Where are the acorns?

I was observing the other day that after a couple of years of bumper crops of acorns, there are hardly any this year. It’s usually kind of a pain to rake our yard because most of our trees are oaks. Between the fact that the leaves stay on the trees well into November, and acorns are not particularly easy to rake we often end up with a lot of clean up in the spring. That shouldn’t be such a problem this year. According to an article in the Globe, this isn’t even close to a ‘normal’ acorn year as oaks are producing almost no acorns at all. Personally I won’t mind having fewer chipmunks and squirrels next year. We’ve been inundated with the critters the last couple of years. However there are a couple of squirrels who are making up for the lack of acorns with our Halloween pumpkins.  If you look closely you’ll see the head of one of them poking out of the pumpkin on the left. After nibbling away at the edges of the pumpkins we had carved for Halloween, they must have thought they hit the jackpot when they opened the one we hadn’t carved and found all the seeds and pulp still inside.