Leaf litter beneath a young Black Birch in early Fall. (Lewis-Slammon, 2014). 

Below is a selection that illustrates the role of the Black Birch in one individual's life.

The Personal Experience of Elizabeth C. Wright, author of one of the first naturalist books written by an American woman as told by Daniel Patterson of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers:

“In our old sugar bush there used to be a great black birch which had many years agone taken root on a fallen log, and its long roots had run down on either side to the earth and taken fast hold there while the fallen tree decayed away from beneath it, leaving our birch standing on a five-legged stool of its own twisted roots, in the air. Another fallen log lay near by, covered with a thick mat of yellow, feather-like mosses, and on this used to stand a patriarch grouse, or "pheasant," or "partridge," as he was called, and wake the dreamy echoes with his drumming. We very rarely saw him, for he was a shy bird, but we heard him many times a day in his season, and found his tracks there. We children used to tap the old birch and catch its profuse sweetish sap in a little trough, to drink of its diluted spicery; and that draught and its neighborhood, and the tremulous thunder of the grouse's wings, with the hum of the wild bees which used to drink at the same place, are all called up by the birch's voice, and become part and parcel of it, past the power of analysis to separate them.” (25-26)