Sap seekers find syrupy joy in Jersey woods

Although it felt more like spring than winter on the annual maple sugaring hike through the Rancocas Nature Center woods in New Jersey on Sunday, director Susan Buffalino told her 60 fellow sap seekers that she hoped the sweet stuff would be flowing in an old, reliable sugar maple at trail's end.

Normally, the above-freezing days and below-freezing nights of late winter stimulate the sap flow, she said, but the recent balminess all day and all night in the Westampton Township woods of Burlington County might have sent the maple a signal to stop the flow.

Nevertheless, she assured them, waffles would be waiting back at the visitors' center along with syrup she had already made from the same tree.

As Buffalino, who has been leading the annual maple sugaring since 2009 in the nature center's 210-acre section of the 1,252-acre Rancocas State Park, approached the tree where she had drilled a hole, inserted a tap and hung a bucket to catch the sap, she saw the honey bees. Lots of honey bees.

Stimulated by Sunday's record-breaking warmth, and as hyperactive as college kids on spring break in Florida, the bees were buzzing to the bucket and into the bucket from the nature center's hives in a nearby clearing.

Buffalino quickly directed the group away from the bees to a second sugar maple, where the kids took turns boring a hole in the bark with a hand auger.

Jonah Sharp, 4, from Cherry Hill, threw his whole body into the task with an intense focus that his father, Matthew Sharp, headmaster at Haddonfield Friends School, said Jonah exhibits while "hunting" frogs, toads, snakes and fence lizards with his brother Nathaniel, 6, around the center's Dragonfly Pond.

Dayna Sharp said her sons "have been hiking since they were babies" in the Rancocas woods as well as on family excursions to a volcano in Nicaragua and to a Costa Rican rain forest. "But this," she said, "is their first maple sugaring."

It was also a first for Elizabeth Tezla, 10, and her brothers Joseph, 8, and Christopher, 4, from Medford, whose mother, Kathleen Tezla said, "They spend so much time on video games and the computer, it's important to get outside, take a breath and look at the beauty around here."

At that moment, Elizabeth suddenly said, "I've got a spider in my shoe!" She did not look thrilled as she shook it out of her shoe but cheered up moments later when she and her brothers gathered around the fire pit, toasted pieces of waffle, and dipped them in a cup of Rancocas Maple Syrup, which Buffalino poured out of a Mason jar.

The tree-to-table syrup was lighter and thinner than supermarket brands, but just as sweet. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of commercial maple syrup, Buffalino said, but because the nature center only has two sugar maple trees, the sap-to-syrup ratio is 20:1, producing a lighter product.

She said she boiled two gallons of sap in a crab pot for four to five hours to fill a couple of Mason jars with syrup.

Buffalino said she loves sharing such experiences as maple sugaring because "I think trees are amazing. There's such a disconnect with nature these days. I want people to understand the connection."

Lavonne Bebler Johnson, who chairs the Friends of Rancocas Nature Center, which  financially supports the nonprofit preserve, overheard Buffalino and recounted an open house tour when a little girl saw some young frogs in the pond and said excitedly, "Oh, I knew them when they were tadpoles!"

Bebler Johnson smiled and said, "That's a connection that will be with her forever."

Buffalino said that whether it's maple sugaring or tadpoles, the joy in her job is seeing people connect with nature in the Rancocas woods. "Everything is connected," she said. "Everything."