Nut drop was more important this year than others. I needed to seed a few clearings in the woodlot created by the logger last winter who removed the dead and diseased American beech trees from the property. The prescription called for reseeding the clearings with pine, red oak and such, but I wanted to try black walnuts. In 1964 the previous owner of our property allowed a selective cut of hard maple logs for use as veneer. This left a legacy of towering, over-aged maples and clearings.

Three black walnut trees grew at a junction of the fence lines near the sugar bush. The squirrels got to work to the point that middle-aged black walnuts now dominate the southern half of the woodlot. I had assumed that the upper half of the woods created a mini-climate which allowed them to withstand the winter cold and the late spring frosts which kill their flowers. But the climate is changing, and for years I have gathered nuts from an exceptionally cold-hardy walnut right at the northwest corner of the woodlot.

Last year in anticipation of the cut, I had planted about ten gallons of walnuts. No sprouts appeared this year, though I have found the odd walnut seedling amid the logging debris which a squirrel must have planted, along with a few little oaks.

In 2005 when I started the walnut orchard, the Grey squirrels (black squirrels named after a biologist) took an inordinate interest in my work, perversely digging them up only to replant them, usually six to ten feet from their original positions on my 20 foot grid. Because I had planted two per hill, I was forced to compare the squirrels’ planting efficiency to mine. Suffice it to say that it is hard to mow two, 4 acre fields with the best seedlings stuck in the middle of the rows. At the time this was a real annoyance, but over the years when it has become harder to stomp around over fallen limbs, I decided to see if I could put the Greys to work on my project.

One of the truisms of forest management is that if you want to plant nut trees, take two pails of nuts to the woods: one for the squirrels to eat, and the other one for them to plant. Whoever dreamed that up had never watched a chipmunk stow the contents of a five gallon pail of nuts in his burrow between dusk and dawn. Red squirrels also work notoriously long hours. With my game camera on my first cache, I recorded a single red squirrel working its way through a pail of nuts, pausing only to attempt to kill a Grey who dropped in to pilfer one. The red started an hour before dawn and worked quite late in the evening, with every scene showing it tracing the same route up the side of a large maple tree with a walnut. The red also outwitted me when I attempted an assassination with my shotgun, so I gave up and moved elsewhere for my seeding efforts.

Later efforts with camera and pails of nuts showed that a Grey squirrel takes a long time with much tail-shaking before she touches the first nut. Before long, though, the whole family gets involved, hulling the nuts and burying them in shallow holes in a widening radius from the initial pile. One camera setting suggested that the three Greys might be running up a maple tree behind the camera, so I reversed it and shot down a long lane. The following day every Grey which descended the tree had a hulled nut in her mouth, and often travelled as far as 400′ down the driveway before the film clip ended. They certainly appeared to be planting walnuts in the area.

The gray squirrel was easy to identify as the matriarch of the nest. She also has a habit of planting things around the flower bed outside my breakfast window, so she was an ideal test subject. One day she worked extremely hard to plant a nut at the edge of the driveway where the fuel truck stops. It took her a long time and she put great effort into getting the nut into the hard earth, thencombing the grass to make the planting disappear. The next time I looked, the nut was gone and she was planting one on softer ground next to a cherry tree fifty feet away. I have begun to wonder how many times a walnut gets planted before the Grey decides to leave it.

In the woodlot I decided to locate my baiting sites where I had observed Grey squirrels fleeing at the approach of my UTV. This seems to work, according to the camera.

A typical nut cache

From what I have seen, here are some guidelines for getting squirrels to do your work for you:

-Avoid chipmunks and red squirrels, unless you are looking for an easy supply of nuts. If so, shovel pails-full of them from red squirrel caches which they seem to forget. Yesterday with a little aluminum shovel I filled three, five-gallon pails from a gap between rotting logs in a pile beside the trail (see photo above). Last year I shovelled twenty gallon loads from two separate open-air caches around the walnut trees.

If your bait pile disappears overnight, it’s not a good spot for Greys.

If the bait sits for a day or two, and then starts disappearing sporadically until about half of it is gone, that’s a Grey. They seem to loose interest in a cache after a while. Perhaps they are motivated by a sense of scarcity, or perhaps it is the novelty of a new discovery which intrigues them.

Red squirrels ignore overly large walnuts. A Grey tried valiantly on camera to carry one of these, but gave up after a couple of half-dozen I had left him. I decided that the likelihood of successful planting greatly increases if the nuts are more like golf balls than tennis.

Greys learn very quickly. At first I put caches near tree trunks for safety, but gradually I started advertising the baits on stumps. They seem happy with this arrangement. It may be that the hawk has finally left.

Walnuts don’t always sprout the first May after planting. They can take two or three years to grow, according to Ed Patchell of the Kemptville Forest Centre.

I wish I could take credit for planting this seedling.