Monday, January 1, 2024

juniper berries


It's too early yet to say if it is, officially speaking, a hard winter or not - but since we've been here, it's only been in the 40s during the day, and invariably well below freezing at night.  So it's great to see what a good year it is for bird food - at least, for those birds that eat juniper berries, like bluebirds and blue jays and robins and grosbeaks and - well, lots and lots of birds like them.  Happily, there seems to be a bumper crop of them this year.

The strange thing about blueberries is that they aren't actually berries, but are a gabulus - or I suppose one would say that they are gabulae - that is, fruit-lookalike coverings to the tips of cones on female juniper trees.  One can, of course, use them to flavor gin, and they have a long-standing reputation as an abortificant (don't tell the Republicans, or they'll be chopping down junipers all over the Southwest) and apparently were once used - how effectively, I don't know - as birth control.  


 

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