Cleaning Up After The Trees

 In October, a maple tree before your window lights up your room like a great lamp.

-- John Burroughs

October, the year's tenth month (with a name reflecting when it was the eighth month under the Roman calendar), is a time of transition. October is when you really notice it is darker later in the morning and earlier in the evening. October is when the weather switches from over 80 degrees one day to cold enough to break out the winter quilt the next. 

The acorn doesn't fall far from the tree - a small sample of
what I have been sweeping up from the patio.
(Margo D. Beller)

October is when the pumpkins, squashes and dried corn threshes start showing up on suburban doorsteps with the September mums. You realize you are closer to the end of the year than the beginning, and you wonder if there will be more snow this year than last.

For me, October is when I start thinking about bringing plants back into the house and putting up storm windows. I notice fewer catbirds in the yard but hear white-throated sparrows. Raptors are on the move and I see skeins of Canada geese overhead, heading south. Soon I will be putting out more seed feeders and suet.

The "flowers" on the ornamental grasses are the
best they've been in years. (Margo D. Beller)

Yes, there are also the colorful autumn leaves that send people into their cars to drive north to Vermont or the Adirondacks or other such hotspots. In my yard the red leaves of the maple and the dogwood, the brown of the white oak, the yellow of the elms and the scarlet of the red oak will be very pretty, at least for a short while. And then the usual October winds will blow them off the trees to become that much more mess to be cleaned up. 

Yes, October is when things start falling out of trees.

This week, the summery days gave way to foggy, cool nights and my sleep has been continually interrupted by the sharp rap of oak acorns falling on the enclosed porch's roof. The squirrels are foraging in the trees by day, and by night the trees must figure it's time to spread some seeds all over the ground beneath them to perpetuate the species. 

The dropping does not cease. Sometimes, if the acorn hits a metal gutter, it can sound like a gunshot. Most of the time, however, it sounds like someone is banging into something in the night.

Two types of nuts falling from my trees. (Margo D. Beller)

Despite the noise I am glad I have this roof over my porch. I have friends with open decks who are forced to huddle under the picnic table umbrella as acorn bombs drop from the sky. When my in-laws lived in New Jersey the big oak next to the driveway regularly pitted the old family sedan, making it look like it had been in a hail storm.

My problem is when the acorns make it hard to walk to the feeder pole or the water dish. That is why I have gone out on the patio three times - so far - to herd marble-like oak acorns with my broom into my large garden pail, lug it to a corner of my yard and dump it for any squirrel, chipmunk, deer, woodpecker, jay or crow that might want a snack.

But there are many, many more acorns all over the lawn, and even when I am drinking coffee on the porch, congratulating myself on a job well done, I hear the acorns continuing to drop. It will be like this for weeks.

What hangs up will eventually come down. (Margo D. Beller)

It is not the tree's fault, of course. It is just trying to survive. If the trees were in the woods this would be a barely noticed process. But these trees are not in the woods, they border the property of my suburban yard. And so I notice big time.

There are some years when there are many more acorns than there are squirrels, like this year. There are some years there are many more squirrels than there are acorns, like last year. This boom and bust is not as random as it may seem.

Acorns are seeds and they are dropped by the oaks to make more trees. But the seeds are also food. The more food there is, the more an animal eats and then the more it breeds. More animals mean more food is needed. When seeds are plentiful, everyone is happy - the animals and the trees. But if there are too many animals and not enough seeds, there will be a decrease in new trees. That seems to prompt trees to shut down making seeds, which then cuts back on the animal population because there is less food.

The technical name for this boom and bust cycling is masting. According to the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, mast is the fruit of forest trees, in this case acorns. During "mast" years, the trees "go into overdrive, producing enormous amounts of nuts." Then comes the bust, a year or more when there are very few nuts produced.

How the pretty autumn leaves will eventually end up...
(Margo D. Beller)

Why does this happen? Again, from the Foundation:

Scientists don’t know the exact trigger for mast years, but it most likely has to do with climate events in past stressful years. Trees may produce an abundance of offspring as a hedge in case the stressful times continue. Stressors may include droughts, heat waves, or cold spells.

I'm no scientist but I know there is a lot of wacky stuff going on in the atmosphere around the world - a rare tropical storm in California, abundant wildfires in Canada, deadly floods in Libya. We are on pace to have the hottest year on record after having the hottest past few months on record.

... and the pods. (Margo D. Beller)

Closer to home, this has been a very wet year. The same abundance of rain that has helped keep my dogwood tree alive, produced the "flowers" on my ornamental grasses for the first time in years and kept the spider mites and white flies off my flowers likely produced favorable conditions for the oak trees to produce acorns after a year when not many were produced. The old trees have grown and now more of their branches are above the porch roof, something I didn't notice until the acorns started raining down heavier than usual this year. 

The oaks are not alone, of course. Many other trees are now dropping their seeds, including the bane of my existence, the black locust. October is when I notice how many of the long, black pods are hanging, waiting for some signal or gust of wind to drop like a blanket over my lawn. Like the acorns, eventually they will all come down and be swept away, to be forgotten until the next October.