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



Alan and all,

   

It was 07 that EVERYTHING froze out in the southeast.(except blackberries and hazels, and quite small crops of black walnuts and persimmons) 

 " I have to warn her that in my area a similar freeze several years ago has apparently led to an intensifying of squirrel wars as the oaks and black-walnuts have been thrown into a biennial pattern by having been frozen out just one season.  The year after a freeze-out these trees tend to bear immense crops that then reduce the trees energy to produce anything but a meager crop the following year.  I wonder when this pattern will balance out a bit and we don't have alternating years of population explosion of rodents and then a starve out when they consume everything they can reach before the long cruel winter."

 

Actually, I think the trees do this on purpose whenever possible.  I guess that reliable production would keep the squirrel population high enough to move all the nuts produced, but it would also allow the weevils and other bugs to eat the crop more efficiently.  Let's see, in 06 there was a good crop of black walnuts and everyone commented that the nuts laid on the ground all winter, no squirrels to eat them.  Then in 07 the very few walnuts produced were snapped up immediately but there wasn't enough for anything to eat that year.  Now this the biggest fruit and mast year anyone living has ever seen, there are very few squirrels to enjoy the crops.  Not many bugs either, though through one of the great miracles of Nature there were chestnut weevils to eat practically all my chinese chestnuts this year.  According to the book they have this biennial cropping thing worked out, and stay in the ground for two years.    

    I hope the sunspots get going and we get some rain again.  In 1988, the final year of that 4 year drought, without modern transportation the people and livestock in Tennessee would have looked like famine photos from Africa.       Donna