Here you see gobs of beautiful, ripe, red Asian bittersweet fruit. I think that I’ve seen more of these berries (Celastrus orbiculatus) this October than I have in any prior year.
Stated another way, these are the gorgeous beginnings of a disaster-in-the-making.
The birds love this fruit and disseminate it widely in their droppings, starting new bittersweet vines all over the place. Those vines, in turn, survive by strangling to death their host trees and bushes to assure that they can steal light and nutrients. Asian bittersweet even attacks and severely damages mighty spruce trees:
State efforts to control this invasive killer have been relatively ineffective; private efforts to get rid of the plants have helped somewhat, but the plants apparently are propagating faster in Maine than they can be removed. It’s plague-like. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 27, 2023.)