Cattails

As a wild food, cattails are both common and difficult to misidentify. A stand of cattails — in which young shoots grow among last year's stalks, many still topped by their distinctive fluffy seed heads — is as close as you'll get to finding a wild supermarket. The "tails" themselves aren't edible but can be burned as torches or tinder, or used as insulation. The stripped seed heads below might suggest that nest-building season has begun.

Cattails
Along the Harlem Meer, Central Park, Manhattan

Comments

[Dave Cook]

By email, an EIT reader observes:

One important thing to note about cattails when foraging in NYC: They're an important habitat and food source for native birds and animals that has largely been crowded out by invasive phragmites. Phragmites is a marsh grass that grows in the same habitat as cattails, and due to its colonial root/stalk system it has been very effective at completely displacing the native flora.

There are very few healthy stands of cattails left in NYC area, and additional stressors on the surviving patches could well do them in. Foragers might be better directed to wetlands in NJ or upstate NY.

[Ann]

I've never been to Central Park. Kind of funny to think of Central Park as having a 'wild supermarket'. :)