With animals rushing about stocking up for winter, Scott explains plants have strategies for ensuring their own species survival.
September's full harvest moon applies not just to farm and garden harvests. Wildlife is harvesting the season's wild bounty, too – from acorns to blueberries, from beechnuts to wild cherries. As anyone who has ever shared a backyard with an oak tree knows, that bounty is cyclical. One year a helmet is advised as protection against falling acorns! Other years there's hardly any.
Nature bears its fruits, nuts and seeds in cycles of plenty that guarantee the next generation. If red oaks bore the same number of acorns every fall, the many wildlife species that favor acorns would consume them all. Instead there's a bumper crop, followed by a couple lean years. This periodic over-the-top boom year ensures leftovers that will take root and grow.
Acorn and beechnut crops are what wildlife biologists watch with special attention because wildlife depends on these two above all others. In lean years we see wild turkeys along roadsides and at backyard birdfeeders; and reports of bears at those feeders increase. In bountiful years they stay in the protective cover of the forest, which is where their instincts tell them to be.
Beech trees produce a good nut crop every two-to-three years, and can provide just about all of a bear's diet in the fall as they fatten up for a long winter sleep. This year, blackberries will fill some of that bill, along with blueberries. It's been a bumper year for both in the state.
And so, by the light of September's well-named harvest moon, both the proverbial "man and beast" bring in the harvest in preparation for the long, dark days of winter.
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