Without nuts to guide them, turkey, deer and squirrel hunters are sometimes lost in the forest. Cookie, cake, pie, and cereal lovers who depend on walnuts and hickory nuts for flavor and filler may be lost, too.

Nuts are also the seeds of life of natural and nursery replacement trees.

Fewer will complain about walnuts popping on roads, slipping on nut-covered slopes, or a few bruised fingers from winter cracking and picking this fall.

Two years ago one could hardly step anywhere without pressing on a nut; last autumn hard mast production was abysmal in many areas. This year DNR wildlife biologists, Nancy Frost (Sauk County), Travis Anderson (Lafayette County) and Jason Cotter (Green County) say a lot depends on who one asks and what is in the forest canopy.

“While wild apples, hazelnuts, and black cherries were good, bur oaks are poor to moderate and erratic” Cotter said. “Some of the red oak species are close to being good, even excellent in these two-year nut trees.”

Frost agrees on production in the red oak group, but the other species are spotty she said. There’s a good tree here, a great one there, and many more poor-producing trees.

Many of the few hickory nut trees that were loaded are dropping fruits, which are found and taken by squirrels before any nut gatherer finishes a cup of morning coffee. Some are small, too, while others are eaten out or never fully developed, both conditions being par for the course.

Anderson hopes area recreationalists will take note of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource’s initiation of a master plan for the southwest region. That project covers the landscape in all of Lafayette County and portions of Green, Grant, Iowa, and Dane counties.

Some significant areas include the Grant and Rattlesnake rivers, Little Platte River, Pecatonica River, as well as grasslands in Blue Mounds, Blanchardville, and Hardscrabble areas. Yellowstone Lake, New Glarus Woods, and Belmont Mound parks and wildlife areas are included in the plan, too.

Anyone interested in providing input should contact their area DNR wildlife biologist in person, by writing or email.

Heavy rains, soggy soils, and summer-like temperatures put a damper on most deer and small game hunting during the openers, and trout fishing, too.

Still autumn signals continue with coloring and falling leaves on birches, elms, walnuts, sumacs, poison ivy, as well as bright fruits and Velcro-like hitchhikers on herbs and shrubs.

It seems the omnipresent stickseed is not misnamed.  While the entire fruit usually grabs hold first, now that ripening is in place the individual seeds, usually four, come apart and remain attached.

While cartoonists have been having a hay-day with whether leaves fall or are pushed off their perch on a shrub or tree, the answer is either or both.  Most leaves fall when a predetermined break point gives way, while others that hang on into winter are dislodged by the beginning of new bud growth, which pushes them.

Even though there appears to be plenty of vegetation for deer to consume, they are making a run on red ripe tomatoes, particularly paste tomatoes; and the bucks have begun their destruction of small trees with antler rubbing.  Maybe some homeowners in some locations may be inviting, rather than sending hunters down the road.

Autumn counters those who say of summer, “I don’t have anything to do.”

— Jerry Davis is an Argyle native and a freelance writer who lives in Barneveld. He can be reached at sivadjam@mhtc.net or at 608-924-1112.