This winter, right through the darkest weeks of December, you could find Scotch broom and tansy ragwort throwing out a few yellow flowers like test balloons. As of mid-January, we still have not had a real frost. According to the state climatologist, 2024 tied 2023 as the seventh warmest year on record statewide, at 1.1 degrees above average. December temperatures averaged 4 degrees above average. Precipitation for the year was average.
Spring on the Key Peninsula is a drawn-out season. Through the fits and starts of our oceanic weather, spring’s progression can be tracked by the blooming and leaf-out of our diverse wild plants.
You could argue that spring begins in early January, right during the coldest weather of the year, when great horned owls sing their love duets, and the first wildflowers appear.
Catkins and Hazelnuts
That first wildflower belongs to the beaked hazelnut. The display began early this year. On roadsides and in forest openings, where hazelnuts thrive, yellow tassels suddenly leap out of nondescript branches. They hang like ornaments and, like kelp in a current, move in sync with the wind.
Those yellow tassels, called catkins, are the plant’s male flowers. Hazelnut is monoecious, meaning it has male and female flowers on the same tree, though it cannot fertilize itself. The female flowers are fun to find. They look like tiny pink-red feather dusters.
Why bloom in midwinter, when pollinators are absent? Hazelnut is pollinated by wind.
Interestingly, when a female flower catches the pollen it needs, it holds it in waiting for months while the ovary develops. It finally fertilizes itself mid-spring.
The word “catkin” was coined in 1578 as a translation of the Dutch word “katteken,” meaning kitten, a description of a willow’s fuzzy flowers. Willows and hazelnuts both sport catkins, but they are not related: an example of evolution converging on an effective flower technology.
Beaked hazelnut is one of those plants that blurs the line between shrub and tree. They are usually multi-stemmed but can grow to 40 feet high. Before they bloom, there is something wizard-like, at least to me, about the way their dark bare branches lean and spread in the woods. Maybe it’s the small twigs that jut from their branches at just the angle you would hold a wand.
I love finding big old mossy ones in the deep woods. They might have dozens and dozens of stems. The fattest stems bend outward under the weight of their foliage until, after many years, they arc back to the ground, giving the plant an octopus shape and making it impossible to walk around. Like a perpetual flower unfolding, young vigorous stems grow into the airspace left by the older stems as they bend outward.
Given such perpetual vigor, it is easy to see why this plant responds well to coppicing and fire.
New genetic research on hazelnuts in British Columbia, particularly an isolated population in Gitxsan, Ts’msyen, and Nisga’a homelands, has revealed that Indigenous people selected and transplanted hazelnuts over great distances and tended them over time. These findings are a striking signature of the way Northwest tribes crafted the Pacific Northwest to hold abundant food.
In addition to the nuts — which were bartered far and wide, including to the Lewis and Clark expedition — the shoots were used to weave baskets, fish traps, and baby carriers.
Swarms of Kelp Crabs
I could have used a hazelnut stick the other night, out on a midnight low tide. Kelp crabs swarmed the shallows like bats in a cave. It was hard to find a place to step.
The northern kelp crab, scientific name Pugettia producta, is active at night. Spidery in figure, it has long legs and a notoriously tough, shield-shaped shell the size of your palm. It is smooth and dark yellow-brown or maroon, like the kelp and seaweed it eats.
I was there with Rachel Easton of Harbor WildWatch, seeing what we could find. In our headlamp beams, many of the kelp crabs were missing legs and claws. They stepped around each other stiffly. Their rostrums, the part of the shell that projects forward between the eyes, came to several points, reminding me of the husk that gives beaked hazelnut its name.
The northern kelp crab is found all over Puget Sound, especially in kelp and eelgrass beds and on pilings. It too has winter breeding tricks. The species name, producta, refers to its propensity to have young at any time of year, a unique trait among our crab faunae.
A female carries 61,000 eggs on average. She holds them for a month before they hatch. Crab larvae swim as shrimplike plankton before they settle in miniature adult form.
When kelp crabs reach a certain size, called the terminal molt, they no longer grow. And while most crab species can only mate when the female has just molted and her new shell is soft, kelp crabs mate any time, hard shells and all.
We found all kinds of life among the rocks and shell sand that night. Fat orange sea cucumbers, leather stars, mottled stars, shrimp in every color hue including one that was half red and half bright green, stubby rose anemones, pink coralline algae, a gumboot chiton, a shag rug sea slug, gunnels, a sculpin with orange fins, decorator crabs covered in tiny gardens of seaweed.
When I peeked into a horse clam shell, inside were two red rock crabs. No, Rachel explained, just one: it had just molted. The still-soft crab had nearly doubled in size. She had me open its shed exoskeleton — these castoff “molts” are what you find washed up at high tide — and inside was a most royal shade of purple.
Color, growth, new life. They’re out there, even in winter.
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