North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Donna &/or Kieran" <holycow@cookeville.com>]

Hey Fluff, I note that if you leave out the coon and put some apples and 
flour in your recipe, it would be pretty good, real NAFEX fare.  I remember 
Dan Hemenway's comment about hickory nuts, that some years they ate a lot of 
nuts, and some years they ate a lot of squirrels.  The alternating of heavy 
and light crops gives nut trees the opportunity to control squirrel 
populations.  There will be a lot of squirrels in the year after a heavy 
crop, but little for them to eat.  They take great risks in searching for 
food, which exposes them to predators and hopefully reduces the population. 
We had big mast year followed by nothing the next year.  I felt so bad for 
the squirrels knowing that almost no one hunts squirrels around here anymore 
so they were likely to starve.  The population crash was so extreme that the 
next winter black walnuts lay under the trees till summer, there were no 
squirrels to eat them.     Donna