Out front, near the end of the driveway, a titanic struggle is underway—really two struggles for one plot of real estate.
A VW Beetle-sized shrub(s) of multi-flora rose (yes, I know all about it...but read on) and an equally massive trumpet vine are grappling in a no-holds-barred, cage match—seemingly to the death. Mano-a-mano they go on; here the rose breaks through, sending arched canes soaring into the air, armed with vicious rows of thorns proliferating like a shark’s teeth. There the trumpet vine winds around the rose canes winning a battle and thrusting quickly unfolding leaves into the sunlight.
Both seed around and multiply in unseen ways underground, but all that is controlled by a riding mower that takes no prisoners. Wading into the mass with shears and loppers is not for the faint of heart. An arm thrust in can only be returned with no sleeve and no flesh…stripped to the bone by a plant piranha. Grasping vines and ripping, tearing thorns render clothing the thinnest of defenses and skin a delivery mechanism for blood…which will surely be lost. Like a Victorian foray into the heart of deepest, darkest Africa, it is an expedition from which one may never return.
And yet...some call the impenetrable tangle home—and fight for it like gangs for their urban turf. No thinking person would question a bird's choice of this living snare for a home. What predator would dare dive into the maze of vegetable barbed-wire after its meal. Surely there's an easier way.
All spring a Northern Mockingbird couple (Mimus polyglottos) has occupied the shrubs, male perching high, singing and surveying, whilst his mate busied herself quietly below, slipping stealthily in and out of the mess. I figured we had them for the season.
Then, just this morning, while verifying that a pair of tree swallows had indeed taken the (bluebird) nest box on the fence post, the mockers changed color. In place of the gray with black highlights and flashes of white, they'd become a rusty red. Positions in the shrubs remained the same, male up high, female below. Even the behaviors were the same. Right down to body shape the birds were similar (o.k., they ARE from the same family...), but these were Brown Thrashers (Toxostoma rufum). Though late to the scene, the thrashers successfully ousted the original inhabitants in what I assume to be a bloodless coup to take over as lord and lady of the House of Pain.
A place for everything and everything in its place.
The mockingbirds are still close by, moved but not over the experience—if withering gazes at the thrashers from nearby perches are any indication. The thrashers are working the garden's ground layer hard, diligently foraging for food unless flushed back to their safe haven by some, usually human, interruption of their task.
And the multiflora and trumpet vine continue their alien-like expansion, waving branches ever more upward and outward like tentacles in their quest for the sun's life-giving energy. They will never let go of each other, intertwined permanently like Siamese twins never to be moved from their spot—short of dynamiting them from the ground. As satisfying as that might be, bits and pieces of each would fall, like nuclear rain, starting new, mutant clumps across the land.
This, at last, is their protection. In their individual vigor, they assist one another and insure each others survival like good symbionts. Attempts to eradicate them are often their best means of propagating and dispersing.
The mockingbirds, at least, wouldn't mind....
