Acorns aren't just food for wildlife, they are the seeds for the next generation of white oaks. For the past decade, researchers say there haven’t been enough of them in Connecticut.
“Prolonged periods without adequate white oak acorn production are leading to fewer seedlings becoming established in our forested areas,” J.P. Barsky, research forester for Connecticut’s Department of Environmental Science & Forestry.
This year’s annual acorn survey shows the state’s white oaks once again failed to produce any significant acorn numbers.
Barsky surveyed 275 white oak trees throughout the state. Only 39% had visible acorns and of those, Barsky said, the trees averaged less than 4 acorns per tree.
To put that in perspective, Barsky said there have been years where he has counted hundreds of acorns on a single red oak in 30 seconds.
Barsky said it’s not known yet why this white oak acorn drought has lasted for the past ten years.
But he said mature white oaks have diminished across Connecticut’s landscape in recent years due to repeated insect defoliation from the invasive spongy moth and drought.
Not just a Connecticut concern
The future of white oaks is a concern throughout the eastern and central United States.
The White Oak Initiative, formed in 2017 by the American Forest Foundation and the University of Kentucky, said 75% of the nation’s white oaks are mature and they are not being replaced at a pace that will support long-term sustainability.
“It’s an uphill battle for the white oaks,” Barsky said.
He partly blames the species’ DNA.
“White oaks are generally not high producers of acorns,” he said, unlike their cousin, the red oak.
When an acorn is produced and falls to the ground, it faces the added difficulty of trying to get its roots through layers of leaves that have accumulated over decades to reach soil. If it fails to do that, it dries up and dies.
When a white oak acorn is able to take root and produce a seedling, Barsky said they are slower to grow than their competitors, like red oak, maple and birch, so they can lose the battle for sun and nutrients and die.
So white oaks can benefit from human intervention.
“Some of the other work that we've been doing, in some of these younger stands, is to release [white oak saplings] from some competition, so that they do have a chance of forming the future canopy of the forest,” Barsky said.
Another danger is hungry wildlife. White oak seedlings are very nutritious, so many get eaten.
The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station says there was a sliver of good news for white oaks this fall in Virginia where researchers there reported a good crop of white oak acorns.
