Photo ©Douglas Tallamy.
Courtesy of Douglas Tallamy. A single blue jay can plant as many as 4500 acorns each fall.
If you venture onto Medd’s Mountain and “start low and go slow” you will find a small path on the lower trail that leads to a bench at the water’s edge where Baxter Creek joins the millpond.
If you relax for a moment on this bench and look directly across the wetland you will see one of Millbrook’s most majestic oak trees towering over the opposite shore.
I have admired this oak from many vantage points, but this spot is the best for taking in its grandeur. The trunk is incredibly straight with no branching until more than halfway up. At that point, the limbs ascend in a beautiful branching pattern that is spectacular in winter. It must be over 100 feet tall.
To my surprise, when I tried to identify the tree, it turned out to be not a northern white oak (Quercus alba) as I had thought but our most common oak, the bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa). It might also be a natural hybrid, so it will be fun to see what the acorns reveal this fall. If they have a mossy fringe, it is a bur oak. It is certainly in the white oak family, and, like all our native oaks, it’s a keystone species that supports more biodiversity than any other North American tree.
Oaks host more caterpillars than any other native tree, and these caterpillars transfer food from oak leaves to a wide variety of other animals. Most of our native birds raise their young on caterpillars, and we now know, thanks to recent research, that it takes 6,000-9,000 caterpillars to raise one clutch of chickadees. If we want birds, then we need to supply their food, and oaks do this better than anything else in the landscape.
With luck we will have a mast year, when oaks produce an abundance of acorns. Then I will finally be able to definitively identify the tree I’ve admired for so long. But, more importantly, this outpouring of acorns will give this venerable old oak another chance to move around the village. Our new world oaks have evolved with blue jays over 30 million years, and that “ancient mutualism,” as it’s called, gives oaks virtual wings. A single blue jay can plant up to 4500 acorns each fall. As they tuck them away for winter, they will consistently forget the location of most of them. These forgotten acorns become food for mice, deer, squirrels, wood duck, and many other animals. But a precious few may root in the fall and leaf out next spring to start a new generation. If they are allowed to grow, they too may become sources of food and shelter, not to mention beauty and a shady spot to sit, for the enjoyment and sustenance of creatures human and non-human alike, far into the future.
If you’re interested in learning more about oaks, I recommend Douglas Tallamy’s book The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees, the source of much of the information above. If you are interested in native plants generally, his two other books, Bringing Nature Home and Nature’s Best Hope are great reads.
For ideas about what native plants to grow in Millbrook, check out birdgardens.ca.
GET OUT! By Lisa Stefaniak
