I’m tired of hearing people call White Oak “trash trees” or “scrub,” especially when oak-dependent warblers are singing right over their heads.
Oaks feed everyone, through wildfire and drought. Birds and moths depend on them like humans depend on groceries, housing, and social services.
Over 200 species of caterpillar feed on oaks. Over 345 mammals, birds, insects, plants, truffles, a special mistletoe (Phoradendron villosum) and algae need them.
Nesting warblers, flycatchers, vireos, and other denizens of the oaks give thousands of oak-fed insects to their chicks, carve nestholes into dead oak trunks, and build nests in the branches, often hid by a skillful application of oak twigs, spiderwebs, or bits of the oakmoss lichen that covers most trunks.
Most of those birds migrated early, slipping away in August or September. A few weeks of quiet passed, the forest feeling emptier and emptier.
Then, a few days ago, I woke up to find the oaks full of yellow-rumped warblers and the road of quiet Swainson’s thrushes, urgently pecking. A quick check: The road was full of smashed acorns.
Every fall, roads fill with warblers, thrushes, sparrows and towhees in frantic quest of tire-crushed acorn bits. Thousands of fat, fallen nuts layer with hand-shaped, weirdly pink oak leaves. Deer, squirrels, turkeys, and bears eat. Jays carefully plant hundreds to retrieve later; the acorns they forget become new oaks.
People ate acorns here for centuries, dried, shelled, leached to remove the tannins, and ground into flour. They’re nutritious, sustaining and tasty when prepared properly.
Just don’t dry them outside, or they’re liable to vanish into the hungry throats of vast animal communities, sustained mostly by oaks.
Oaks define generosity to me. They’re built to make more than they need — thousands of acorns, leaves and twigs — in the expectation that most of it will be eaten, dropped, and gone by winter. They’re like billionaires who give away their fortune every summer, expecting nothing in return but for the rain, sun, drought, and animals to keep shaping them.
You can literally plant a grove of oaks by throwing down a handful of acorns, and they’ll give you food, shade, birds, moths, and a little light fall color for the rest of your life.
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