To: <fuwafuwausagi@muchomail.com>, "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Raccoon problem - the tasty solution with a bonus squirrelrecipe...
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 21:09:53 -0500
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