This acorn is MINE! Go find your own…
Acorns, squirrels. Squirrels, acorns.
The two go together like peanut butter and jelly…. Sonny and Cher…. possums and cuteness. It’s hard to think about one without thinking of the other.
My local squirrels are blessed to have a big oak tree in my backyard that supplies them with a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of acorns every Fall. Last year, I got a ton of pictures of my fuzzy tailed friends reaping this nutty bonanza… like the handsome chap above with the still-green acorn in his mouth who gets to be this week’s Saturday Squirrel. I even featured a pictorial of a squirrel burying one of these acorns in an SS post last September.
But something’s been missing this year. My poor roof, which has had to endure these acorn beatings year after year, has been silent. Deathly silent, in fact. Last year, the acorn harvest was so plentiful that it sounded like a weeklong hailstorm was taking place. Where are all the acorns!?!?!?
Come on, acorns!!! I know you’re up there somewhere!
The fact is, oak trees are not consistent in the quantity of acorns they produce from year to year. Last year was what is considered a “mast year”… a season in which oak trees will produce an overabundance of acorns. Sometimes, the trees will produce few to no acorns… as my oak is obviously doing this year, and also did in 2010 when the eerie September silence I’m experiencing now was also ever present. So it looks like this winter, my squirrels will be at the mercy of their secret nut caches, ability to find other food sources, and of course, my generosity in refilling their corncob feeder. I can already hear the little stomachs grumbling now…
For less than the price of a cup of coffee, you can feed a hungry squirrel in need!
I guess I better stock up on that corn….
Have a great weekend free of nuttiness!
we screamed OH NO! immediately as we read about a world without nuts…but even a world without the nuts for squirrels is bad. We also have not much acorns and not much nuts on our tree :o(
Looks like an epidemic of non-nuttiness. We are gonna have to round up Sally Struthers… and We Are The World.
The thought of a world without nuts makes me sad.
😦
Exactly like that.
We live in an oak woods … and you’d think we’d have lots of squirrels, but since the bobcat decimated their population some years back, we rarely see any squirrels. Our oak trees are usually — every year — acorn factories. On a bumper years — we have TONS AND TONS of acorns and the acorns are not only plentiful, but huge. They leave dents in the cars when they fall and are as big as small plums. Other critters — chipmunks, birds, bunnies and oddly enough, coyotes and our dogs — also eat them. I wish the squirrels would return, but I think right now, the coyotes are keeping the population down. The coyotes are very wily hunter and will happily eat our pet cats and small dogs, too. There are pluses and minuses to living in a rather wild area.
We’re going to have to find a place to relocate all those bobcats. I think they would love it on Elba, or maybe Alcatraz! That would free up that huge harvest for the critters who can most enjoy it, and they can ship it around the world to squirrels who will have to endure the winter without acorns….
I had no idea there were wily coyotes! 😉
We have trees but sadly not oak trees… we feed our squirrels almonds from Costco. Yeah, I know… we’re crazy. Crazy in love with our squirrel friends! They are so very spoiled. We can call to them and toss the nuts down from our balcony and sometimes they even manage to catch them. Perhaps we can use this as a training technique and build a squirrel army. 🙂
OMG! Squirrels catching nuts is so cute!!! I’d love to be able to do that as well, but I can barely even open my window without making the squirrels head for the hills! At least my squirrels are self-motivated… they do more before 9 AM than I do all…. well, who am I kidding, I sleep all day!
Sorry, I can’t comment because I have “World Without Nuts” in my head to the tune of “World Without Love”
Then my carefully chosen title for today’s post worked like a charm again! I expect some royalties from Peter and Gordon….
Can’t imagine world without nuts…what happens to the saying…sometimes you feel like a nut…sometimes you don’t…:0(
I guess that’s how acorn trees feel sometimes! Someone must have been feeding my trees some Mounds bars…
😦
Funny thing… I went out to fill the corncob feeder this morning, and almost got hit by a falling acorn. Granted, it could have just been an angry squirrel, but maybe the tree isn’t totally fruitless this year…
There he is! he is responsible for our lack, get him! No wait he has corn! Too late! Do you think he will notice we threw a nut at him? Nah, just act casual, he will think it just fell by itself. Hmmm. corn.
I’ve tried to photograph our black squirrels but they only taunt me. They keep leaving half-eaten apples from my neighbour’s tree on the porch rail and the window sills. Cheeky!
Awwww, they’re sharing! That’s so cute! 🙂