COLUMN: It’s important not to go berry picking

A walk on the trail these days will likely bring you to at least one eye-catching display of summer berries, whether it’s blueberries, red raspberries, blackcaps or foxgloves.

The abundance of spring flowers, plus the work of millions of pollinators, has now resulted in a harvest of delicious fruit.

While members of the raspberry clan are fairly easy to recognize, be careful that the “blue berry” you see is actually a blueberry; a few of our wildflowers—blue bead lily and blue cohosh—also have blue berries, but they’re best left out of your diet. The true blueberry is a shrub and is usually found growing on the sunny rock lands of Muskoka.

Now that I’m on the topic of wild edibles, I have to throw in my grumpy anti-forage message. Admittedly, I love a sweet trailside nibble as much as the next hiker—a few red raspberries or a handful of blueberries add so much to the memory of a great outdoors experience. But nowadays there needs to be an awareness of the potential negative effects of ‘surf as you go’.

For several decades, we lived by the golden rule of berry picking: take only a third, leaving the rest of the fruit for use by wildlife and plant propagation. I recently had my eyes opened to the reality of foraging in these modern times.

For starters, you’re not alone on the trail… there could be dozens, even hundreds, of other trail walkers passing through in a week. I take a third of what I find, Mary takes a third of what’s left, Robert takes a third (hmm, he thinks, it must be a poor year for berries), Rebecca takes a third (actually it’s hard to take a third). of a single grain).

I recently attended a great lecture on food where the speaker explained the “choose only one third” fallacy. Nature seems to have this interesting balance between the fruits available and the fruits needed to reproduce. If 100 berries are produced, at least 80 will not be viable or land somewhere to germinate. Some of these will naturally be eaten by bears, birds and other creatures.

Wildlife cannot count, so they will devour everything they can find or reach; leaving a few fruits that hopefully one or two will be able to successfully send out good seeds. And then we come looking for something to add to our GORP or energy bar.

We all thought it well, but with the increased use of all trail systems, our collective sweet tooth has limited the reproduction of some plant species. But wait… there are more!

These berries are the staple food for many, many wildlife species, from birds to mammals to insects. As the rapid development of the landscape turned the forests into freeholds, the wildlife that once lived there was displaced and moved into the few remaining protected areas in the vicinity: the parks.

Parks are where the walking trails are. Walking trails are where people go. The few raspberry patches that grew there should now support the original population of wildlife, newly arrived displaced creatures and satisfy the palette of hungry hikers.

Who has the option to get such fruits from other sources? We do. Yes, a basket of blueberries costs what I made working a full day in my youth. No, the enriched experience of foraging in the wild is lost while you wait in the checkout lane. But we humans have that option, while bears, raccoons, song sparrows, deer, robins, wood thrushes, chipmunk sparrows, and the like do not.

Added to the pressure of “wild gathering” is the revived popular notion of living off the land. While there is nothing wrong with learning to be more resourceful in caring for yourself, the available land space to do so is very limited.

All parks have a legal restriction on harvesting within their property boundaries. Most nature reserves and conservation areas also have a “do not pick” guideline.

Crown land is available for foraging, but this designation is quite rare south of Georgian Bay. Private lands require permission to enter from the landowner. Which comes full circle back to the only lands really available are where the trails are, in the parks.

If I happen to see you sneaking a nibble on the side of the trail, I won’t think badly of you (because I might do the same). However, please do not create a situation where you are found loading buckets of wild berries.

In southern Ontario, we need to change our expectations from a good berry harvest consisting of a basket of horticulturally grown fruit to sale.