Sambar Browse Plants - Wild Cherry

Wild cherry goes by a number of different names including native cherry and cherry ballart. Ten members of this genus occur in Australia with other members in New Zealand and across the Pacific islands.

Wild cherry is a common small tree in Eastern Australia, occurring in dry forests and woodlands in the higher rainfall areas of South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales and Queensland. Although it is not apparent to the casual observer, the wild cherry is parasitic on other trees and shrubs and gains some of its nutrients from its hosts.

Wild cherry has the general appearance of a conifer with weeping cypress-like foliage (hence the species name ‘ cupressiformis’) of yellowish-green to dark green colour. The bark is dark brown with a rough surface texture. When browsing animals such as wallabies and deer are present trees invariably show a ‘browse line’ where the lower foliage and smaller twigs has been neatly snipped away to whatever level the animals can reach.

Small cream flowers are produced each year but are so inconspicuous that few hunters will have noticed them. The flowers are followed by the seed which is a small green nut about 0.5 centimetres in diameter. The nut is attached to a fleshy fruit-like structure which is actually an enlarged section of the flower stalk. The fruit is initially green but changes to orange and then red as the seed matures. The fruits (the so-called ‘cherries’) are about a centimetre long and are edible but rarely worth a hunter’s trouble to pick them because of their small size and sparse distribution on trees. Presumably the fruits (and associated seeds) are attractive to birds and the hard seeds would be distributed in bird’s droppings.

The wild cherry can be found in sambar country from sea-level up to mid-slope, but not at higher elevation areas such as on the Snowy Plain and Dargo High Plain.

If there are wild cherries where you are hunting they are always worth investigating as they provide excellent cover in all weathers because of their dense foliage and as the fallen needles make for a soft bed. In addition, the foliage is a favoured food source, which results in that very neat browse line. But above all else, a wild cherry seems to be the preferred sambar rub tree although no-one seems to be able to explain why this is – presumably it has something to do with the bark or timber having a scent that the deer find attractive (strongly scented pine trees are similarly attractive).

Big old cherry trees often seem to serve as territorial markers in sambar country, particularly when they are strategically situated on a river or creek crossing or where a game trail crosses a ridgeline. In these locations trees may show healing scars that are evidence of being rubbed repeatedly over many years.

Anti-sambar activists would have us hunters believe that if it wasn’t for sambar being present in the bush no wild cherry would have a browse line and they would, in fact, always have foliage sweeping the ground. This is not true, but it sounds plausible to people whose only experience of these trees is seeing them beside a highway where there are no surviving browsing animals.