Article by Will Husby and Sheree Johnson | Photo by Kwanseon Kim, “Crimson Table of the Woods”
The robin has been caught mid-meal — head tilted, beak open, one bright red huckleberry waiting just ahead.
At first glance, Kwanseon Kim’s photo captures a familiar forest moment: a bird taking a berry. But the image opens into a much larger story. This is not just a robin feeding. It is a glimpse into one of the quiet mutually beneficial exchanges that keeps Bowen’s forests alive.
A Berry With a Job to Do
Red huckleberry is part of the forest understory, beneath the tall trees in conifer and mixed conifer-maple forests. In early summer, the berries ripen; the crimson table opens for business.
Robins, thrushes, towhees, grouse, and small mammals all drop by for a snack. For the birds, each berry is part of a nutritious meal. For the huckleberry, each berry is part of a package that sets up the next generation of huckleberry bushes. Inside each fruit are several tiny seeds. When a bird eats the berry, the seeds pass through its digestive system and is dropped elsewhere in the forest, wrapped in a small package of natural fertilizer. The bird gets fed. The huckleberry plant gets dispersed. Part of the forest gets renewed.
Flowers, Shelter, and an Underground Partnership
In spring, before the berries appear, red huckleberry is one of the first understory plants to bloom. Its tiny pinkish green urn-shaped flowers are easy to miss– but not by bumblebee queens. After their long winter of hibernation the queens need food urgently. The huckleberry flowers provide them with pollen and nectar when few other forest flowers are available.
A mature red huckleberry bush can grow almost as tall as a one-storey house, though most are closer to person-height. Dense patches are ideal places for many species of forest bird to nest and hide from predators. Black-tailed deer browse huckleberry stems and shoots, especially in fall and winter when other greens are scarce. With few predators, the number of deer on Bowen is so great that in many parts of the island where huckleberry bushes once thrived as a dense understory, only small, clumps remain, mostly in thick patches perched high on stumps and logs where the deer can’t reach them.
And there is still another exchange happening underground. Red huckleberry partners with soil fungi. The fungi draw water and minerals from the soil; the plant trades back sugars made from sunlight. Beneath our feet, root and fungus meet in a partnership that helps the plant and fungus thrive together.
A robin, a berry, a bee, a fungus, a seed, a rotting stump, a shaded forest understory — none of these stands alone. Biodiversity is not just the number of species in a place. It includes the web of relationships among them.
That is what makes Kwanseon’s photo so compelling. The huckleberry is not background. It is food, shelter, pollinator support, seed source, and soil partner. For many ecologists, red huckleberry has the qualities of a keystone species: a modest-looking plant whose flowers, berries, structure, and underground relationships support many other lives around it.
The next time you walk through a Bowen forest, look for red huckleberry. Notice its fresh green branches, its delicate spring flowers, or its small bright berries in early summer. Taste a few if you like, but leave most for the birds and other creatures who rely on them.
Then pause before you move on. The forest may look still, but all around you, exchanges are underway. Somewhere nearby, another robin may be waiting for its turn at the crimson table of the woods.
The Bowen Island Conservancy is a land trust and registered charity that works to protect and preserve the island’s natural environment, from endangered coastal bluffs to inland lakes, wetlands, and fens. This article is part of a monthly series featuring photographs submitted to the Bowen Island Conservancy’s Biodiversity Photo Contest. To see the latest submissions and winners, visit the Conservancy website.
