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?

Return to Blue Jay Way

When we first moved in to this house 13 years ago, blue jays were the most prominent wildlife to be seen or heard from October until April. They flew back and forth across the driveway. So many came and went from the giant blue spruce near the house that we started calling the spruce “the bird condo.”

The jays argued with each other, scolding each other from branches and on the ground.

I had a passing thought of getting one of those street signs, and have it made up to say Blue Jay Way. In those first few years there seemed no better way to describe this little patch of Vermont.

Within a year or two I started noticing the crows. Again, especially in winter. As sunset approached I would see them flying over the house. One, two, three, seven. It was impossible to count them all – and impossible to see where they were going.

When I learned about crows roosting together in big numbers during the winter, it seemed obvious to me that a roost was nearby. I thought it would be fun to follow the crows one night and find out where they roosted, but I had a baby to care for, and wherever they were going, it was out of sight from the house.

Crows are relatives to blue jays. They are both in the bird family Corvidae (along with ravens and magpies, but the ravens are a story for another day). Now with blue jays and crows around the place all the time, the street sign would be better off reading "Corvidae Way."

Then one fall about six years ago things got very quiet. The blue jays were gone. Just suddenly, and totally gone. They didn’t bicker on the driveway. They didn’t come and go from the bird condo.

There were fewer crows too. And by the next year there were noticeably much fewer crows as well.

Back then West Nile Virus was very much in the news. I knew that crows were sensitive to West Nile, and that blue jays were too.

But I didn’t dare think that it was West Nile that had wiped out the blue jays and the crows. The disappearance of blue jays and crows could have been a local phenomenon, just on our property. And anyway, Vermont had had only one human case of West Nile virus diagnosed. It seemed unlikely that the virus was the cause.

Last year I noticed a few blue jays around. Now this year, they are everywhere. It is just like the old days. The call out in the middle of the day, getting me away from my desk and to the window to see if they are mobbing a hawk or an owl.

The crows are back too. Not in as many numbers as they once were, but I’ll give them another year.

Recently, I spoke to someone from the Ascutney Mountain Audubon Society. He said that the numbers of blue jays and crows in the area’s Christmas Bird Counts had dropped in the last five years. But he too thought the blue jays were back this year. He didn’t hesitate to say he thought it was West Nile that did them in, and that it was some adaptation among these blue jays and crows to West Nile that had allowed them to come back.

Sounds of the Season

The leaves went crunch. Crunch. Crunch. It sounded like something big and heavy walking through the woods. But the late autumn woods are deceptive. What sounds like something huge walking ponderously along often turns out to be the cautious bound, pause, bound, pause of a squirrel.

I peered in to the woods, but saw nothing.

A red squirrel trilled near the sound of the footsteps. The trill is its way of saying, “My place! Stay out!” So perhaps it was another squirrel, but perhaps not. Red squirrels are bold, and seem to consider everything, big and small, a threat. There was once a red squirrel in our backyard who trilled at me every time I went out the back door.

What I didn’t hear was the persistent chip chip of the chipmunks that I often hear this time of year. The chip is a warning call, hurrying young chipmunks away from occupied territory. But no chipmunk could set up a home near that aggressive red squirrel.

The crunching stopped for a moment, then began again.

A blue jay scolded in a screeching jay-jay on the other side of the footsteps. Jay-jay, it scolded again. Jay-jay! Something was making it mad.

Was it me, or the thing in the woods? I could see nothing, but then I’ve watched a moose walk in to the woods at that very spot, and disappear from my view after taking a few steps.

I never solved this mystery. The sound of my daughter calling out the window to me ended my search for the footstep maker. But it was a nice reminder that even this sparse season has its own sounds, and its own stories to tell through them.

At Home in the Supermarket

So, I got to thinking, do any birds take advantage of the fact that some trees (oaks and beeches, particularly) hang on to their dried leaves in the fall?

I did a Google search, and found that some birds to favor certain species of trees, but they like trees with features that support their particular type of nest – a strong fork, say, or the likelihood of it providing a hole.

Then I realized that, duh, by the time the leaves dropped not only have the birds in this area already raised their young, but most of them have already headed south for the winter.

Stubborn as I am, I started wondering about mammals, and if they might show favoritism to a certain tree, since they stick around. Gray squirrels, for example. Do they tend to build their nests in oak trees so that they stay hidden well into early winter?

Plus, a gray squirrel nest in an oak tree would be kind of like setting up a home in the supermarket.

I live at a high enough elevation that there aren’t many oak trees around here, nor many gray squirrels. I turned to my handy Stokes Nature Guide to Animal Tracking and Behavior for an answer.

Donald and Lillian Stokes say that gray squirrels tend to use their “leaf nests” (those wads of leaves and twigs stuck up high in the branches of trees) in the summer. They tend to retire to tree-hole dens in the winter.

So even squirrels don’t take advantage of the superior autumn camouflaging traits of some trees over others.