While sitting in the park watching my children play during the last weeks of October, I heard a woman talking with her friend about the thick carpet of nuts laying all around.  She scraped at a few of them with the toe of her shoe and shook her head with dismay, saying, “Wow, I bet it’s going to be a very cold winter.” 

This is one of those things we all like to say in the fall -- if the hornets’ nest is high, if the woolly bear caterpillar’s stripes are thick, if the acorns fall in abundance --  then it is going to be a rough winter ahead.   

But just days after I heard that woman comment on the abundance of acorns, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced weather predictions for the coming months, and according to their best figuring we can expect milder-than-normal temperatures this year.  So either the folks at NOAA haven’t been for a walk in the woods around here or the large numbers of acorns falling have very little to do with real forecasting. 

While her weather prediction might be wrong, the abundance that woman in the park noticed was real.  We are indeed experiencing what scientists call a “mast year,” when almost all of the oak trees produce lots and lots of acorns simultaneously.  Such simultaneous abundance has been known to sometimes occur on a huge scale, with mast years sometimes witnessed uniformly up and down the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.  Other years, it is more of a regional event, occurring only over stretches a few miles wide. 

Although there is no word yet on the size and scale this year’s acorn mast, Lynette Scaffidi, a naturalist at Brookside Nature Center in Wheaton, says that this year’s abundance follows two years of low acorn production locally, which is a typical cycle for oak trees.  You might have seen one or two trees last year that produced a bumper crop, but not like this year where many oaks are producing large numbers of the nuts. 

There’s also an interesting connection between rodent numbers and mast years, she says.  When rodent populations are high, the acorn numbers are not.  “Why produce a bunch of acorns just to have them eaten?  That’s too expensive for the tree, energy-wise,” she remarks.

But how the trees know to produce simultaneously and at times in opposition to the rodents remains mysterious.  Ecological researchers don’t know how the trees signal each other to begin the large-scale production.  There are theories that the fungal filaments which pass nutrients from one tree to the next may act as signaling mechanisms, allowing the forest to get synchronized under our feet and out of our view.  And weather the year before a mast most likely plays a role in the timing of the event.  But how these things work on regional scales remains unclear, and why the trees have developed this adaptation also remains mysterious.  Somehow the whole thing seems to provide the oaks a way to overcome some particularly large environmental challenge. 

Either way, many acorns will be leftover when this season comes to a close; the animals out there will not be able to eat all of the nuts that fall from the trees.  This will cause a new crop of oaks to sprout up and begin growing over the next couple of years.

To some people this sounds like really bad news because oaks are wind-pollinated, and like many plants that depend upon breezes to reproduce they can cause a nightmarish allergic reaction within certain human immune systems.  The pollen seems to lodge itself in the throat and eyes like microscopic Velcro, and can spur everything from an itchy, watery sensation to a horribly painful sinus headache. 

I know, because I am one of those people.  When the oak pollen peaks in April I am indeed miserable and fumble around for my antihistamines.  I curse at dry winds that seem to torture me with every breeze, and the oak catkins which land on my car seem to mock me like pollen-filled tendrils reaching across my windshield, leaving yellow, smeary deposits when the wipers go across the glass.

And yet… I cannot resist the appeal of a giant oak when I see it.  The branches of many of these great trees stretch out overhead like the arms of enormous, grey grandfathers, their funny hand-like leaves providing cool shade in summer and their trunks making beautiful silhouettes against the snows of winter.  I wish more people would plant them, and  I hate to see even one get cut down.  When I drive past an old one cut into logs I am truly sad. 

So I guess if the pay-off for a few weeks of allergies is more oak trees, I’ll take it.  My watery nose will only last a short time, but the beauty of an oak can last for decades and feed legions of animals in a forest, even an urban forest like ours.  I can always buy more tissues, more antihistamines, and more windshield fluid.  It is impossible to buy what an oak gives back in beauty and utility. 

I also think the acorns are lovely.  While I was walking last week along the trails in Sligo Creek Park I found myself rolling one between my index finger and thumb.  It was a meditative way to exercise.

My kids like the acorns, too.  Walking off to search the ground carefully with her head pointed downward, my three-year-old daughter reminds me of someone searching the beach for prized seashells. She hollers with pure joy when she finds a perfect one with smooth, green sides.  My son, on the other hand, likes the emptied brown caps of the nuts, and considers a perfect “double” or “triple” to be a lucky charm of sorts.  They laugh when I compare the nuts to funny little faceless men wearing tweed driving caps, or say they look like olives made from wood. 

After a while we stuff our pockets full and carry a few of them home as treasures.  We are squirrelly this way, and anyone looking under our couch is likely to find leftovers, drying out among the dust bunnies.