Posted on 12/02/2008 8:52:08 AM PST by BGHater
The idea seemed too crazy to Rod Simmons, a measured, careful field botanist. Naturalists in Arlington County couldn't find any acorns. None. No hickory nuts, either. Then he went out to look for himself. He came up with nothing. Nothing crunched underfoot. Nothing hit him on the head.
Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill.
But Simmons really 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.
"I'm used to seeing so many acorns around and out in the field, it's something I just didn't believe," he said. "But this is not just not a good year for oaks. It's a zero year. There's zero production. I've never seen anything like this before."
The absence of acorns could have something to do with the weather, Simmons thought. But he hoped it wasn't a climatic event. "Let's hope it's not something ghastly going on with the natural world."
To find out, Simmons and Arlington naturalists began calling around. A naturalist in Maryland found no acorns on an Audubon nature walk there. Ditto for Fairfax, Falls Church, Charles County, even as far away as Pennsylvania. There are no acorns falling from the majestic oaks in Arlington National Cemetery.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
There was a drought last year so it might have affected the trees this year.
Too bad about the squirrels. There are still way too many.
I think we need an Acorn bailout...
Bush’s fault, of course.
>I think we need an Acorn bailout...
Well of course ACORN is going to get taxpayer monies... whether you like it or not.
They come and go.
Anyone with a live oak or a pecan tree can tell you that.
Nuts and ACORN. Obama won. I think this guy is confused.
I’ve noticed it this year in No. Calif. No acorns this year...none.
Whenever we don’t find many acorns it means the wild boars have returned and are inhaling all the acorns.
The previous two years we have had bumper crops of acorns; vast numbers of the damned things falling from the oak trees around my house to make raking an even bigger chore than usual. This year, there are not as many. Neither occurrence is unusual, except for those determined to find some phantasmagorical climatic significance in every little crevice of the natural world.
That's probably the answer right there. Those tree rats could use a good thinning out anyway.
It may be that due to this year being so wet that the acorns sunk further into the ground than normal. Could just be due a cycle of nature and keeping the squirrels in check.
There don’t seem to be that many oak trees around anyway.
There are so many squirrels in my small town that every day you hear of a squirrel chewing in power, cable and phone lines causing an outage. Nothing but Rabies infected fluffy tailed rats, I tell you
“I’ve noticed it this year in No. Calif. No acorns this year...none.”
I live in Northern California, and I walked across a parking lot with lots of acorns this morning. In fact, I was wondering why the squirrels haven’t cleaned them up.
Interesting. I’m only home in Pennsylvania on the weekends, and occasionally miss a weekend. When I went to do my annual acorn collection to have a supply to hand-feed to my squirrels, I couldn’t find but a handful and those weren’t in good shape. I thought maybe I’d missed the peak season and groundskeepers had done an extra-thorough job cleaning up acorns along with leaves. I ended up ordering a big batch from eBay (yep, you can even get acorns on eBay). No way could I disappoint those adorable little squirrels, who have absolute faith in the ability of the humans at my house to dispense acorns year round.
There are other assessments, kcgardens.kansascity.com:
“Where’s the beef – No, I mean where’s the acorns?
Ok, let’s cut to the chase on this one because inquiring minds want to know. This is a topic I have never really given any thought to, or for that matter, never really even noticed. That is until the phones started to ring at the Extension office. The question heard over and over was: Why doesn’t my oak tree have any acorns? It’s always had them before, some years more than others, but this year there isn’t one on the big old tree.
The answer is really simpler than one would think. The reason for the lack of acorns on pin oak and red oak trees is the freeze of April 2007. Now, that may lead one to ask an additional question: What does a freeze that happened over a year ago have to do with this year? The answer is: Everything! Let me explain.
The red oak family has an interesting habit in the fact that it takes two seasons for acorns to form. The first year, the tree forms what are called acornets which are immature acorns. These small growths are hardly noticeable at all on the tree. The second year, they develop into what we know as an acorn.
The freeze of April 2007 killed the developing acornets, thus halting the production of an acorn crop in 2008...”
The Mesquite Beans are good this year.
When I was googling around a bit to try to figure out why I couldn’t find any acorns this year, I read on one site that oak trees seem to have evolved a strategy to produce almost no acorns in occasional years. The theory is that this keeps the population of acorn-eating critters from ballooning to the point where all the acorns would get gobbled up every year, leaving none to grow into new oak trees. Makes sense, and since apparently this has been observed before, it strikes me as a lot more likely than the alarmist “climate change” theory.
OMG, we’re all gonna die!!! We’d better pass legislation against carbon dioxide or else we’ll die even faster. I’m so depressed.
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