Fall

Within a second of its release from a branch, an acorn falls to earth at the rate of approximately thirty-two feet per second, or about fifty-seven miles per hour. How do I know this? I looked it up on the internet. There was the answer—which has me thinking that we must be nearing the fulfillment of Google’s ambition to catalog all of the world’s information. How much more in the way of interesting but semi-profitable information can people want to know beyond the velocity of an acorn falling to the ground? 

            The oak trees are spawning, letting go of thousands of little brown nut packages with cute caps like so many preschoolers in uniform. The noise they make cascading through the trees tells you nothing about their size. No one would blame you for thinking a large animal is moving through the understory the way acorns slap the leaves and bounce off the woods around them as they hurtle to the ground. Our oak trees stand among maples, various pine, beech, and birch, all of which rely on seed pods that find their way gently to the ground without leaving a mark. They must find the acorn-bearing process burdensome. What a racket, and, oh, ouch. 

            For the chipmunks, squirrels, and blue jays, acorn season is a shopping bonanza. Black Friday. Also for the hawks, foxes, bobcats, and others that prey on shoppers. Within the perimeter of our dog Huckleberry’s GPS collar there are no chipmunks or squirrels; leastwise, any with time to stop and forage on the ground. But this might be interesting. Our porch is approximately thirty feet wide, a little less than the distance a falling acorn would travel in one second. My wife would need to volunteer, but I believe if she had a chipmunk coddled in her hand at one end of the porch, and I released Huckleberry from the other end, we could document him traveling as fast as an acorn. In which case—exactly how these nomenclatures get established—future online inquiries might refer to acorn velocity as approximately one Huckleberry per thirty-two feet.

            Anyway, inside the Huckleberry perimeter, there are few foraging animals unless they can fly (up). Immediately outside the perimeter, congestion is exaggerated as everyone arrives in response to the acorns. In your mind, compare it to what happens around the average farm stand with a wagon full of corn on the cob. We have been scrambling to understand the different animal noises; a few, it turns out, are from the chipmunks, which have vocalizations to denote danger overhead, property rights, and “for a good time call.” We have had one hawk more-or-less in residence all season. Now we think there are two; a problem, normally, but not during a chipmunk jamboree. The owls, also, seem to be doing well judging from the forest noises after dark and celebratory hoots that follow. Coyotes behave similarly, from what I understand. Their ancient, eerie howls are usually in response to a successful hunt or happy return of their members to the fold. We have had a lot of coyote howling the last few weeks. 

All in all, harvest season, I guess. 

            By the way, raise your hand if someone on a Zoom call has ever reported that a bat is flying around the room behind you. Not likely, unless you have left the porch door open that is adjacent to a bat house and failed to notice the sunset. It is easier to rescue a bat from a confined space than a bird, perhaps because bats can “see” an open door or window better than a bird, which insists on overcoming the problem by flying up. 

            The normally mobile Huckleberry watched the whole thing without moving a muscle, intrigued, possibly, by the idea of little chipmunks with wings. If it flies up, however, it is not worth getting off the couch.