Blackberry season

admin
, 11 September 2017
Blackberry season
dormouse / Derek Middleton

By Charlotte Owen

WildCall Officer

It’s blackberry season and there’s a bumper crop this year. Perfect for making jams and crumbles, blackberries also provide a veritable feast for a huge range of wildlife. From water voles to dormice, wasps, moths, birds and badgers, few can resist the bramble’s free buffet and a good patch of blackberries can be a real wildlife hotspot.

These sweet, pulpy fruits are deliberately delicious to lure in potential seed-dispersers. Blackberries are known botanically as an aggregation of drupes, with each shiny, black sphere (or drupelet) housing a single seed at the centre. The ideal diners are small birds, whose digestive systems make short work of the bulk of the fruit but pass out the seeds unharmed and intact, usually a good distance away from the original bramble, making them the perfect seed dispersal system. The process of digestion can even improve germination rates by thinning the seed’s protective outer layer, allowing moisture and air to reach the seed more easily and kick-starting the growth process. And of course the seed is often deposited in a healthy dose of fertiliser.

But if the bramble wants its fruits to be eaten, why does it guard them with such ferocious thorns?

They present a significant hazard to larger mammals, as any keen blackberry forager will know, and efficiently protect the plant’s leaves and stems from browsing deer and rabbits. They also make it harder for them to gorge on the berries: their mammalian digestive systems are efficient enough to destroy the seeds as they pass through, before depositing them all in one go, making them a poor option for seed dispersal. While they may manage to eat one or two, the bulk of the fruit is protected for the bramble’s desired diners, which are small enough to hop nimbly between the thorns and avoid being prickled. The thorns also function as effective climbing hooks for the long, whippy bramble stems to grow towards the light and tangle together into an impenetrable briar. Perhaps coincidentally, this also favours small birds by providing them with a safe place to roost and nest.

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