Photo Credit: Dominic's pics'

When Nature Goes Nuts

According to the National Wildlife Federation:

The acorn crop in an oak forest can reach 700 pounds per acre in a good mast year, when one ancient tree with an immense trunk and a spreading crown could yield 15,000 nuts. Yet by the end of November, most of them will be gone. Packets of energy that are easy to open and digest, acorns are a significant food item for some 150 species of birds and mammals and typically make up at least 25 percent of the diets of black bears, raccoons, gray and fox squirrels, wild turkeys and white-footed mice, to name a few. White-tailed and black-tailed deer, meanwhile, eat oak foliage along with bushels of acorns.

But yet, there weren't any, or very few, acorns on the ground in the Mid-Atlantic region in November.

Couldn't Find any Acorns Anywhere

Rod Simmons, a field botanist, couldn't find any acorns. He got spooked when he was teaching a class on identifying oak and hickory trees late last month. For 2 1/2 miles, Simmons and other naturalists hiked through Northern Virginia oak and hickory forests. They sifted through leaves on the ground, dug in the dirt and peered into the tree canopies. Nothing.

Simmons and other Arlington Naturalists called around the region and heard similar reports. No acorns on an Audubon nature walk in Maryland. Same reports in Fairfax, Falls Church, Charles County, and as far away as Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia. No acorns falling from the oaks in Arlington Cemetery.

An Over Abundance of Resources

Last year was a mast season. It was a good year to be a squirrel. No worries of starvation, plenty of protein to nourish the newly born babies. It was an exuberant time. A mast year occurs when the number of nuts that trees produce in a given year is exponentially higher than the average.

All Things Cyclical - Even Acorns

The spacing of bumper acorn crops about three or four years apart is no accident either.

"The evolutionary response of oaks to seed predation is to produce more acorns than the sundry forest animals could possibly eat," says animal ecologist Rick Ostfeld at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies (IES) in New York´s Hudson Valley.

But he notes that if there were large crops every fall, populations of squirrels, mice and deer would increase until no amount of acorns could satiate them. So the oaks intermingle good mast years with poor ones, during which many of the seed predators starve. "Trees aren´t as stupid as they look," he says.

Seems There's a Lesson Here

A zero acorn production year, from what I can research, is rather extraordinary and unheard of. The implications of how it will affect the forest animals is not known. It's assumed to be far reaching. Because of the complexity of the relationships between the plants, animals, weather, and pollination, etc... no one really knows why this extraordinary event has happened.

Seems to be a parallel between the Global credit crisis and the zero acorn production. Both are extraordinary events and both had previous years of an over abundance of resources. When times are good, pay down your debts, save discretionary income, budget your time, money and resources. Because there might be a day when the acorns may not come.