By late October, most of the apples in well-tended orchards have been pressed into cider, baked into pies or stowed away for the long winter to come. But fruit on untended trees – relics of long-ago farms or sprouted from cores tossed aside by passing hikers – may still be around. Though these “wild” apples trace their origins to central Asia, they have become a favored food for many New England wildlife.
According to Tom Burford, fifth-generation apple grower and author of “Apples of North America,” the story of the apple begins in the mountains of Kazakhstan, where groves of truly wild apples can still be found. From there, apples traveled with traders along the Silk Road to Persia, Mesopotamia and southern Europe, eventually becoming established throughout continental Europe and the British Isles. In the early 1600s, European colonists introduced the storied fruit to North America, where it was grown primarily for cider. In New England, farm abandonment in the mid-1800s and the collapse of the cider industry due to Prohibition in 1920 left many orchards untended, an inadvertent offering to the wild.
Bark, buds, twigs, leaves, nectar, pollen, sap, seeds. Nothing goes to waste.
In May, apple blossoms buzz with activity, as both honey bees and wild bees forage on apple nectar and pollen. One study found 81 different native bee species in just 11 orchards near Ithaca, New York. For a heady experience, stand under an apple tree on a warm afternoon in early May and let the vibrations of thousands of tiny wingbeats transport you to the Kingdom of the Bees.
In early autumn, yellow-bellied sapsuckers shift their “sugaring” from maple and birch to oak and apple, drilling up to 20 holes a day in tidy rows. The aptly named woodpeckers feed on the sap that flows from these sapwells, along with any insects found on nearby bark.
When winter comes, grouse and deer will turn to apple buds and twigs for sustenance, and beavers favor apple bark in nearly every season.
This time of year, however, the fruit’s the thing. A few autumns ago, I found a pile of bear scat composed entirely of semi-digested apples at the edge of the field behind the Harris Center, with several dainty mouse scats perched on top. Prior to hibernation, black bears enter a period known as hyperphagia (“excessive eating”), gorging themselves for up to 20 hours and 15,000 to 20,000 calories a day. Wind-fallen apples make for a sweet treat, but in the bears’ haste to prepare for winter, proper digestion can take a back seat. In this case, the mice had come to finish what the bear had only just begun.
Deer, turkey, fox and coyote can also be found dining on dropped fruit, and coyotes will even climb trees in pursuit of apples clinging to high branches. In 2019, a video of a coyote delicately picking apples with its teeth while balancing near the top of a backyard tree in Ontario went viral, though it’s not the only time this behavior has been captured on camera.
Porcupines, too, have a penchant for pommes. Earlier this year, the Harris Center installed chicken wire around the base of one of the old apple trees in our meadow, in the hopes of dissuading the neighborhood quill pigs from damaging the aging tree. A few weeks after the wire went up, I watched with amusement – along with several out-of-town hikers, fresh off the trail, who’d never seen a porcupine before – as our resident porcupine deftly used the caging as a ladder to lift itself into the tree.
In “Naturally Curious,” Vermont naturalist Mary Holland notes that bountiful apple crops can increase salt-seeking behavior in porcupines, as apples are acidic and high acid intake can cause mammals to excrete sodium in their urine. As a result, in years when apples are abundant well into the fall – like this one – porcupines seek out extra sodium, sometimes finding it on car tires, plywood or sweat-soaked tool handles. To keep your rakes, shovels and wheelbarrows intact, be sure to stow them securely out of reach of your quilled – and impressively incisored – neighbors this fall and winter.
For smaller animals, including many birds, ornamental crabapples also take on importance in late fall, when other food sources are scarce. Every year, like clockwork, sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving a pileated woodpecker shows up to glean the bite-sized fruits on the crabapple tree in the yard of Harris Center Naturalist Emeritus Meade Cadot. Though pileateds are known as insect-lovers, their diet shifts quite a bit with the seasons: carpenter ants in winter, wood-boring beetle larvae in early spring, a variety of insects in summer and fruit in fall. Meade’s crabapple tree also hosts autumn flocks of American robins, cedar waxwings and from time to time wild turkeys, all there for the late-season fruit.
Wild apple trees often become established in clearings or field edges, and need full sun in order to bear fruit. They’re also vulnerable to girdling and entanglement by the invasive bittersweet vine. If there’s an old apple on your land, you can find out how best to care for it in University of Maine Cooperative Extension’s Bulletin No. 7126: “Wild Apple Trees for Wildlife,” or “Managing Grasslands, Shrublands and Young Forest Habitats for Wildlife: A Guide for the Northeast,” both available online at no charge.
Whether you steward your own apple trees or simply enjoy them on conserved land and in forgotten spaces, as I do, the gifts of wild apples are plenty, and relished by creatures great and small – one more thing to watch for in the glory that is autumn in New England.
Brett Amy Thelen is Science Director at the Harris Center for Conservation Education.