J.P. Barsky is really passionate about trees.
"We have a number of challenges in our forest. A lot of people just see a giant green wall of things and think that everything is fantastic, when in reality, it's not," Barsky, an agricultural research technician with The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, said.
It's his job every year to find out how Connecticut's oak trees are reacting to environmental stressors, like droughts or the invasive spongy moth.
He does it by conducting what he calls "the sore neck challenge," looking up and counting the acorns on hundreds of oak trees across Connecticut.
One of Barsky's survey spots included a hill at the edge of Sleeping Giant State Park in Hamden where he gathered data on several trees.
"I'm looking up into the canopy through my binoculars and counting the number of acorns that I can see in 30 seconds," he said.
The last two weeks of every August, Barsky travels all over the state and stops at nearly 600 oak trees to conduct the annual count. The data is not just important to determine if deer, bears and wild turkeys will have a plentiful food source in the fall; Barsky said it can paint a picture of how the trees are responding to stresses from defoliation and disease.
“What I’m also doing is getting a qualitative estimate of what percent of the canopy is carrying acorns. So I'm getting the quantitative data that is a useful hard number, as well as the more subjective qualitative data,” he said.
While Barsky has only been conducting the annual survey for a few years, the state project has been going on for nearly two decades. The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station started counting acorns annually in 2007 to evaluate how wildlife populations respond to years when acorns are plentiful, versus scarce.
“They [acorns] drive a number of other ecological processes for small mammals, bird populations, insect populations — a number of insects feed on acorns — and so counting them gives a great picture for other ecologists to do their research work,” Barsky said.
He surveys the same trees every year and if one dies, Barsky looks for another in the same vicinity.
Connecticut is one of several eastern states which conducts an annual acorn survey.
"That helps land managers determine whether they should have a forest harvest or not,” he said.
Red oaks boom, white oaks bust
This year's survey showed red oak trees had a bumper acorn crop.
Nearly 87% of red oaks produced acorns compared to a historical average of about 60%.
Barsky said he was surprised by the result. Red Oaks produce acorns on a two-year cycle. So he thought the hard frost in May 2023 would have negatively impacted the trees' ability to produce acorns this year, but it didn't.
Another result that puzzled Barsky, is the lack of acorns produced by white oaks, which go from pollination to fruiting in one growing season.
"I thought, this year, the flowering time in late May was really ideal for white oak trees,” he said.
But that did not translate into a large number of white oak acorns.
By the end of Barsky's two week survey, he determined only 9% of white oaks produced acorns.
He said this year's results are becoming a disturbing trend.
"What I've seen is about 10% of the white oak trees have not had an acorn observed during the study period, which is really remarkable," Barsky said.
It's not just a Connecticut phenomenon. There is growing concern about the lack white oak saplings in the entire country. That's a real problem for the wine and whiskey industry, which relies on barrels made from white oak trees because they contain a crucial physical characteristic called "tyloses," which can make barrels watertight.
"If we don't have white oak coming for our next future forest, their industry is going to be really struggling to perpetuate itself,” Barsky said.
So, a collection of private and public groups teamed up several years ago and launched the White Oak Initiative to promote the growth of future generations.
Barsky said it's hard to figure out why white oaks aren't regenerating because it is likely a multifaceted issue, involving weather patterns, growing conditions, invasive insects and even hungry deer, who feed on saplings, shoots and shrubs closer to the forest floor.
"White oak is a preferred species in the understory for white tailed deer,” Barsky said.
As trees die, fewer young ones are repopulating CT forests
It's not just white oak Barsky is concerned about.
"There's not a lot of oak regeneration or even maple regeneration,” he said.
The forest is blanketed in a thick layer of leaves, which can make it difficult for acorns and seeds to get to the soil and develop roots, Barksy said.
"Our land use patterns have changed, and we used to have a lot of different firewood harvesting processes for charcoal, and we used to have a lot more of a fire regime in the Northeast and across the country. We no longer have that,” he said.
One thing we do have, he said, are invasive plants crowding out native species and invasive insects, which threaten our native trees.
"So all of these things are eating away at the thing that I love very much,” Barsky said.
He hopes the data collected every year by his “sore neck challenge” helps find answers to the puzzle of what's ailing America's oaks.
