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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
from the September 27, 2009 Newsletter, issued from the Siskiyou Mountains west of Grants Pass, Oregon:
ACORNS FALLING
Nowadays this happens more than I like: At night when I'm in my mosquito net next to the trailer, just about as I'm drifting off to sleep, BANG! An acorn from the big Oregon White Oak over my trailer drops an acorn on the tin roof above my trailer. These are big acorns, too. You can see a couple still on their branch below:
Of course the green one on the left is immature, and the dark brown one is about ready to fall. We're talking about the Oregon White Oak here, QUERCUS GARRYANA.
It's easy to see how important acorns are to wildlife, and why indigenous Americans once collected them so assiduously. North Carolina State University provides instructions on how to leach bitter tannin from acorns and prepare acorn meat so it can be added to bread dough and muffin batter, made flour of, and prepared as a thickener for stews and gravies, at http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/consumer/poison/Quercsp.htm.