Top of the Mast

I was jogging not too long ago, when I saw the road was covered, in one small section, with small, triangular nuts. I stopped and scooped up a handful. Beechnuts. I put them in my pocket to show my children.

There are plenty of beech trees in this corner of the world, but mostly what I see on the ground are their prickly, three-part husks. The nuts themselves are too precious. They are gobbled by bears and turkeys, stored away by squirrels and mice.

The only time I ever see a handful of beechnuts is when I discover the food cache of some mouse that has gotten into my house. (Unfortunately, the caches I find are usually in the pocket of shorts that I’m taking out of winter storage.)

Piles of beechnuts on the road? Surely, this is a good mast year.

Mast is the berries and nuts eaten by forest animals. The berries are “soft mast.” The nuts – acorns, beechnuts, butternuts, even maple keys and pine seeds – are called hard mast. When you hear or read just “mast,” it usually means the nuts.

Most years trees produce a few seeds. Some years they produce almost none. But every few years there is a bumper crop. In a good mast year bears don’t raid garbage cans as much. Populations of mice and squirrels boom. Living is easy for nut-eating forest creatures, and the impact ripples throughout the ecosystem.

But squirrels also have a taste for eggs and young birds. When their population booms, bird populations suffer. You can read more about this phenomenon on the Vermont Institute of Natural Science blog. The scientists there have observed this first hand.

Life pulses through the forest with good mast years and bad. The scary thing is that tree diseases are taking a big whack at nut-bearing trees. The American chestnut is all but lost, wiped out a blight caused by a fungus that was probably imported to this continent through human trade.

Back in the day the chestnut was a vital source of mast for forest creatures. A keystone species. Now it’s the butternuts, who suffer from a canker, also caused by a fungus, also believed to be imported, that are being wiped out.

Beeches are prone to beech bark disease, which doesn’t kill them, but may cut down on the number of nuts a tree produces.

I seem to have written myself into a corner. This post has sat on my harddrive for two weeks and I haven’t been able to come up with a good ending. Consider this the end for now, with a good ending to come later.

Parliament of Owls, Adjourned

We started hearing the owls about five or six years ago. I’m not talking about a single owl, hooting in the distance, briefly. We had always heard those.

There was an owl hooting near the kitchen window. Another on the other side of the house, beyond our bedroom window. An owl behind the house. We would hear at least one of them hoot at least once a week.

We heard them in all seasons: winter, as expected. Barred owls stake their territories and mate during what in the rest of the world is early spring, but what is still winter on this hill. But we also heard them as the trees leafed out in spring, in the heat of the summer, as the leaves changed in the fall, and in the dreary “stick season” between leaves and snow.

We would hear a single owl hooting. Or they would call to each other from each side of the house. Or we would hear the one near the bedroom calling to an owl farther off – on the other side of the road.

They were barred owls. Once I heard a hooting that I thought could be a great horned owl, but just that once. The rest were barred owls giving their, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all,” call in all its variations.

One night this summer it sounded like all the local owls had gotten together – for a party or a fight, I’ll never know. There was hooting, howling and screeching. They sounded as much like monkeys as they did like owls.

After we had had owls as our nightly companions for a few years, my husband noticed that the red squirrel that nested in our yard had gone. No other red squirrel had taken over her territory.

Had the squirrels become a snack for the owls? It seemed possible. We could only hope that the owls had reduced our abundant mouse population as well.

Then the blue jays returned. I have not heard so much as a single hoot since. Blue jays will mob owls and hawks, surrounding them, calling at them, and chasing them away.

Have the blue jays run the owls off?

Also, along with the blue jays, we now seem to have a red squirrel again as well. Could it have happened so quickly? The jays pestering the owls into leaving, and a red squirrel retaking the old territory now that it is safe from owls?