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Squirrels need bailout after tough acorn year
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Published: January 1, 2009
Even the squirrels are falling on hard times.
Their prime winter entree -- acorns -- are in short supply, particularly in Charlotte, where red oak trees appear to be on reproductive strike.
Their counterparts in the white oak family have dropped a bumper crop. But white oaks are mostly country trees.
In the city, red oaks -- primarily willow oaks -- command 75 percent of the oak canopy.
So, as winter sets in, expect city squirrels to be attacking your bird feeders with greater aggression.
"There's a red oak hanging over my office," said UNC Charlotte biologist Larry Mellichamp, who runs the school's greenhouse. "It has a flat tin roof, and for three weeks in autumn the acorns drop on that tin roof and drive me to such distraction I want to go out and cut the tree down.
"I don't think I've heard the first acorn drop this year."
Mellichamp and Bruce Fraedrich, a plant pathologist for the Bartlett Tree Co., say the culprit is the Easter Sunday freeze of 2007.
It takes a red oak two years to produce acorns. White oaks are yearly acorn bearers. Just as Charlotte's red oaks were flowering in April 2007, the temperature dropped below 20 and blooms withered.
"If they had flowered normally in '07, we would be having acorns in great abundance," Fraedrich said. "The flowers just never pollinated. A lot of animals are going to find leaner times this winter."
From a mush to none
Usually this time of year, the top of Charlotte lawyer Martin Hunter's driveway is a mush of crushed acorns, fallen from a willow oak that towers over the driveway and his neighbor's house.
"I've not seen a one this fall," Hunter said. "Usually they drop on my cars and sound like ping-pong balls. When I didn't hear them and we weren't crushing them with the cars, I started to wonder if global warming was getting the acorns, too.
"When things aren't the way they're supposed to be, you begin to worry."
Usually, his yard is full of squirrels.
Not now.
Hunter keeps his bird feeders well-supplied, and he doesn't plan on scattering food for squirrels.
"I won't shoo them away as much this winter," he said. "I'm no big fan of squirrels, but I don't want them to suffer.
"They'll be getting a winter bird seed bailout."
In the front yard of Bill and Ellen Archer's Cotswold home is a sweeping shumard oak, a member of the red oak family.
Most falls, it drops acorns as big as marshmallows.
"I don't believe I've seen a single shumard oak acorn," Ellen Archer said. "Other trees are having a robust fruiting year. But the red oaks aren't.
"It's like: First, the stock market. Now, this."
After Archer realized the acorns weren't dropping, she hung an extra feeder in the yard and filled it with sunflower seed, which squirrels devour. She's also crammed dog biscuits in a suet feeder for them to gnaw on.
She's more worried about the other animals that can't get to bird feeders -- like possums, raccoons and deer. For them, she delivers platters of kitchen scraps to a compost pile. "Every day we add to the pile," she said. "So all the critters will have something to nibble on when we get some real winter."
Never a sure thing
By now, squirrels and other animals such as bears and deer should have foraged for acorns and stored their winter food. In fall, squirrels begin eating and storing food to survive the winter.
They eat other foods, but their main winter diet is acorns.
Yet, even with white oaks, acorn production fluctuates year to year. The healthiest and largest oaks can't accumulate enough food and energy to produce strong crops two straight years.
The red oak's failed acorn crop could mean two things: fewer squirrels in Charlotte come spring and fewer young willow oaks because their seeds weren't available for squirrels to disperse.
"The lesson here is to diversify the urban forest in case one variety has a hard year," Mellichamp said. "You just can't depend on a bumper crop of nuts or fruits every year."
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