by Allison W. Bell
During these cold snowy days, I find it especially pleasant to be reminded of verdant mountain summers—by feathered friends. Here in western Massachusetts, flocks of dark-eyed juncos are common visitors to birdfeeders in winter. By late April, however, they will disperse to their breeding grounds in coniferous or mixed-coniferous forests in the U.S. and Canada. On the highest summits of New England and New York, hardy juncos are one of only a few species to nest in the alpine zone above treeline.
On their July 1902 hike, Hattie Freeman and Emma Cummings met them all along the Presidential Range. “Occasionally we paused to listen to some bird note,” Hattie wrote. “We knew the Swainson’s thrush, winter wren, blackpoll warbler, black-throated blue warbler, junco and 
Peabody birds.” Emma Cummings included all of these mountain species in her 1904 guide Baby Pathfinder to the Birds.
Schuyler Mathews, author of the 1904 Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music, observed juncos on Mt. Washington and described their song as a “metallic or glass-like tinkle.” Dr. Nancy G. Slack, my co-author for Field Guide to the New England Alpine Summits (2014) likens it to “a musical sewing machine.”
Watch video: Juncos at the feeder
In 1885, ornithologist Bradford Torrey spotted “the prettiest [junco’s] nest . . . beside the Crawford Bridle Path, on Mount Clinton. It was lined with hair-moss . . . and with four or five white, lilac-spotted eggs made so attractive a picture.”
At summer’s end, juncos reverse their migration. Florence Merriam, in Birds Through an Opera Glass (1889), welcomed the autumn juncos as “companies of little gray-robed monks and nuns, just emerging from the forests where they cloister during the summer months.” It’s an imaginative description—visually apt, but technically incorrect. Juncos might be reclusive, but they are not celibate. They spend May-July mating and raising their young.
I’ll admire my juncos while they brave this week’s polar-style weather. And I’ll look forward to catching up with them in the north woods this summer.
Balsam firs are native to the northeastern U. S., growing from Maine to Minnesota, and across eastern Canada. North Woods mountain hikers recognize elevation gain where hardwood forests give way to red spruce and fir stands at around 3,500 feet. Hattie Freeman noted this forest change on the trail to the Perch in July 1902.
These evergreen “boreal” forests are cool, wet, and fragrant. Balsam firs have oblong blisters on their trunks filled with aromatic resin, a concentrated perfume of their crushed needles. This wonderful smell welcomed overnight guests at J. R. Edmands’s camps on Mt. Adams, where balsam boughs were piled for bedding.
On major northeastern peaks, balsam firs gain dominance as trees grow shorter in the krummholz zone around 4,500 feet. High winds and cold temperatures here inhibit growth, forcing trees into tangled impenetrable thickets that early AMC hikers called “scrub.”
The shorter trees give a glimpse of their reproductive structures, usually far overhead in lower forests. Here, in June, upright female cones are forming mid-branch above clusters of pollen-producing male cones.
At treeline, balsam firs are reduced to dwarf-size, sometimes no more than inches tall, growing as prostrate mats. Any upright growth is killed off by winter ice and wind.
Krummholz trees grow VERY slowly in extreme mountain conditions. This cross-section of balsam fir from Mt. Washington shows over 110 annual growth rings in a trunk only 2.75 inches across.
Some balsam firs find sheltered spots above treeline to hunker down. Here at almost 6,000 feet on Mt. Washington, is a wind-pruned globe of balsam fir—the highest Christmas tree in the Northeast. Likely here when Hattie Freeman passed by in 1902, who knows how many New Year’s Eves it has celebrated?