Few natural things signal fall more emphatically than a nut. This moniker is coated with autumn’s shine and filled with food.
When hungry animals, including us, feel like having a nut. We eat hickory nuts and walnuts. We see squirrels, deer, turkeys, and red-headed woodpeckers picking up acorns, consuming them as well as some caching the nut’s packaged energy. Vehicles and road implements smash, shell out, and otherwise destroy acorns, walnuts, and shagbark and yellowbud hickory nuts. Hazelnuts are usually consumed by chipmunks before they are ripe, so we rarely see a mature nut.
American chestnuts are a mere novelty because most trees have been wiped out by the fungus-causing chestnut blight. Most chestnut plantings don’t last many decades, either. The same is true of butternuts succumbing to another fungus. When abundant, these trees are called white walnuts.
Most of our wild nut consumption comes from shagbark hickory nuts and black walnuts. Hickories, walnuts, and pecans are members of the same plant family, Juglandaceae, a group named for the walnut genus, Juglans.
I saw a rural town road here in southwest Wisconsin signed as Carya, the genus of hickories. It made me wonder if this might be a great location to pick nuts.
Shagbark hickory nuts and walnuts are in good supply this autumn in most of the trees’ natural ranges in Wisconsin, while acorns seem not to have been able to follow the same course. The planted chestnut trees, albeit limited, always have a plentiful crop, outdistancing oaks tree-for-tree. Chestnut nut production does not cycle, either.
From time to time, organizations have attempted to have the shagbark hickory named as Wisconsin’s state nut tree. Those legislative bills were never brought to a vote. We need a state mushroom (morel?) and gamebird (ruffed grouse?) first.
Nuts are fruits, just as tomatoes, corn kernels, cucumbers, and cherries, and while nut has a precise botanical meaning, we use the term more generally for a number of seeds.
The precise definition is that a nut is a simple, dry, indehiscent (not having a natural opening) fruit, which includes acorns and chestnuts. Walnuts and hickory nuts do not fit that definition, but for our purpose they are nuts just the same.
Wild nuts are easy to find but sometimes difficult to crack open, unlike a bean or pea pod with a natural suture to open the fruit.
Any way we use commercial nuts, such as pecans, can be applied to hickory nuts and walnuts. They are used as human food, bird and squirrel food, plain as decorations, art work, and are carried as good luck charms in pockets and purses.
Gathering nuts does not require a license and there is no season but permission of a landowner is required. Edible nuts can be gathered in State parks, but only for personal consumption.
Many of the early gathering seasons, including goose hunting, sturgeon fishing, ginseng digging, black bear and mourning dove hunting continue, while archery and crossbow (deer), ruffed grouse, squirrel, crow, rabbit (Northern Zone), and turkey seasons recently opened Sept. 16.
Generally speaking, weather has been ideal for partaking in these early seasons and those pursuing the quarries presented.
“Hunters have not been talking much about the hunting seasons yet, but boy are they getting ready with guns and ammunition,” said Don Martin, at Martin’s in Monroe.
“Animals, like vegetation, have been changing as we enter autumn,” said Doug Williams, at DW Sports Center in Portage. “Feeding routes have changed; soybeans are no longer being targeted. Song birds are beginning to migrate, and the Wisconsin Hunting Regulations pamphlet is now available in printed form.”
The pamphlet, and the WDNR forecast, continue to be available online.
Autumn viewing, experiencing, and photography continue to advance.
Take notice of the season by smelling the pleasant scent of vegetation beginning to decompose, the feel of bristly and shiny surfaces, the sound of nuts dropping from trees, seeing tiny flecks of an orange and red bittersweet fruit, and tasting a juicy apple, wild- or orchard-grown.
Southern Wisconsin habitats are highly varied and diverse so color changes of leaves, fruits, and flowers do not all occur at once. Some are coming into their glory, while others are fading, falling, and fragmenting. Soybean crops hit their color peak and many plants have already dropped their leaves, leaving the three-seeded pod fruit to be combined later this fall.
Animals are changing, too. Deer antlers are now shiny, boney structures, fawns are spotless and adult deer are more brown-gray than reddish-brown. Adult ring-necked pheasants (males) are brightly colored, while many ducks and songbirds have lost some of their plumage luster.
— 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.
