Kristin Harty Barkley
The Cumberland Times-News Sun Oct 17, 2010, 08:01 AM EDT

CUMBERLAND — It’s nuts out there.

Since the Maryland Wildlife & Heritage Service began counting acorns on branches in the 1970s, this is the greatest number of nuts ever to bang off your car hood, roll onto your driveway or feed your backyard squirrels.

“Allegany County has what we call a bumper crop and that adjective doesn’t get used very often,” said agency spokesman Harry Spiker. “We had a good acorn crop in 2003, but it wasn’t even close to this year’s production.”

This massive onslaught of wildlife’s favorite food is due mostly to red oaks. Those are the ones with leaf lobes that are pointed. The lobes on the white oak leaf are rounded.

Here is the official statistic. In Allegany County the average number of acorns per oak branch is 25.65. Survey crews determine such numbers by strolling through the woods and peering into the forest canopy through binoculars.

Compare the current acorn success to the past three years when the number of nuts per branch in the county got no higher than 3.84 in 2007.

Garrett County has a lot of nuts, too, just not as many as Allegany County.

From Spiker’s point of view as a wildlife biologist, having a lot of nuts is a good thing.

“Pretty much all the game animals eat acorns,” Spiker said, “squirrels, turkeys, deer, bear.”

As you read this, bears are out there getting fat on the woodland buffet course, according to Spiker. Because of the acorn bounty, bears are not being as bad as usual.

“Our nuisance complaints are down because bears are getting plenty to eat in the woods,” Spiker said. Read that as fewer complaints from the people who grow corn or raise sheep.

Spiker speculates, too, that hunters who are afield Oct. 25 for the opening day of Maryland’s bear hunting season may have more trouble than usual finding bears, even though the bruin population continues to grow.

“In the past, I have always suggested that hunters set up near a food source, such as a cornfield,” Spiker said. “This year, every place is a food source. There are even acorns in the heavy cover where bears spend some down time.”

The key to this year’s branch-bending acorn crop was a spring that did not have a major frost, according to Sunshine Brosi who directs the ethnobotany program at Frostburg State University.

“A frost in April when the flowers are out can make for a bad acorn year,” Brosi said. “Once acorns get through that stage in good shape and start growing, they seem to do well during a dry summer like we had too.”

Dan Hedderick of the Maryland Forest Service said his foresters and technicians have reported bumper acorn crops throughout Allegany County.

“Besides being good for wildlife, this may help us to get more oak regeneration throughout the Green Ridge State Forest,” Hedderick said. “We’ve been having problems with that because of the lack of fire, competition from other plants and browsing by deer.”

Although abundant acorns are good for many things, Jason Griffith is concerned about how 50 to 75 runners will stay upright when they sprint along state forest trails on Halloween.

The Fire on the Mountain trail run of about 32 miles includes the Long Pond Trail from Point Lookout near Little Orleans to Fifteen Mile Creek Road South. That trail, like most of the forest, has an acorn covering. Griffith is the deputy race director of the event scheduled for Oct. 31.

“We ran the trail as a test Sunday morning, and there are a few pretty steep climbs and descents,” Griffith said. “You feel like you are spinning your wheels going up and like you are on ball bearings running downhill.”

Griffith said some nuts in the woods won’t deter the runners.

“Trail runners and ultra runners are a pretty hardy group,” he said. “They are used to dealing with wildlife and getting lost. I’m more worried about the leaves that will fall between now and the race and the rocks and roots they cover up. Those will be a greater concern.”

Contact Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com

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