Black Birches and Chestnut Oaks

     Black birch trees and chestnut oak trees are common associates of each other on wooded, rock-strewn mountain slopes and hill tops in the eastern United States from southern Maine to Georgia and Alabama, including here in Pennsylvania.  Together, and with red oaks, sugar maples and other tree species, they create a tree community, a forest of their own making. 
     Black birches and chestnut oaks are both medium-sized trees and well-named.  The birches are also called sweet birch because of the wonderful wintergreen odor and taste of their twigs and bark.  And the oaks are known as rock oaks because of the rocky soil they grow from. 
     These tree species, like all vegetation, are valuable to the environment they live in.  The roots of both species help hold the soil down on their mountaintop strongholds.  Their leaves provide oxygen to the atmosphere and their dead and fallen leaves and limbs help enrich the soil of the forest floor.  And their dead and toppled logs provide shelter for red-backed and slimy salamanders, white-footed mice, a variety of invertebrates, fungi and moss.  
     Black birches have dark bark, which names them in part, simple leaves with tiny "teeth" on their margins and catkins in spring.  Their foliage turns yellow in death, adding to the beauty of colored leaves in forests in fall.  Their twigs are pleasant to chew and birch beer is made from fermented sap that is collected early in spring.  Birch sap can also be boiled down to syrup and sugar, if they are desired.  But it takes up to 80 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.
     And black birch trees are also valuable to wildlife.   White-tailed deer, snowshoe hares, porcupines and white-footed mice browse their twigs and buds in winter.  Ruffed grouse eat their buds in winter.  And the tiny, wind-blown seeds of this birch species are consumed by mice and small, seed-eating birds, including American goldfinches, pine siskins, purple finches, white-throated sparrows and dark-eyed juncos during that harshest of seasons.
     Chestnut oaks have rough, dark bark that also has long, irregular, V-shaped ridges and deep furrows.  I've noticed that many of them have forked near the ground, making two main trunks on each tree.  Chestnut oaks also have large, simple leaves with wavy margins, like chestnut leaves, that are not lobed like typical oak leaves, hence their common name.  And they produce an abundance of large, warm-brown acorns that feed a host of wildlife on wooded mountains.  Black bears, white-tailed deer, rodents, wild turkeys and other creatures consume lots of acorns from this oak tree.
     Black birches and chestnut oaks form tree communities on rocky, wooded slopes in the eastern United States.  There they are valuable to their habitat and wildlife in that habitat.  And they have values to us.