The Good Oaks

In less than a week it will be October, the month when Doug Tallamy's book, The Nature of Oaks, begins. In the prologue, Tallamy writes, "Oaks support more forms of life and more fascinating interactions than any other tree genus in North America". Why start the book in October? Because, he says, "it was October when I decided to write this book."

In 1945, an 80 year old black oak was struck by lightning and fell on Aldo Leopold's land located in the state's sand counties region on the south bank of the Wisconsin River northeast of Baraboo, Wisconsin. This land, now known as The Shack and Farm, has become notable and widely celebrated through his iconic book, A Sand County Almanac, a collection of essays published in 1949 that blends poetic nature writing with deep ecological philosophy. The next year he cut up the fallen oak for firewood to heat his shack and wrote about the years witnessed by that oak over its lifetime in the February chapter, "The Good Oak".

On September 21, five students from the University of Wisconsin La Crosse joined several other volunteers at a tree plantation on the corner of County F and FA for a work day and to learn about the trees as part of their capstone projects. This land, called Skemp 2, was acquired by the Mississippi Valley Conservancy in the early 2000's as part of the La Crosse Bluffland Protection Program and subsequently deeded over to the City of La Crosse with a conservation easement. In 2010, MVC planted hundreds of trees on 7 acres of what had been a corn field. These trees were mostly oaks- red, white, bur, and swamp white, but also some shag bark hickory and cherry. And the squirrels added some walnuts! The trees were initially protected by tubes, but when they were removed a few years later, most of the young trees suffered from constant deer browse. And what was left were not trees, but mostly small bushy "want to be trees". As most know, the deer population in Hixon Forest is very high- it has been estimated that there are over 100 deer per square mile in Hixon compared to a healthy carrying capacity of up to about 20 to 25. With that many deer looking for food, the young oaks didn't stand a chance. But with a lot of help from volunteers, the trees were protected with 6 foot high cages starting in 2017, and as the trees grew out of the cages, they were moved to protect other trees. Now most of them are out of the reach of the deer and are thriving. Some have even started to produce acorns, a food staple for many insects, birds, and mammals! Here is one swamp white oak on the property loaded with acorns in a photo taken on September 21, 2026:

In the October chapter of Tallamy's book, blue jays are featured. He describes how a single jay can bury up to 4,500 acorns each fall up to a mile away, but remember where only about a quarter of them are buried. The rest have a chance of growing into a tree. Some speculate that the oaks were able to move north in North America significantly faster after the last glaciers receded because of blue jays. Also in this chapter, Tallamy discusses masting, that mysterious phenomena whereby oaks synchronize their production of acorns every few years yielding a bounty crop. The why of doing this is easy to speculate upon- the most widely held view is that it is an adaptation against acorn predation, flooding the system with so many acorns all at once that it overwhelms the critters that feed on them, thereby increasing the chance that some will be able to become trees. The how of doing this is still baffling. How do the trees "communicate" and coordinate their acorn production? Is it via chemical signals? Or is it through a "neural-like network" of fungi in the soil?

Subsequent chapters continue to delve into the world of oaks. How oaks are a keystone plant supporting a whole host of animals, including more caterpillars than any other genera of trees in most of North America and how many birds depend on those caterpillars to raise their young. Indeed, according to Tallamy, a pair of chickadees feed their young mostly caterpillars collecting 350 to 570 every single day, depending on how many chicks they have, for the 16 to 18 days it takes the chicks to fledge. That's a total of 6000 to 9000 caterpillars required for one pair of chickadees to raise one clutch of baby birds! And many of those caterpillars come from oaks.

The odd behavior of some oaks retaining their leaves through winter called marcescence is discussed in the December chapter, explaining that one theory is to protect the buds- "when leaves are retained around nutritious buds, it makes it more difficult to eat buds without getting a mouthful of dead leaves, which are decidely poor in nutrition and taste." Unfortunately, this did not deter the deer very much on Skemp 2! Tallamy continues through the year, month by month, bringing the reader more interesting information about these majestic trees.

In 2090, most of us will no longer be here, but the oaks on Skemp 2 will be a relatively young age of 80 years, the age when Leopold's oak came down. His oak was 30 inches in diameter and showed growth rings from 1945 on the outside to 1865 at its core. He speculated that it managed to be one out of a thousand acorns in 1865 to survive and grow into such a tree because of a "low in rabbits"- "no oak grows above the reach of rabbits without a decade or more of getting girdled each winter and re-sprouting during the following summer". He "mourns the loss of the old tree" but knows its progeny will be around to take over its job of wood-making. After his oak seasons while on the ground for one year, he begins cutting it up for firewood. As he does so, he watches as "little chips of history spew from the saw cut" and chronicles the life of the tree as he cuts through the years, starting in 1945. Through the 1930's when "the bootlegger" owned the land and "hated this farm", to the roaring 20's "when everything grew bigger and better in heedlessness and arrogance". "We cut 1908 , a dry year when forests burned fiercely, and Wisconsin parted with its last cougar" ... "1899 when the last passenger pigeon collided with a charge of shot near Babcock"... "1896 when 25,000 prairie chickens were shipped to market from the village of Spooner alone" and into the 1860's when "thousands died to settle the question: Is the man-man community lightly to be dismembered? They settled it, but they did not see, nor do we yet see, that the same question applies to the man-land community." The last paragraph in the chapter reads, "These things I ponder as the kettle rings, and the good oak burns to red coals on white ashes. Those ashes, come spring, I will return to the orchard at the foot of the sandhill. They will come back to me again, perhaps as red apples, or perhaps in the spirit of enterprise in some fat October squirrel, who, for reasons unknown to himself, is bent on planting acorns."

In 2090, perhaps one of our 80 year old oaks will also come down after being struck by lightning and a person like Leopold will cut it up for firewood and ponder the history witnessed by that tree. Who knows what the little chips of history will show as the first cuts are made. How will he describe the years of the 2080's down to 2026? Time will tell, but as Yogi said, predictions are hard to make, especially about the future. When the year 2026 is reached, however, and the final cuts are made to 2010, what will spew from the cut? Will he know that the oak was planted in an old corn field and was browsed, not by rabbits, but by an outsized deer herd? And will he know that his tree, along with all of those surrounding it, were nurtured by the hands of many volunteers like those five UWL students? Most of all, will he say that the man-land question has been settled?