Formed at Seoul's Yonsei University, the nascent Acorn Rangers group polices the bucolic campus, scaring off other humans from swiping squirrel food.... Strolling across campus, Ms. Park, a junior, sprung into action after spotting an acorn assailant: a woman in her early 60s, clutching a plastic bag stuffed with the tree nuts.In Wisconsin state parks, the rule is: "[Y]ou may pick edible fruits, edible nuts, wild mushrooms, wild asparagus and watercress for personal consumption." Personal consumption. Not to start an acorn powder business.
"The squirrels will starve!" barked Ms. Park, her voice booming so loudly that other acorn hunters -- human ones -- scurried away. The two argued for nearly an hour....
Over the past five years, there has been a fivefold increase in criminal charges for illegal gathering of "forest products," according to the Korea Forest Service. The few violators ever caught in the act face up to five years in prison or a maximum fine of roughly $40,000....
At Bukhansan National Park, a popular hiking destination in Seoul, a team of 200 employees and volunteers are now deployed to catch nut thieves. One year the confiscated acorns totaled nearly 450 pounds, such a large haul that they used a helicopter to redistribute the loot for the squirrels....
We have a huge oak tree in our yard. We can get acorns so easily I wouldn't even use the word "forage."
Anyway, you can't just eat them. They're full of tannin and it makes them bitter and irritating to your digestive system. You have to process them. Lots of info on how to do it here. Me, I love crackers, and I'm trying to be low carb at the moment, so... maybe. Our squirrels are doing just fine.
But is it really true that acorns are a "superfood"?
“Basically all nuts are nutritionally healthy in moderation…what makes acorns different is their abundance in North American forests,” says Wayne Askew, professor emeritus of the Division of Nutrition at University of Utah College of Health. “Acorns contain large amounts of protein, carbohydrates, and fats, as well as the minerals calcium, phosphorus, and potassium, and the vitamin niacin.” A former instructor of the Wilderness Nutrition class, Askew “used acorns as an example of a wild, edible food for foraging that would be a good energy and protein source and relatively safe (compared to mushrooms for example).”So, it seems that if you're happy buying whatever nuts they have at your grocery store, the only reason to branch out to acorns is if you want the satisfaction of acquiring your nuts directly from the trees and you don't feel bad about competing with the squirrelly critters who can't go to the store.
You could compensate by buying stuff at the store to feed the squirrels, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do that. A lot of people feed the birds, then get annoyed that squirrels get into the bird food. So one thing you could do — assuming you feed the birds, and you're gathering the acorns in your yard for yourself — is to stop getting annoyed at the squirrels that eat the birdfood. Does that solve all the problems — at least for people with their own oak trees? NO! You should not be feeding the birds!
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The obvious shortcut is to eat the squirrels. They probably have niacin.
I'll bet I could start a rescue organization for Pet Rocks. I'll sell bumper stickers proclaiming "Save the Orphaned Pet Rocks!"
Chicks dig that stuff.
While I don't have an oak tree in the yard, I have been putting out birdseed for neighborhood birds and squirrels for almost 30 years. The birdseed gets dumped out...by which I mean "lovingly presented"...on our front and back porches every morning. Our cats enjoy watching the birds and squirrels as close to the windows merrily chomping away, acting quite oblivious of the predators inside the house but only inches away.
After nightfall, the remaining birdseed is gobbled up by neighborhood possums, which are also a visual feast for the cats.
I've never understood why some people think squirrels shouldn't be allowed to eat birdseed but I guess they have the right to be wrong about that. I suspect they're wrong about a lot of other things as well, bless their hearts, but as long as they don't get between me and my bag of birdseed there won't be any trouble.
Squirrels are rats with bushy tails.
Nichevo said...
The obvious shortcut is to eat the squirrels. They probably have niacin.
I’ve heard that they are high in cholesterol.
Acorns also feed mice. Mice feed ticks. A bumper crop of acorns leads to a bumper crop of ticks.
You might want to root around under your oak tree for truffles.
All this worry about the squirrels reminds me of this episode of 99% invisible:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/uptown-squirrel/
Squirrels as we think of them are not really "natural" to the environment.
That episode also has a great discussion about how squirrels are the #1 threat to the US electrical grid.
Squirrels were NOT responsible for the explosion and power outage in Madison in July though.
Squirrels are vermin. If people are worried about them starving, put out poison.
My neighbors have two huge old oak trees that cover the yards all around with acorns, which armies of squirrels feast on. Walking barefoot in the yard in the fall is like walking on a bed of legos from the broken shells the squirrels leave behind.
Charlie Eklund said...I've never understood why some people think squirrels shouldn't be allowed to eat birdseed
Because they'll rip your feeder apart trying to get to it. And then they'll rip a hole in your roof so they have a warm place to sleep at night.
Squirrels are destructive.
We have several large oak trees and a huge pecan tree here. When the pecans come on, we put store bought walnuts on the porch to keep the squirrels away from the pecans.
Then my husband takes his truck with the big pipe cow catcher thingie on the front and bumps the pecan tree a few times and bango! All set for the holidays.
Althouse doesn't forage...she garners her acorns
Seriously misleading headline on the "You should not be feeding the birds!" link.
Lots of information about not feeding bears and sharks, but nothing to explain why they think I shouldn't put out millet for the chickadees.
To be fair, they do mention the white ibis, but I have yet to see one of those show up at the backyard feeders.
And then they'll eat the soy-based plastic off all the wires in your electric car. F*** squirrels.
I have a squirrel that's chewed through my screened porch screen twice. Chewed through one electrical cord and two Cat cables.
Tried the poison bait traps from the exterminator, the bad smelling spray stuff.
It's personal this time.
Asians love this kind of stuff. Every year some elderly Asian from urban King/Pierce counties dies of exposure in the foothills of Mt. Rainier because they got lost while hunting mushrooms. If the acorn thing catches on there won't be a natural oak sapling left in the state.
In the book "Oak: The Frame Of Civilization" by William Logan, much is made of the acorn as a food throughout human existence. If you work with oak or just admire the tree, read this book.
Deer would be a bigger worry. They love acorns. Fortunately here in the Midwest they also love corn and soybeans. And for some reason roses. They'll go through our neighborhood and just eat the rose buds and blossoms. Sqirrels are just rats with a better tailor.
In my area there's a shortage of squirrels, but an increasing number of bobcats. I'm thinking the bobcats have figured a way to eat acorns in bulk.
I don't mind critters, and generally like them. Right up until they start destroying stuff.
I'll leave snakes alone; they kill the mice.
But this is how humans destroy (sic) the environment. We do things without considering the consequences - not that this means we shouldn't do things. That's why I don't like wildlife preserves; wildlife management is a better approach to mitigate all the negative consequences as much as reasonably possible.
And educating people of the consequences of actions.
Consequence of actions: in this case, the consequence is some nut (Ha!) job screaming at you. I think the squirrels will be fine.
I prefer eating acorns via pigs. All this has triggered a need for "Secreto". That special cut of pork from acorn fed pigs in Spain.
We had a bumper crop of acorns from our 3 huge oaks in the backyard. I decided to collect them to give to the deer this winter. Two bushel. It turned into a complete failure.
I had no idea acorns got worms
"Acorn Rangers" would be a good band name.
One year the confiscated acorns totaled nearly 450 pounds, such a large haul that they used a helicopter to redistribute the loot for the squirrels...
More than 1,500 squirrels were killed by the acorn storm.
Move up the food chain. Eat squirrel.
The Wall Street Journal reports. Like I was considering acorn futures for my 401K.
Is there some sort of cycle for acorn production? We've got a bumper crop this year. I've joked it's too bad they don't taste good but then looked up whether they can be eaten. You can but as our host says the preparation can be arduous. In addition, the site I found mentioned it is a good idea to soak them in water before processing so as to get the worms out of the ones that have them. Yup, no thanks, I'm out. The squirrels are living well around my neighborhood this year!
Mrs. stevew puts seed out for the birds. She's got a feeder that has a perch loaded on a spring such that when anything heavier than a small bird, such as a squirrel, stands on it the access hole to the seed is closed. Jays are heavy enough to cause that to happen too.
I had a friend who had a couple acres in New Hampshire covered in oak trees, he would buy a pig each year and let the pig convert the acorns into ham, bacon, pork chops, sausage, etc.
He is also the guy who told me about a hermit that lived not far from his place, which is why I called bullshit on the “Last American Hermit” story, or whatever it was. We were good friends and it wasn’t the kind of relationship where we lied to each other.
Squirrels are rats with bushy tails.
A friend used to say pigeons are rats with wings.
Squirrels actually are rodents.
One in fifty oak trees, I think, has readily edible acorns. Acorns that don’t require processing to remove the tannic acid. It’s two genes, and they are independent of each other, so you can’t breed a pure line. You could, of course, use grafting if you had one, to produce a whole genetically identical grove of these trees.
I am sure if you google around, you can find any and all errors in what I wrote from memory here.
@Althouse, thanks for the link, but I’m not feeding dolphins or stingrays or sharks or white ibis. Right now I have a squirrel-proof bird feeder (which really is squirrel-proof), a squirrel-proof suet feeder(which unfortunately also seems to be bird-proof as well), a feeder that holds peanuts for blue jays (squirrels only come when there aren’t any jays to gang up on them and drive them off), and a thistle seed feeder for the glorious-colored gold finches. I enjoy observing the birds and they seem to enjoy the seeds. Good trade off in my book.
Bears can be an issue, and one taught us the hard way to bring our feeders in at night. But neighbors down the street leave their trash cans behind theIr house, and that has to be a far greater attractant for the bears.
I think “Smokey Mountain acorns” are actually squirrel brains. I don’t think that you get away from the “worms” problem though.
Are squirrels an endangered species? My father would sit for hours on the back porch and plug squirrels with his .22. His justification was that they raided the bird feeders, but I think he just enjoyed shooting squirrels. He'd then take the furry little carcasses and throw them on the honeysuckle bush and watch the hawks swoop down for a meal. He shot those squirrels for years, but never seemed to put a dent in the population. They always seemed well fed and made a good meal for the hawks. He would just mow over the acorns. Maybe the squirrels in Korea are different, somehow.
These folks would be apoplectic in Spain where the very best jamon comes from Iberian black pigs that dine on acorns (bellota) exclusively - it's called jamon de Iberico de bellota and even the fat,which is high in HDL, is good for you. It actually melts in your mouth. The pigs are free ranging in oak groves where they Hoover up the acorns. On the other hand, I don't think I ever saw a squirrel during the five years I lived in Spain.
https://www.bing.com/th?id=OIP.mfZrmKPAvsrquyQOyGP14gHaEJ&pid=Api&rs=1
from a tiny acorn grows today's mighty [h]oaks
We had a mast year last year for the oaks. Not very many acorns this year. Not many hickory nuts, either.
In our Chicago years, you could count on a squirrel blowing a transformer and causing an outage for a few hours. Sounded like a bomb going off. Not great after 9/11.
It's hardly foraging when all you have to do is reach out and garner.
Some Asian folks used to come around my college in Portland every spring to collect the ginko tree nuts. Here in D.C., city workers apply some sort of hormone-retardant to the trees to prevent them from fruiting, for which I am grateful. Ginko fruit stinks.
It's another big year for acorns in D.C. Every day is like the comic strip Mutts.
https://bit.ly/32IJQAc
NO! You should not be feeding the birds!
Despite its title, that article didn't actually say, whether by anecdote or organized information, that it was actually bad to feed birds, just that it might be bad for one obscure bird, the white ibis, which gets lazy when humans feed it, or it might not be bad for that bird at all.
I have squirrels that have licked paint off my front porch for years, even after re-painting. It's latex paint, but I wonder if it makes them high.
Recently, I saw a 95 year-old contestant on You Bet Your Life. When Groucho asked him to what he attributed his longevity he asserted it came from eating daily a few ounces of the world's most nutritious food: peanuts.
Groucho seemed less than impressed.
or it might not be bad for that bird at all.
"White Ibises are common and their populations have grown by 4% per year from 1966–2015, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey."
Behold, Citizens, the results of Sacrificing food to the White Ibis, Sacred Bird of Florida!
"White ibis population explodes in Virginia"
And Virginia.
Would that I could pop squirrels with my .22. City won’t let me. They eat vegetables. They dig up flower beds and planters. They destroy plastic containers sharpening their teeth on my trash cans and flower pots. Thank the Lord for hawks, owls and cars that do something to keep the squirrel population down.
I was in DC some years back with some Japanese guys. They were from Osaka, where trees are practically unknown. They found the squirrels fascinating.
We have several oak trees as well in the yard. Some years, they produce so many acorns that they seem to rain down for a few days in the fall, every few seconds or so, plop, plop. Subsequently many small oak trees appear in my azalea beds.
This led one year to a squirrel population explosion. I captured about a dozen of them, sometimes two a day, in a live trap baited with peanuts. They were relocated to the Christian summer daycamp nearby in the hopes of their redemption.
The remainers were dealt with in a less gentle fashion. Christians might be familiar with this pattern.
I'm sure Americans trying Korean food have tried Dotorimuk-muchim without knowing what it really is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotori-muk
Once I gathered some white oak acorns--supposedly the most edible--from my yard and processed them as directed in a book I had. It was mostly pealing and then boiling them multiple times to get the tannin out. Then I roasted them in the oven and made a pie using a modified pecan pie recipe. I ate a small slice and was sick at my stomach for two days. I didn't try it again.
There is a big squirrel obesity problem in my neighborhood. 2 or 3 squirrels in each yard, and a squished one on every street. They could do with fewer acorns.
The worst crime of the squirrel is that they eat tulip and crocus bulbs.
My standard poodle thinks that squirrels are his principal enemy.
The squirrels in my yard enjoy chewing through poly irrigation tubing for cheap water. Apparently to wash down the acorns.
Way out west in my neck of the woods, acorns were a staple in the diets of the indigenous Maidu and Miwok peoples who inhabited California's Central Valley and Sierra Nevada foothills for a thousand years or more. Squirrels were not a problem, as they ate them too. In those days any food was a "superfood".
Squirrelly behavior..
I feed the birds at my house. I have for 35 years. I get dozens of species year round. I put out corn, black oil sunflower seed Kaytee Nut & Berry Blend, Niger seed and suet. Because I'm just blocks away from the Mississippi River, which is a migratory flyway,I get migratory birds in the spring and fall (e.g., white-throated sparrows, which spend weeks migrating through -- scores of them). Every year a flock of Slate-colored Juncos winter in my yard. I've even attracted Pileated Woodpeckers and I live in the fricken' inner-city. The only other place I have seen Pileated Woodpeckers is in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. I also have apple, plum, cherry and pears trees as well as raspberries and currents. My yard is a constant stream of birds to the point that I also get raptors because of the abundance of prey. I simply do not buy the whole 'feeding birds is bad for them' bullshit.
"That episode also has a great discussion about how squirrels are the #1 threat to the US electrical grid."
This is true. I work for an electric utility and one of or business unit presidents joked that whenever a transformer or a substation blows, it a good idea to have a throw-down squirrel.
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