the Walnut Diary

I had carefully gone over the new hemlock storm door with epoxy, covering knots and any shakes which could potentially cause slivers. Then it was time to leave the stuff alone so that it could set. So I got into the Kioti and went for a drive through the woodlot. It was the right time of year, and the rain had stopped.

The surprise was a large pile of fresh, green, black walnuts, just lying there on the ground. The pile adjoined an old metal tank, a relic left by the owners who cleared out in 1966. A rodent had dug a den underneath it. By the hoarding behaviour and the evidence of great industry in the nut collecting, I assumed that the red squirrel had run out of room in the den, and was currently figuring out what to do with his crop surplus. I called my neighbour, Lloyd, and asked him if he would like to steal from a squirrel. He responded with enthusiasm.

Lloyd was impressed by the size of the hoard, and we went to work loading pails full of nuts into the box of the Kioti, both of us chuckling about the fun of stealing from a red squirrel.

Grays earn a farmer’s respect, but reds are nasty little devils, and far too quick of foot. Grays are willing helpers on reforestation projects. Dump a pail of acorns or walnuts in the woods, and about half of them will come up as sprouts. If a red finds them, though, every nut will go into a hollow tree or a deep burrow to rot, with no hope of growth. It is for this reason we hate to see red squirrels hoarding nuts. Grays are scatter hoarders, burying their nuts at the perfect planting depth in the sod, then relying on memory and amazing spatial awareness to find their caches under deep snow. It is impossible to watch a gray emerge from a snowbank with a walnut and not admire the little guy. Of course many nuts are not needed or forgotten, and they get to grow into trees in your flower beds and lawn.

Lloyd and some of his friends are replacing dying ash trees on their property with other growth, and the black walnut tree is showing considerable success and hardiness in the changing ecology of Leeds County, so the nuts will either be planted in late fall, or dumped in likely locations to enlist the help of local gray squirrels.

Here is a link to the research I refer to glancingly in the above entry:

https://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/pdf/10.1139/z03-143