Tree Talk: August 2026
The bat and the sycamore tree
A pleasant summer day has been seemingly difficult to come by this season. Hazardous air, heat domes, and unrelenting winds have made my usual work in the world of arboriculture just a tad less endearing. However, one July morning last month was an outlier, and this particularly perfect summer morning had more in store for me than just optimal weather.
As I led a group of Groundwork Erie student workers into the Franklin Park Tiny Forest that balmy morning, ready to fix fences and pull weeds, I looked up into a 12-foot-tall sycamore sapling and saw the most beautiful thing.
There, blinking down at us from the underside of a huge sycamore leaf, was a young Eastern Red Bat pup.
Eastern Red Bats are not necessarily rare – in fact, they are just about the most common tree-dwelling bat species in eastern North America. But to see one nestled up in a tree in East Erie – a tree I had helped plant just three years ago – stopped me in my tracks. At that moment, I felt such ecological joy for both the tree in front of me and its small rust-colored inhabitant. How lucky I felt to witness this small creature rest in its found haven, and in the middle of a public park!
When the bat flew off (and up) to take refuge in a taller tree nearby, I was left gazing instead at the young sycamore it had launched from.
American Sycamore trees can grow to be giants. The oldest and tallest sycamores documented have reached 175 feet tall and 16 feet in diameter. They grow fast, are a common tree species in our region, and are aesthetically unmistakable due to their peeling multicolored bark and large leaves. When I say they are common to the region, I mean it – American Sycamore trees have been recognized in the North American fossil record from over 100 million years ago. Throughout our own recorded histories, sycamores have been a cornerstone of human development. The trees were built into shelters across Appalachia at the hands of both colonists and nomadic tribes, carved into dugout canoes by multiple indigenous peoples, are rumored to have sheltered American soldiers in the 1777 Pennsylvania Battle of Brandywine, and have even traveled as seeds to the moon and back on board the Apollo 14.
Given time and space to grow to an advanced age, these trees can develop cavernous hollows in the middle of their trunks that have historically provided both novelty and shelter.
Sometimes the trunks of large sycamores can develop burls, or bumps, due to environmental factors – this phenomenon can be witnessed in our very own city while traveling down the line of sycamores on Greengarden Ave. All this to say that the American Sycamores are huge, both figuratively and literally, in our local and regional landscapes.
Yet it was one of the smaller sycamores of Erie – standing just a little taller than a shed, no more than a half-inch thick, growing in a literal microforest – which gifted an Eastern Red Bat with a little bit of refuge this summer. It gifted me, too, with a little bit of child-like joy and ecological hope.
For more information on Erie's Arboretum at LEAF, visit: leaferie.org
Hannah Rhodes is the program director of Lake Erie Arboretum at Frontier Park (LEAF). She can be reached at hannah@leaferie.org
