7:06 a.m. 43 degrees, wind S 1 mph. Sky: no separation between heaven and Earth; a world bound in mist Permanent streams: flowing. Wetlands: low clouds, high fog. Pond: yesterday's flotilla of leaves and pine needles sank, took their places among the muck, a blanket for tadpoles, frogs, and turtles.
Autumn colors in a single big-toothed aspen leaf, red and orange lines across a yolk yellow background. Alders green grading slowly to brown, much like apple leaves.
In the alder: a lone male black-throated green warbler. Chickadees probing lichen along the branches of white spruce.
Red oak acorns attack my standing-seam roof, tumbling into the backyard, collecting below the clothesline. Day and night oaks drop nutritious packages of protein and fat, a sleep-depriving downpour like prairie hail. Every morning the ground cobbles with acorns. Hanging laundry requires flipflops. Red oak acorns take two years to mature. Every three to five years, depending on various variables—weather, geography, genetics, tree health, among them—the Northeast produces a bumper crop.
Whenever acorns flood, the forest animals prosper, a phenomenon known as a trophic cascade. The summer after acorn over-abundance, white-footed mice and chipmunk population may swell from two per acre to more than fifty. Mice breed straight through the winter; chipmunks earlier in the spring. Gray squirrels are everywhere and hard to avoid when driving. Two years after the acorns, and a year behind the mouse and chipmunk peak, timber rattlesnake births are often much higher; hawks and owls often fledge more chicks; foxes more kits.
In addition to fat and protein, red oak acorns are loaded with tannin; a bitter compound used to cure leather that happens to bind protein and prevent assimilation across the gut wall of seed predators. Rain and snowmelt leach tannin, making the acorns progressively tastier the longer they remain on the ground. By early spring, there may be little else left to eat.
I chewed one yesterday; I don't recommend it. Red oak acorns are bland and acidic like an oily aspirin. Deer don't share my lack of appreciation. Their saliva denatures tannin, rendering the acorns immediately palatable. Black bears love them, too, as well as fisher, raccoons, gray fox, blue jays, grackles, and wild turkeys, which scuffle through leaf litter along both sides of the driveway every morning searching for acorns.
There are three hundred oak species in North America; sixty north of Mexico; one in my backyard.