Wild Wonders of Winter

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Pickin' Up Pine Cones

On your next winter hike, pause to pick up a pine cone, and ponder it. In your hand is a sustaining link in a reproductive chain that stretches back some 300 million years — 60 million years before dinosaurs appeared, 150 million years before the first flowering plants. The seed cone was an evolutionary leap forward for primitive plants, whose earlier forms relied on the whims of wind and wet weather to scatter and germinate fragile spores. By the time the dinosaurs arrived, soaring conifers that held their embryos within seeds sheltered inside protective cones dominated high-ground forests.

What kind of pine cone have you found? Of the roughly 35 species of pines in the United States and Canada, most are considered either “hard” or “soft.” If the cone has thin, flexible scales it’s likely from a soft pine — maybe an eastern or western white, a whitebark, or a limber. A cone with thick, rigid scales, perhaps armed with prickly barbs, probably dropped from a hard pine such as a jack, red, lodgepole, longleaf, shortleaf or loblolly.

The largest cones under a given tree are the seed-bearing females. In the mountains of Oregon and California, the world’s longest pine cones — 18 inches to 2 feet — hang from sugar pines. But for sheer mass, even they can’t match the cones of California’s Coulter pine. Measuring 8 to 18 inches long and up to 7 inches across, those cones weigh in at a whopping 4 to 10 pounds when green. “One who seeks the Coulter pine’s shade should wear a hard hat,” naturalists advise.

The seeds within pine cones provide critical nutrition for numerous mammals and birds. Your cone probably already opened and released its seeds, but you can extend its useful life as a winter food source. Take it home, fill its crevices with a mixture of peanut butter and bird seed, and hang it by a ribbon from a tree limb.

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