries the dew later in the morning, the webs are still there, of course, but are much harder to locate.

Many of these meadowland webs are constructed by sheetweb weavers, which are spiders that usually have a pattern on the abdomen. Take a closer look at these glistening structures and you’ll observe that they’re shaped like domes or bowls. Two of the most interesting of the sheetweb weavers found in the eastern United States are the ones known as the hammock spider and the bowl-and-doily spider.

Hammock spiders construct a web shaped like a hammock. The spider stays concealed in a far corner of his creation until he nets an insect. Leaves that fall into the web are sometimes used as hideouts as well.

The bowl-and-doily spider constructs a shallow silken bowl about six inches across that sits directly upon a doily-like flat maze of threads. The bowl is clearly designed to trap insects. When they fall into the bowl, the spider bites them from below and wraps up their bodies in the silk for safekeeping. The purpose of the doily is less certain, but it perhaps serves to protect the spider from attack from below by predators.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Belted kingfishers are one of my favorite birds. A pair fishes along the small creek on our property during the breeding season. In winter they move downstream to the Tuckasegee River, although the male will make infrequent appearances from mid-November into March, probably to maintain control of his hunting territory. Each spring they return for good, raising a ruckus as they fly over our cove with rattling calls that are a part of their mating ritual.

With most bird species, the male is usually the more conspicuous. The female kingfisher is an exception, however, having a chestnut breast band in addition to the gray one displayed by the male. Because she broods her young deep in the ground, the female's maternal duties don't make her an easy target for predators. She has no real need for the sort of subdued protective coloration characteristic of female cardinals, towhees, and countless other species. Her decorative breast band makes her one of the few female birds in the world with plumage more colorful than her mate’s.

If you have kingfishers that are active in your vicinity from March into early summer, look for their nesting dens. Situated in a steep bank, the entrance hole is about the size of a softball. If it’s being used, there will be two grooves at the base of the hole where the birds’ feet drag as they plunge headfirst, in full flight, into the opening. The tunnel leading to the nesting cavity may be from three to 15 feet in length. Kingfishers have toes that are fused together, thereby helping them excavate more efficiently. Obviously designed to prevent access by predators, these nesting dens can be located some distance from water, often in roadway cutbanks or where there has been excavation around a building site.

Ornithologists have determined that an adult-sized bird consumes about 10 fish, each about four inches long, per day. A pair of kingfishers with nearly-grown young would have to catch about 90 fish per day to feed their offspring and themselves. That’s a lot of fish. During inclement weather, the number of fish caught is drastically reduced because of murky water. Crayfish are used as a substitute food; nevertheless, nestlings often starve to death during such periods.

Once the kingfishers are fledged, their parents teach them to fish by dropping dead fish into the water for retrieval. After 10 or so days of this sort of instruction, they are expected to catch fish on their own and are driven from the parental territory.

It’s not surprising that such a conspicuous bird would have a place in Cherokee bird lore. They composed stories that accounted for the kingfisher’s fishing tactics and incorporated the bird into their medicinal ceremonies.

When anthropologist James Mooney was collecting Cherokee lore here in Western North Carolina during the 1880s, he recorded two accounts of how the kingfisher (“jatla” in Cherokee) got its bill. Some of the old men told him the animals decided to give the bird a better bill because it was so poorly equipped to make its living as a water bird: “So they made him a fish-gig and fastened it on in front of his mouth.”

A second version Mooney recorded was that the bill was a gift from the benevolent Little People, the Cherokee equivalent of Irish leprechauns. They had observed a kingfisher using a spear-shaped fish as a lance to kill a blacksnake that was preying upon a bird’s nest. So they rewarded him his own spear-shaped bill.

This outsized bill accounts for the kingfisher’s success as a fisherman. One of the prettiest sights in the bird world is that of a kingfisher hovering over the riffles in a small stream before plunging headfirst underwater after its prey. Its success rate is phenomenal. Before going fishing, the Cherokees evoked the kingfisher in sacred formulas (chants and songs) that would hopefully insure equal success.

Because it was so adept at penetration in regard to excavating its nesting tunnels and fishing below the water’s surface, the Cherokee medicine men also evoked the kingfisher in medicinal formulas that were a part of the healing ceremonies used to cure internal diseases. They wanted their medicines derived from plant materials to penetrate their patients’ bodies deftly, like a kingfisher plunging into its burrow or diving under water. And they wanted to extract the diseases with dispatch, like a kingfisher emerging from the water with its prey firmly clamped in its bill.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

In the opaque early-morning light outside our bedroom windows, the birds that reside in our woods — or do we reside in their woods? — commence warming up for the day with tentative calls and whistles. The male cardinal seems to take the lead most mornings. Before long, however, the patterns arrange themselves into a tapestry of music.

Throughout the year male and female birds of the same species use various call notes to stay in contact with one another or as signals of alarm. For instance, male and female eastern towhees whistle a call that sounds like “tow-hee.” Therefore the common name.

During the breeding season, the male of the species makes the vocalization we recognize as song in order to establish a breeding territory, attract a female, and warn other males of the same or competing species out of that territory.

The male towhee’s song sounds for all the world like “drink-your-tea.” If you learn the phrases associated with specific calls and songs (“mnemonics” or memory devices), you will be able to identify birds readily whether you actually see them or not.

Some male birds can really sing. Rose-breasted grosbeaks sound like robins that have had music lessons. (Scarlet tanagers, on the other hand, sound like robins with a sore throat.) In my opinion, winter wrens emit the most sensational bird vocalization in the southern mountains: a musical series of bubbling warbles and trills that may last for five seconds or more.

There are several bird songs that seem to mystify people. You can hear their songs on a regular basis but never seem to locate the birds. I am invariably queried about these “mystery” songs each year. Two of the most common “mystery” birds of the southern mountains are the yellow-billed cuckoo and the ovenbird.

The yellow-billed cuckoo is a bird that is often heard but seldom seen. Along with the Swainson’s warbler, it is one of the most furtive birds that breeds in Western North Carolina. The cuckoo is known to farmers as the “rain crow” because its hollow, low-pitched “kowp, kowp, kwop, kwop” vocalizations are often sounded just before a summer thunderstorm.

If you must see a yellow-billed cuckoo, sit down near a black cherry tree that contains tent caterpillar nests and watch for movement. You may well have to sit there for a good while — bring your lunch — but you may be rewarded with a fleeting glimpse of the bird described as “a wandering voiced.”

The ovenbird resembles a thrush but is actually a warbler with an orange crown. It nests on the ground in an oven-shaped nest. All day long you can hear their rising “teach-teach-teach” vocalizations without ever seeing the bird except, at best, as a flitting shadow.

Fred Alsop notes in his Birds of the Smokies (1991) that ovenbirds sometimes create a “vocal domino pattern,” when “the singing of one territorial ovenbird often stimulates the adjacent territory holder to proclaim his presence, which induces a third male to announce that he is still on station, which may cause other males to follow suit or hand the challenge back to the original singer.”

There are many CD and cassette guides to bird calls and songs. Although I don’t recommend the two-volume “Stokes Field Guide to Birds” (1996) by Donald and Lillian Stokes as an everyday field guide, I do recommend “Stokes Field Guide to Bird Songs” (Time-Warner Audio Books, 1997) by Lang Elliott with Donald and Lillian Stokes. This 3-CD boxed set provides precise call and song recordings of 372 species. The 64-page band location booklet that comes with the set also provides one of the best listing of the “mnemonic” phrases used to recognize bird vocalizations that I am aware of.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

For some years now — when walking the woodlands around ancient Cherokee settlements — I have been on the lookout for an evergreen holly species that’s not native to Western North Carolina or the southern mountains. I haven’t yet encountered this particular holly and would very much appreciate hearing from anyone who has.

What I’ve been looking for is yaupon (Ilex vomitoria). This species of holly is common in coastal areas and uncommon in isolated spots in the piedmont. It is an evergreen, much-branched shrub or small tree that can be from six- to 20-feet tall with a diameter of about six inches. The elliptical, leathery, round-toothed leaves are about an inch and a half long. The red (rarely yellow) clusters of berries appear from September into November on female trees. As with other holly species, male and female flowers are borne on separate plants.

All of the Southeastern Indian tribes utilized the dried twigs and leaves of yaupon to make a brew thought to be a purifying agent. As the scientific name of the species indicates, one of the ways it “purified” was by inducing vomiting.

As early as 1573, the Spanish naval officer Pedro Menendez made peace with a group of Indians living where yaupon was not available by sending one of his men to them with an offering of the plant. They considered it to be “the greatest gift that can be made to them.”

Nancy J. Turner and Adam F. Szczawinski note in Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms of North America (Portland, Oregon: Timber Press, 1991) that “yaupon can be made into a mild tea, but if drunk in a concentrated brew can cause hallucinations and vomiting. It was used by southerners as a substitute for coffee and tea during the American Civil War.”

According to Charles Hudson’s account in The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976), the beverage was also thought to generally cleanse the soul, serve as a social bonding agent, and be the ultimate expression of hospitality.

“In their own language, the Indians called the brew ‘white drink’ because white symbolizes purity, happiness, social harmony, and so on, but the Europeans called it ‘black drink’ because of its color,” observed Hudson. “To make black drink, the Indians first dried the leaves and twigs and put them in an earthen container and parched them over a fire to a dark-brown color. This roasting made the caffeine more soluble; coffee beans are roasted for the same reason. They placed the roasted leaves and twigs in water and boiled it until it was a dark-brown liquid. The drink then was poured through a strainer and into vessels to cool. As soon as it could be poured over one’s finger without scalding, it was ready to be consumed. Drinking it hot heightened its effect: caffeine is thirty times more soluble in boiling water than at room temperature ...The Indians sometimes used it as an emetic. On these occasions they would drink it in large quantities, and in a quarter to half an hour they would vomit. Sometimes they would hold their arms across their chests and expel the contents of their stomachs six or eight feet ... In any case, the emetic effect was more the exception than the rule. The Indians would often sit in council and drink black drink for hours at a time with no marked physical reactions.

“The physiological effects of black drink are mainly those of massive doses of caffeine (which) stimulates the central nervous system, exciting it at all levels. In fact, caffeine is the only true cortical stimulant known to modern medicine. It enables a person to have more rapid and clearer flow of thought, makes him capable of more sustained intellectual effort, and sharpens his reaction time. It also increases his capacity for muscular work and lessens fatigue. Moreover, some evidence suggests that large doses of caffeine speed up blood clotting .... These effects from large quantities of black drink could have been important and even decisive factors in activities such as the ball game (stickball) or warfare.

“But the Southeastern Indians drank black drink for ideological reasons as well as practical reasons. Meetings of the councils of chiefdoms were preceded both by drinking black drink and by smoking tobacco .... Two men came in through the door, each with a very large conch shell full of black drink. They walked with slow, measured steps and sang in a low voice. They stopped when they were within six or eight paces of the miko (chief) and members of the white clans sitting to his right, and they placed the conch shells on little tables. They then picked them up again and, bowing low, advanced toward the miko. The conch shell was then handed to the miko; the servants solemnly sang in sustained syllables, ‘Ya-ha-la,’ while the miko held the shell to his lips. After the miko was finished drinking, everybody else in the town house drank.”

Hudson also noted that Indian tribes in the interior portion of the continent where yaupon was not native “transplanted” the shrub “so that it would be close at hand.” Cherokee use of yaupon in “black drink” ceremonies has been well documented.

In his Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, The extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, first published in 1791, the Pennsylvania botanist William Bartram was the first non-Indian to note that the Cherokees cultivated the plant here in WNC and doubtless elsewhere within their mountain homeland.

In May of 1775, Bartram was traveling up the Little Tennessee River north of present-day Franklin. He laid over for two days at Cowe, a village situated at or near present-day Burningtown.

“Early in the morning,” Bartram recorded, “I set off attended by my worthy friend Mr. Gallahan, who obligingly accompanied me near fifteen miles, we passed through the Jore village, which is pleasingly situated in a little vale on the side of the mountain, a pretty rivulet or creek winds about through the vale, just under the village; here I observed a little vale of the Casine yaupon .... the Indians call it the beloved tree, and are very careful to keep them pruned and cultivated, they drink a very strong infusion of the leaves, buds, and tender branches of this plant, which is so celebrated, indeed venerated by the Creeks, and all the Southern maritime nations of Indians ....”

Frances Harper, in an annotated edition of Bartrams Travels (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958) traced the botanist’s route through WNC and concluded that his “course lay up the valley of Iolta Creek. The ‘Jore village’ may have been ... on the divide between Iotla and Burningtown creeks .... The yaupon was here far inland from its natural range, and it must have been introduced by the Cherokees. It is very doubtful if it can have survived in that spot to the present day without the care of Indians.”

Well, maybe so — but then again, some fine day I might just locate a stand of yaupon naturalized somewhere in a sheltered spot up in the Big Cove community on the Qualla Boundary or in a far valley of the Nantahalas or Snowbirds. If so, it will mark the spot to which an ancient Cherokee medicine man had transplanted the plant for ceremonial use.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Fiddleheads are emerging from the leaf litter in our forests. Almost everyone, even those not especially interested in plants, has heard of fiddleheads and knows that they’re supposedly edible. Whenever I teach a plant identification workshop for the Smoky Mountain Field School or the North Carolina Arboretum or elsewhere, someone inevitably brings up the topic.

When leading field trips, my first response to fiddlehead queries is the obvious one. I point out that fiddleheads aren’t a species of fern but a growth form. Most fern species — to a greater or lesser degree — display the characteristic fiddlehead shape when they arise from the plant’s underground rhizomes. The “fern leaf” differs from the “true leaf” of the flowering plants in its vernation, or manner of expanding from the bud. In the ferns, vernation is circinate; that is, the leaf unrolls from the tip, with the appearance of a fiddlehead, rather than expanding from a folded condition.

This unfurling strategy helps the immature frond make its way upward through the soil and leaf litter. It also protects the developing leaflets (pinna) that will comprise the leafy portion of the mature frond. The first fronds to appear in a new season’s growth are purely vegetative; fronds unfurling later bear the spore capsules (sporangia).

The technical name for a fiddlehead is crozier (also spelled crosier). This is derived from the crooked end of a bishop’s staff, which is sometimes referred to as a pastoral staff. Such a staff has a curved top symbolic of the Good Shepherd and is carried by bishops of the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and some European Lutheran churches and by abbots and abbesses as an insignia of their ecclesiastical office and, in former times, of temporal power.

In addition to being highly functional, the emerging fiddleheads of some fern species are quite beautiful. Those of cinnamon fern (Osmundia cinnamomea) are a pale lime green and can stand a two feet or more high before unfurling. Species in the wood fern group (Dryopteris species) often display wooly greenish-brown fiddleheads.

But now we get to the heart of the matter. When most people bring up fiddleheads, they do so because they’ve heard they’re edible. They want to know which ones can be harvested for consumption. My answer is that few of the ferns in the southeastern United States where I live and work are edible. And the one that’s said be particularly tasty is also thought to be dangerous.

Bracken (Pteridium aquilinum) is distributed world wide, being commonly found along roadsides and in disturbed areas with poor soil. They display exquisite silvery-gray fiddleheads shaped like an eagle’s claw. My wife and I have never eaten them, but they are reputed to be delicious. I doubt that light consumption of boiled bracken fiddleheads would be harmful to anyone; nevertheless, scientific research indicates the plant contains a number of toxic substances that readily kill livestock and might cause stomach cancers in human populations (as in Japan and China) that eat substantial amounts of the rootstock or fiddleheads.

Unfortunately for us, the North American fern species bearing fiddleheads that’s reputed to be the most delicious and absolutely safe to eat doesn’t grow wild in our region. That’s the ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris). Its distribution range has been described as Alaska to Newfoundland, south to British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia in North American; Scandinavia, Central Europe, Russia, and Asia; with significant naturalization in Ireland and Great Britain.

This species is described as displaying emerald-green fiddleheads and, when mature, having clumping leaflets (somewhat like cinnamon fern) that taper all the way down to ground level. In this latter regard it resembles the well-known New York fern (Thelypteris noveboracensis), which is common throughout eastern North America as far south as Georgia. Although edible, I can attest that New York fern is not tasty, unless you like boiled cardboard.

The solution to the fiddlehead dilemma for persons living outside of the ostrich fern distribution area might be relatively simple. Ostrich fern is readily available from nursery sources listed on the Internet. It’s advertised as establishing “vigorous” stands rather quickly in damp, partially shaded situations. One Internet source that I located offers a “Pkg. of 2 - $5.75.”

Why not purchase, say, 8 plants from a reputable grower (i.e., one not harvesting them in the wild) and propagate them for home consumption (as with asparagus) once a stand is established? My wife and I have decided to do just that. We would appreciate hearing from anyone who has experience growing ostrich fern for consumption outside of its natural range.

There is an informative Internet site devoted to fiddleheads at, you guessed it, www.fiddle-heads.com.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..