Sycamore In Winter

Bark

• The mature sycamore's bark is white, causing the tree to gleam when winter sunlight strikes its trunk and limbs. Sycamores are potentially huge, growing more than 100 feet high with trunk diameters exceeding 10 feet. In natural scenarios, sycamores grow in groups together near river and stream banks across much of the Eastern United States. The reflection of light off the whitish bark draws attention. The bark peels away, displaying underlying layers of green, tan, brown and gray.

Seeds

• Sycamores possess both female and male flowers, so every sycamore generates seed-containing fruit. The sycamore fruits resemble small, rounded, brown balls. Composed of tiny seeds known as achenes and connected to minute tufts of hair forming a compact sphere, the balls ripen by October but remain dangling from the branches throughout the winter. These seed balls are abundant and decorate the limbs through the cold, windy months before disintegrating and floating away once spring arrives.

Food and Habitat

• The achenes provide nourishment in the winter for various creatures, including chickadees, finches, gray squirrels, beavers and muskrats. Many of the largest sycamores feature hollow trunks, which become habitats for different birds and mammals. Before the advent of chimneys, the trunks were the favored home of the chimney swift, notes the "National Audubon Society Field Guide to Trees: Eastern Region," Other animals that sometimes live in a hollow sycamore in the winter are raccoons, squirrels, opossums, barred owls and pileated woodpeckers.

Clean Up

• As winter approaches its end, the litter accumulated beneath a sycamore creates a cumbersome chore to clean up. Multiple twigs, dead leaves, strips of bark and seed balls blown about by the breezes or knocked off the tree by winter weather amass under the tree, requiring raking and disposal.