[Woodcarver] CHAT! No Black Walnuts?

[Classic Carving Patterns]

Hi Maura,

Walking my yard is one of my favorite things to do, that's how I noticed
the total lack of nuts in the yard.  Now, I believe that I am observant
enough that I would have noticed a (one) squirrel ferociously making mad
dashes across the grass in an attempt to find, carry off, and bury
several bushel baskets worth of walnuts and chestnuts. So I think that
if it had been squirrels it was obviously a well organized gang effort. 

After talking with Mike, my husband, and the Extension Agent we, Mike
and I, have had a second thought to all of these walnut stealing
squirrel suggestions.  As there are no walnuts this year and the acorn
crop was also effected I think we are going to need to add corn,
peanuts, and a squirrel feeder to our winter bird seed order!

I've attached below an e-mail I sent to Vic in response to his
suggestion about calling our Extension Agent, as I realize that I never
told the digest WHY I thought it was the cicada.

In Response to Vic:

I was going to do that this afternoon. We contact our local Agriculture
Extension Agent on a fairly regular basis for information as we are part
of the Maryland Wild Acres program ... Have been for many years now.

My thinking is that we had an usually large number of cicadas this year.
We have always had a few each summer and even had a few 'cicada years'
but this year was spectacular in their numbers. After mating the female
will lay her eggs in a new growth branch. She bores a hole, deposits
them and a few weeks later they hatch out as very tiny larva. These (the
larva) fall to the ground and bury themselves until they are ready to
re-emerge years later. Now, those new growth branches died off. It
looked at first as if our farmette had suffered from wind damage, except
the number of dead branches increased over several weeks. So my thinking
is that when the branches died from the cicada egg deposits we lost all
of the nut bearing (baring?) branches for this year. ?!? So I am
thinking that walnuts and chestnuts set nuts on new growth where oaks
and hickory set it on older growth as we have some acorns.
Now if I had been including two legged nuts in my count I would have at
least had a total of two ... Me and Mike :) Thanks for the help!


Susan
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-----Original Message-----
From: Linehan718 at aol.com [mailto:Linehan718 at aol.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2004 6:07 PM
To: irish at carvingpatterns.com
Subject: Re: [Woodcarver] CHAT! No Black Walnuts?


maybe you have some very busy squirrels working overtime.  they say(at
least here in new york) that it was one of the wettest and coolest
summers on record.  don't know if that had something to do with it.

Maura carvin' in nyc
http://www.picturetrail.com/whiteknight718