Where have all the acorns gone?

Nut-bearing trees here and in parts of surrounding states have dropped few of the nuggets important to the survival of squirrels and mice, and a main diet of many other creatures, from turkeys to blue jays to deer.

Ron Laughlin, a professor of botany at Elizabethtown College, has noticed it.

"Where my daughter lives there is a large red oak in her backyard. Last year, you could hardly walk, there were so many acorns. It was like marbles. But there are none this year," he reported Tuesday.

Joe Frassetta, the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry's district forester for this area, has noticed it. He's allergic to oak pollen and didn't suffer nearly as much this past spring.

Local residents have reported squirrels gnawing on plastic Adirondack chairs and devouring porch pumpkins.

And local hunters, who pattern wild game by following the crop of mast, or hard-shell seeds such as acorns, have noticed it.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission sends people into the woods every fall for that reason, producing a mast survey disseminated to hunters.

"There is a very poor acorn crop across southeastern Pennsylvania," the agency's regional forester, Dave Henry, observes. "There's very little mast in the forest."

The lack of acorns this fall — following a bumper crop last year — has been so startling and across the board among oaks, hickories and walnuts, that some naturalists are worried that something is amiss. The global warming red flag has even been raised.

"Let's hope it's not something ghastly going on with nature," fretted Rod Simmons, a botanist in northern Virginia in a long story about the missing acorns that ran in Sunday's Washington Post.

Simmons said he had never seen a "zero production" year for oaks and hickories like this one in his area.

The story and blogs contained sightings of apparently starving squirrels acting strangely, such as delving into trash cans.

But though wildlife may be in for a lean winter, one bad year of nut production does not a disaster make, according to experts from around Pennsylvania.

Forester Henry, for one, cites three factors to explain the dearth of nuts this year.

First, he says, a freeze in May occurred when oak trees were flowering with what would become acorns.

Also, gypsy moth damage, even if it did not kill oak trees in affected areas, weakened them so much that acorns were not produced.

In addition, he says, dry conditions the last two summers likely affected acorn development in many areas.

Indeed, the Game Commission's mast survey for Lancaster and Lebanon counties noted in October that "some oaks are aborting some of their acorns early" because of dry conditions.

Other experts point out that some species of oaks produce acorns only every other year. For all oak species a lean year follows a year with a bumper crop of nuts, which can occur in two- to seven-year cycles for reasons researchers still haven't nailed down.

In addition to frost and drought, acorn production can be affected if heavy rains wash away pollen, preventing trees from pollinating each other.

"I've never seen it where they don't produce anything, but it's very possible if conditions are just right," Frassetta says.

"It's been up and down for years, so I don't know if this is a cause for major concern," adds Laughlin.

It's not, emphatically states Mark Abrams, a professor of forest ecology at Penn State. "Some oaks are down a bit this year but in no way was it a total wipeout, a zero."

In fact, around State College, he says he found a very impressive crop of pignut hickory nuts.

As for the specter of starving squirrels and other animals, wildlife experts say not to worry.

"Wildlife had done this before and they will continue to survive," says Henry. "It just makes them a little leaner going into winter."


Staff writer Ad Crable can be reached at acrable@LNPnews.com or 481-6029.