Masting Aftermath—Part 1

This fall was a huge masting year for local oak trees around here. The number of acorns they put out must be more than 20 times the normal crop! I have to be careful walking in the woods, lest I step on a cluster of acorns and watch my feet slide out from under me—as if I had stepped on a banana peel or a bunch of ball bearings on a concrete floor. The local acorn-munching animals—squirrels, mice, deer, and blue jays—will be fat and happy all winter. Their larders will be overflowing and the forest floor will still remain peppered with jillions of leftover acorns.

And that, of course, is exactly why nature evolved the masting process: to create such an overabundance of acorns every few years that the voracious animals can’t possibly eat them all. It’s a way that the oak trees ensure the future of the oak forest—all those leftover acorns will result in an abundance of oak saplings next spring.

There is no intent involved in this process, no plan; no design to seek out a desirable spot. It’s more a case of creating an abundance of seed… most of which will die or get eaten; a tiny fraction will survive and grow. Similarly, fish and other species generate a huge amount of eggs, with the expectation that a tiny fraction will survive and carry the species on.

People have known about this oak masting process and have tried to predict when a such a year will come along. But the oaks even outsmart humans. Europeans have attempted for a few hundred years to forecast the coming of a masting year, without success. Nature’s intelligence remains unchallenged.

Some tree species—such as maples, sycamores, and poplars—distribute their seeds with the help of the wind. It does a tree no good if its seeds drop close to the parent. That’s competition that the parent doesn’t need (as well as the necessity to avoid inbreeding), and the offspring will lose the struggle for survival to the parent. So nature’s wisdom has evolved various methods to disperse the seed some distance away—to a more nurturing location or even to transport the species to an entirely new location.

A maple seed is a beautifully designed helicopter-like wing that spins as it falls to the ground—slowing its descent, so as to allow any wind gusts that may come along to float the seed off at a distance. The fat acorn, however, drops straight down, so nature has evolved another way to disperse them: various animals do the job of transporting the acorns away from the parent. Many acorns don’t even get a chance to drop: blue jays will remove them directly from the tree and spirit them off to some distant lair.

Squirrels cache most of their acorns in widely scattered hiding places. Although they have an excellent memory for their secret spots, not every acorn will be retrieved later and eaten. What’s more, the squirrel usually buries the seed, so if an acorn gets forgotten, it’s in the perfect underground location to sprout and grow.

More on masting next time…