Lewis & Clark saw Osage Oranges: last of a series

But first owl news. One year after a Great Horned Owl was photographed in Central Park, almost to the day, another GHO was seen in the Ramble. That was on Tuesday, Jan 9, 2007. Last year's owl stayed more than a month. Day before yesterday's owl stayed the usual one day. Yesterday it was gone. Now....on to Osage Oranges.
Great Horned Owl in Ramble, January 10, 2006
Photo by Cal Vornberger

First they repelled cockroaches. Next it was spiders. Now ants.
Here's the last osage orange posting, from Missouri. Too good to miss.

Marie,

On the occasion of the bi-centennial of Lewis and Clark's Voyage of Discovery, an artist painted a mural on a wall in the Museum beneath the Gateway Arch showing Meriwether Lewis sitting outside Pierre Chouteau's home (a site now a part of the Arch grounds). Lewis was making sketches of a huge Osage Orange tree and its weird fruit to send to President Jefferson before the Voyage had left St Louis, some of many sketches he would complete of the strange plants, birds and animals he and Clark would find on the journey west. These included of course Lewis' Woodpecker and Clark's Nutcracker.

Today there are many such trees remaining in St Louis and across Missouri with their great whorls and rusty orange trunks, possibly because they were not commercially useful, but merely imposing and strangely beautiful. My mother had heard that the fruit was possibly repellent to the little ants that came in the kitchen after a rain...don't think they did much good, though.

Jacquelyn Chain

St Louis