Wildlife Eating Mulberries

     It happens in mid-June every year in southeastern Pennsylvania; several kinds of birds, mammals and insects, and two species of reptiles, eat juicy mulberries from the trees and off the ground.  Mulberries, in their abundance, are a big food supply for those critters along hedgerows and woodland edges in farm country.
     Many birds of several species, usually a few kinds at once in mulberry trees, are entertaining to watch ingesting mulberries; the newly-developed, white ones, pink ones as they mature, and the deep-purple, fully-developed and juicy ones from the trees.  Causing most of the action, little groups of American robins, purple grackles and starlings fly in and out of the trees, shaking the twigs with their feeding, almost constantly, all day, every day, while the mulberries last.  Those birds eat the mulberries themselves, and feed them to their recently fledged young.    
     But several other species of birds, perhaps in lesser numbers, also consume mulberries in the trees, including cedar waxwings, Baltimore and orchard orioles, gray catbirds, northern mockingbirds and northern cardinals from neighboring woods and thickets, and red-winged blackbirds from nearby fields and meadows.  These types of birds have beauties in themselves, and they enhance the beauties and intrigues of the mulberry trees they are feeding in by their almost constant zipping in and out of the trees to get fruit.  These birds, too, feed a lot of those berries to their babies in their nests, and to recently fledged young.
     Gray squirrels eat mulberries during the day, but most mammals, including black bears, white-tailed deer, red foxes, gray foxes, coyotes, raccoons, striped skunks, opossums and a variety of rodents, feed on mulberries under the cover of darkness at night.  Sometimes one can spot the tracks of those mammals in mud under the trees during the day, which can be exciting finds.  Coons and possums climb into the trees to ingest mulberries, but the other mammals eat many of them off the ground.  Deer and bears, however, can reach high to get mulberries on lower limbs.
     A variety of invertebrates, including hornets, yellow jackets, millipedes, sow bugs, slugs, snails, at least a few types of flies and others, feed on bruised or decaying mulberries on the ground.  Some of those invertebrates become food for toads, skunks, a variety of small birds and other critters in a number oif food chains based on rotting mulberries.
     Eastern box turtles and wood turtles also eat mulberries fallen to the ground.  These two kinds of woodland turtles are omnivorous and take advantage of food supplies when and where they occur within their limited roaming areas.  These reptiles probably smell the decaying fruit from a bit of a distance, and make haste, for turtles, to get that fruit.
     Mulberry trees are scattered across the landscape by birds ingesting their berries, digesting the pulp, but passing some of the seeds in their droppings as they fly here and there over the countryside.
Some of those seeds sprout and become medium-sized trees.
     And once established, mulberry trees are hard to kill.  Wherever I lived in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, one or more mulberry trees were on the lawns, probably introduced there by birds passing through and passing seeds.  For many years I annually cut those mulberries down to the ground, but each year each one sent up new shoots.  I never did successfully eliminate any of them.  That probably can be done only by killing every root of each tree.    
     Mulberry trees are beneficial to several kinds of wildlife in the middle of June each year.  They are in North America to stay, and wildlife can be glad of it.  And the visits of wild critters help make mulberry trees interesting to us humans.