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.