I'm not quite ready to give them THAT much credit. However, our resident hoard, er herd, of treerodents has a one-up on me. For now anyway.
I was traipsing through the regrowth trees (almost every tree here on the 78 acre wood, er, farm is regrowth in the past fortyish years as revealed by looking at the aerial view from 1975 on historicaerials.com) and I spotted a collection of nut-husks on the ground at the base of a tree. Since the tree self-identified as a not-species-confused maple tree and knowing that maple trees do not produce a nut-like seed/fruit/whatever the proper designation is I attempted to first identify the nuthusk and then locate the source.
The nuthusk (just the husk - neatly sectioned into its quarters sans the internal nutlike content) seems to identify as belonging to the family known as Old Hickory, er wait - just hickory - the Old variety is an historical person that beat the Brits at New Orleans.
Knowing that I had traipsed through this portion of the 78 acre wood before and had never noted even one hickory tree, let alone one in close enough proximity to the maples as to toss its nuts in their general direction, I continued my traipsing in search of even one hickory tree. I figured that shouldn't have been too difficult a task because the leaves were turning and from experience I knew that hickory foliage turns mostly yellow starting even before the maples start their red-orange-yellow thing. All I needed to do was scan the treeline for one or more yellow-looking trees standing out among the still mostly green maple.
But there were no mostly yellow trees. Just maple, hemlock/white pine (we have both, often in the same stand - they were some of the few trees that were seen in the old aerial photo), and oak none of which were even close to yellow. Unless we have some species confused oak trees that somehow have managed to produce a hickory nut rather than an acorn, I have as yet no idea where the treerodents gathered their collection of hickory nuts.
I do know, or am significantly confident that I know that the causal agent of there being hickory nuthusks on the ground at the base of the several maple trees was in fact one or more treerodent because once the effects of the yearly climate change are in full evidence, revealed up near the top of the several maple trees are sprawling mansionhomes characteristic of the architectural style of that line of famous designers who founded the TreeRodent School of Architecture.
So for now they are keeping a secret from me. But I will persevere. I have almost another year to locate the hickory grove so as to become competetion for the treerodents in the next nutharvest.
Wish there were some black walnuts on the property.
