FoodFood InformationNuts
Acorns
Up to 50 species of wildlife depend on acorns for a substantial part oftheir diet. Acorn woodpeckers, deer and the western gray squirrel are nearthe top of that list.In some years, acorns are not even available. So thesespecies need to be somewhat elastic in their diet.
For humans you would just get a stomach ache if you ate straight acornswithout leaching them. For several Native American tribes, acorns providedup to 50 percent of their diet. The Native Americans put acorns in a basketand put the basket in a running stream for a week or so to leach the tannins.One contemporary solution is putting acorn meal into a cloth bag and hangingthe bag in a toilet tank to produce the same effect without wasting water.
The protein content is only 7.5 percent, while the fat content is 24.4 percent.It would almost be like eating butter. Acorns are also high in carbohydrates.For deer it's a tremendous energy source. In a good acorn year, deer willgrow very fat and more twin fawns will be born the next spring. Given achoice, deer will eat about 90 percent acorns, if they're readily available.And they'll put on tremendous amounts of fat.
Oak trees in a good year are highly productive. Oak trees can produce upto 3,000 pounds of acorns per acre of canopy. By contrast typical annualgrassland in California produces about 2,000 pounds per acre. But the acorncrops from blue oaks and valley oaks seem to be strongly correlated withtemperatures in the spring, when they're flowering. And in fact, when it'sdrier, they tend to do better. Some oak trees take one year to produce theiracorns; others take two. The lack of a consistent "masting" orseed-producing cycle in oaks may be a way that oak trees have developedto trick the animals that eat the seeds, keeping them from becoming so dependenton the crop that they are primed to eat it all. The trees produce so manyacorns some years that the animals that feed on them can't possibly eatthem all. To get past that gauntlet of predators and make it to grow upto be a big oak tree is very difficult, especially for valley oaks and blueoaks.
Some acorn woodpeckers will actually hatch a second nest of eggs in yearswhen the crop is sufficient. Scrub jays eat acorns, and also "plant"them by stashing the nuts in places they hope to find again. Some of thehidden acorns end up in places where they can grow. Acorns for jays arejust junk food. They store them up and use them as fast food.
Deamer 11/20/96