Nature Notes: Oh, the Mighty Oak
What is the world’s oldest profession, prostitution or usury? We don’t have historical evidence upon which to answer that question. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Well, if you believe in evolution the answer is easy. It was the egg. Chickens are birds; birds came from a dinosaur-like ancestor; dinosaurs, like modern-day turtles and most other reptiles, laid eggs, thus the egg preceded the chicken.
Chicken eggs are nothing more than a developing embryo inside a tough shell. Pullet eggs are not fertile, but a champion adult can lay up to 300 eggs or more a year. If one didn’t take the eggs from underneath each hen on a near daily basis, she would eventually stop laying when she felt that her clutch was full and ready to be incubated. So it is with all modern birds. They lay eggs. A few, like the forest turkey of Oceania, let the ambient heat incubate the eggs, as with turtles, but 99.9 percent sit on their eggs until they hatch.
In the plant world, the nearest thing to a chicken or turtle egg is a nut. A nut is a plant embryo in a tough shell. There are many different kinds of nuts, and many evolved separately from different nut-producing ancestors. Perhaps the family with the most nut-producing species is the beech family, Betulaceae, which in North America includes the beeches, chinkapins, chestnuts, tanoaks, and oaks.
The last-named group has the most of our beech family species. North America has more than 208 different oak species, most of which — 150 species — are found in Mexico. Like the wind-blown, parachute-equipped seed of the world’s largest flowering plant family, the Asteraceae or sunflowers, the acorn is the invention of the oaks, which makes them so popular. The oaks fall into two subgroups, the white oaks and the black oaks. In the former the leaf edges are serrate or round-lobed, in the latter the oaks are pointy-lobed, while each lobe is bristle-tipped. The bristles act as drip organelles to channel water droplets so they don’t accumulate on the leaves. White oaks live in dryer climates and don’t need them.
Long Island is rich in native oak species. We have at least 14. The last four arrivals from the Appalachian deciduous woods set that dominates eastern North America are the blackjack oak, willow oak, southern red oak, and dwarf chestnut oak. Two others, the chinkapin oak and water oak, are waiting in the wings. All oaks’ acorns are very similar to each other, and that may be, in part, why there are so many hybrids among the oaks. The flesh of the white oak acorn was esteemed by many different groups of North American Indians as a source of flour and other food-making stuff.
The black oak group includes scarlet, black, red, pin, and the shrubby bear oak. They tend to be richer in tannin, which makes the acorns more bitter tasting but better protects them from marauding insects including gypsy moth larvae and canker worms. On the other hand, the tannins were used by colonists and trappers to tan mammal skins in order to make them more rot-resistant. Thus, Tan Bark Creek, a small stream that rises in the moraine south of Springs and meanders its way northward into Three Mile Harbor via a culvert under Soak Hides Road, was used by early settlers and colonists to strengthen animal pelts.
Members of the black oak group leaf out before the white oaks, some of whose leaves are still expanding here. If you have black or scarlet oaks in your yard as I do, you no doubt noticed a large number of stringy orange-ish threadlike appendages covering car bodies, roof tops, driveways, patios, and lawns this week and last. These are the male flowers, or catkins. Insects don’t pollinate oak flowers, the wind does. It shakes the catkins to loose their pollen, which drifts around to eventually land on the pistils of the flowers. When the male flower dies, it drops to the ground. Why such a bumper crop of male flowers this year? It may have had something to do with the record cold and snowy winter we just endured.
Oaks are very, very strong. It takes a big, big gale to blow one down. Until the western United States began providing us with Douglas fir lumber, oaks were the wood of choice in many types of construction — making furniture and creating piles for dock and bulkhead work. According to the late Robert Gardiner, the thick trunks of the very large white oaks, which blew down en masse on Gardiner’s Island during the 1938 hurricane, were ultimately salvaged and transported to Queens, where they were incorporated into the construction of LaGuardia Airport’s landing facilities.
The saddest thing about the oaks, and, in particular, about the white oaks on the South Fork in modern days, is that during gypsy moth invasions when they are totally defoliated they are killed straight out, and the trunks eventually fall. In such ways, tons of very high-quality wood that would have been sawn into lumber or used otherwise in the old days merely lies on the ground and softly rots until it finally gives up the ghost. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, sawdust to sawdust.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].