Mast on Moss

Mast is the term for fallen nuts and seeds on a forest floor — a major food source for squirrels, deer, turkey, raccoons, bears, and people too before the advent of grocery stores and mail delivery.

This is the leading edge of the acorn crop to come.

Acorns from oaks (black, red, and white), pignut hickory nuts, and black walnuts are staples, with black cherry, black gum, crab apple, hawthorne, dogwood, wild grape, beech, raspberry, greenbriar, huckleberry, spice bush, and maple seeds filling out the banquet table.

Missing, thanks to an Asian fungus that arrived around 1904: American Chestnuts.

Chestnuts were once 25 percent of the forest in my area and a major wildlife food source. Now, they’re all gone — a loss of 3-4 billlion trees now replaced in the forest by less productive oaks, gum, maple, tulip, ash, sycamore, walnut, and elm.