Vol. 4 The Official Newsletter of the California Acorn Counting Team 28 Sept. 2000

Editor: Walt Koenig

As is traditional, the year’s acorn counting season officially commenced in late August when we flew to Minneapolis (Jean from hustling, bustling downtown Lincoln NE and I from SFO). After our ceremonial rib dinner at Famous Dave’s, where Jean’s wife Anne happened to be eating as well (as a serious barbeque restaurant, who would have thought it would attract vegetarians as well?), we all headed north, eventually converging at Cedar Creek where we shacked up in one of the old farm houses scattered over the landscape.

The second controversy revolved around the bur oak just outside the back door, underneath which were hundreds of long-fallen acorns. Had we missed the season already? Were we busy trying to count phantom acorns that had long since dropped off the trees? The fact that lots of the acorns seemed to be accompanied by their caps didn’t give us much confidence in our world-famous technique. Half-way through the survey, Jean had me coming back in a few weeks to make sure we didn’t miss the 2001 crop. By the time we were done, however, our fears were somewhat assuaged, as the problem appeared to affect only a small number of the bur oaks. Nonetheless, it’s unequivocally one of the pitfalls of visual surveys, which otherwise have it all over seed traps, at least as far as we’re concerned.

Nine hours and 216 trees later, we dragged ourselves back to the lab having accomplished the first ever complete Big Day of acorn counting at Cedar Creek. And the truth is out: it’s a pretty good year, at least up there in central Minnesota. This is our 6^th year there, where we survey 4 species including bur and pin oaks along with a smattering of red and white oaks, the latter of which are up near the edge of their ranges. Both white and red oaks were the best ever. Pin oaks, which seem to almost always produce a lot of acorns, were just below their high in 1998. Only bur oaks were not at near record levels, having a crop intermediate between the good years of 1996 and 1997 and the bad years of 1998, 1999, and especially 1995, when we found absolutely no acorns in any of the 90 trees we surveyed. We’ll refrain from saying more in order to avoid a nasty legal battle with the Chicago Board of Trade, whose acorn futures contracts are heavily influenced by news leaks such as this.

Having completed the survey with a full day before our return flights, we were left with the onerous task of getting down to some serious partying. For Jean, that mostly involved going down to the Cedar Creek Labs and giving his old colleagues a hard time. For myself, I had dinner at Bob Zink’s house. Bob is an old grad school crony who landed a job at the University of Minnesota after he got released from an unnamed institution in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in the early 1990s. To the relief of his former colleagues, Bob, in order to get tenure, switched most of his killing instincts toward gunning down poor defenseless game birds, which he prepares on the state-of-the-art grill situated over in the Garage Sector of his vast Midwestern estate. Since many of you don’t know Bob, I’ll spare you the details, but for those of you who do, you’ll be glad to know that he’s still quite a hoot. Many thanks, Bob, for helping to get the acorn year off to a great start!

Monday morning involved a serious investigation of the Minnesota State Fair, conveniently timed to coincide with the acorn survey. The fair, as always, exceeded my wildest dreams, at least when it came to fried foods stuck onto sticks. I spent most of my time trying to carefully choose what to consume, which involved difficult choices between deep-fried cheese curds, fried onion "flowers", pork-chops on a stick, Minnekabobs, and more. The winners included a fresh pecan roll, a Minnekabob, one local species of corndog, and, last but not least, a large bag of those often imitated, but never duplicated, minidonuts. Why noone seems to realize that a healthy minidonut industry is essential if California is going to compete successfully in the 21^st century is beyond me, but there’s no question that the niche is wide open out here for any of you considering a career move.

The very sad news the evening I got back was that Lucia, our woodpecker, had gotten sick that day and died in her sleep late that afternoon. For all of us, this was a sad event indeed. An obituary can be found on page 3.

Following my return, we enjoyed a 2-week decompression period, after which Jean came out to California on the evening of 9 September. Unlike the last couple of years when we were unaccountably flush, this year we were on a budget, so instead of renting a car for $300 I spent some $2,200 fixing up our 1989 Camry so it would have 5th gear (something it’s been without for the past 2 years) and we could take it on the grueling acorn survey. If the economics of those alternatives don’t make sense, do me a favor and don’t tell me about it.

Just for a change, we went on the statewide survey first this year, so before Jean even had a chance to start complaining about the lack of home delivery of the New York Times to our door at Hastings it was off early the next morning on the inimitable, one and only, singular, unduplicated, and even unique California Acorn Survey.

Once again, we cruised down to the Hastings gate and found ourselves....turning right! What does this mean, we wondered? Why, with a perfectly good alternative available, do we always circle the state clockwise, especially since clocks don’t even have hands anymore, much less travel in one particular direction?

Two hypotheses came to mind. My candidate is that we go clockwise for the pragmatic reason that this allows us to avoid the $3 toll on the Golden Gate Bridge, an expense that would consume a large fraction of our overall acorn-counting budget, at least in some years. (Over the 7 years of the survey, we have already saved a total of $21, or enough to buy a fair number of those acorn futures contracts from the Chicago Board of Trade.) If this hypothesis seems unlikely, you have no idea how cheap I can be.

Alternatively, the answer lies in coreolis forces. The obvious test of this hypothesis is to perform some sort of comparable survey in the southern hemisphere and see if we go counterclockwise. Australia is an obvious possibility; do you suppose that they have or need an annual Pub survey down there?

Speaking of Australia, it’s perhaps unavoidable that I must report the news that, despite our best lobbying efforts, acorn counting was once again rejected as a demonstratin sport at the Sydney Olympic Games.

I personally attribute this, like so many other things, to the poor judgment of a people whose heads are constantly trying to pump out all that blood dripping into their brains as a consequence of living upside down all the time. One would think that acorn counting would be considered a historic sport among all those descendants of British convicts. But nooooo....instead they go for sissy stuff like the triathalon.

Do I seem bitter? After all those acorn cookies and tips concerning the size of the year’s acorn crop we leaked to members of the International Olympic Committee, you bet I’m bitter. Let them beg, but they can forget it: next time we’re going straight to ESPN.

And so the survey began, swept along by the awesome power of those clockwise coreolis forces. By 0730 we were already at Jasper Ridge, a solid 30 minutes ahead of schedule, beating even the daily retreat of the coastal fog bank. This year we added two minor complications to our counting: we surveyed trees for mistletoe and took a small sample of leaves from all valley oaks in order to survey for galls.

The first was instigated by Janis, who is convinced that mistletoe rules the world, or at least is correlated with winter territoriality in western bluebirds. In contrast, neither of us could remember why we were looking at galls. Did it have something to do with potential geographic variation? temporal variation? was it that little extra something that might convince the Olympic morons to incorporate acorn-related events in the 2004 games? or had we simply hallucinated the potential for galls to offer anything of interest after one of our bad dinners last year? Unfortunately, the galls weren’t telling, and we were (as always) clueless.

Lucia died after a short illness on 27 August 2000. She was born at group Black Oak, where she was found by myself and Ron Mumme under the nest after having fallen (or been pushed out) on 27 July 1981. Lucia starred in several films, including "For a few acorns more" by Oxford Scientific Films (1996) and a recent Birdwatch episode on PBS (1999). (Egg-tossing, as shown here, is only one of the many behaviors she faked for the camera.) She was well known for her cheerful wakas to her family and warning cries when ‘intruders’ came to the School House. She will be sorely missed.

Lucia was the oldest resident at Hastings Reservation with the exception of myself; indeed, I was looking forward to a few years from now when she would be older than most of our field assistants. Although her natal group, Black Oak, is still doing well, she far outlived all her known relatives, including her brood mate and sister 713 (last seen May 1983; whether 713 indeed facilitated Lucia’s premature departure from the nest was never unambiguously determined), any of her siblings from an earlier 1981 nest (689, 690, and 691, last seen in 1985, 1981, and 1983, respectively), her father/uncles (102 [last seen 1984], 321 [last seen 1985], and 426 [last seen 1991]), or her mother 427 (last seen 1983). Indeed, Lucia, having survived to the age of 19.1 years, was by far the oldest known acorn woodpecker ever, the current (field) records being male 770 (born at Lower Haystack in 1982, last seen at group 1800 19 Oct. 1996; lived 14.4 years) and female 945 (born at Blomthree in 1984, last seen at Murf 14 April 1999; lived 14.8 years).

Donations in her memory can be made to the National Audubon Society.

Of course, we didn’t let the lack of any reason to collect the galls stop us, since we have learned to respect our every passing thought, no matter how pathetic, as potential insight into our inner, rarely glimpsed, genius. So at almost every one of the 226 valley oaks on the survey we collected 10 to 20 leaves along with their galls for a study whose goal is as yet to be precisely determined.

By the way, it’s suddenly occurred to me to announce the first ever California Acorn Survey Contest. Due to a remarkable coincidence, part 1 of the contest has to do with oak galls! Specifically, in 1,000 words or less, finish the sentence: "if I had data on the frequency of galls on the leaves of several hundred individual oaks at a variety of sites in California, I would...". Email your entries to <wicker@uclink4.berkeley.edu>. There is no deadline for the contest, which closes when an interesting answer is received. The winner will receive 25 free reprints and a nice acknowledgment.

The fog at Jasper Ridge finally cleared up around 0900, and after a pleasant survey and a nice chat with Phillippe, the Manager, we headed off for lunch in San Francisco.

For those of you who missed last year’s California Acorn Report, you may not be aware of the rich history behind the gastronomic portion of the California Acorn Survey. We used to finish Jasper Ridge and buy sandwiches at the Cheese Shop in the Town & Country Shopping Center across from the Stanford football stadium. The precise reasons for this have been lost in antiquity, but it wasn’t until 1999 that we finally remembered that it took forever and, more cogently, we didn’t even like the stupid sandwiches we got there. Consequently, we petitioned the California Acorn Counting Commission for permission to alter our officially-sanctioned schedule. The rest is history.

This leads directly into one of the most popular sections of the California Acorn Report, namely, the Restaurant Review. Here we go....

This year we had remarkably good luck, sampling five restaurants, all but one of which was good, and having the opportunity to dine at two highly exclusive establishments, both of which were outstanding. (In order to distinguish these latter two places, we rate them not in terms of 1 to 5 acorns, but in terms of a single happy [or sad] acorn face.) They are, in random chronological order:

Pho Hoa -Hiêp II, 1833 Irving Street, San Francisco.

Our most exotic ethnic cuisine was consumed at lunchtime on the way to Hopland on the long first day of the survey. And ethnic it was! Jean, asking as usual "what’s good?" was immediately steered to the back of the restaurant by the waiter who apparently thought he was asking for the restroom. Once this minor misunderstanding was cleared up, he ordered a cheeseburger, only to be served a wonderful beef noodle soup complete with tripe, tendons, and what was euphemistically called "beef balls" (I didn’t inquire further). I ordered a taco, but instead got BBQ pork with rice, which was also great. The ambiance was eclectic, enhanced by the Ansel Adams pictures interspersed with lovely prints of napalmed Vietnamese forests. Highly recommended, maybe even more so than the place across the street where we ate lunch last year. Rating: 3 acorns

Despite having reservations for 1800, our hosts Adina and Kerry held our table until 1930 when we finally finished counting acorns and came back down to the headquarters area. They were even kind enough to include a pre-dinner excursion to see some Oregon oaks, now one of the only species that we still fail to include in our otherwise comprehensive survey.

Since reservations are extremely hard to come by here, we won’t go into detail except to note that it’s one of two establishments we visited this year (apparently a trend) at which the owners and hosts not only prepared an outstanding dinner, but then went on to sit down and socialize with us during the meal! When, I ask you, was the last time you went to Chez Panisse and found yourself eating with Alice Waters and discussing details of the day's events? It was exhilarating, and the food was great also. Many thanks, Adina and Kerry! Rating: a happy acorn face

Chez Brad et Louise, D Street, Davis.

This terminally cute B & B/trattoria just outside of downtown Davis is hosted by another up and coming couple eponymously named Brad (aka "H") and Louise. We’d known about this place for years but this was the first time we’d driven the extra miles down from Sierra Foothills Station to sample the legendary cuisine and stay in the infamous "guest house" out back. And what an experience! Brad, the maître d’, is a tad pushy, and the wine list a bit thin (H tends toward Jim Beam himself, rendering it desirable to bring your own bottle of wine rather than count on the house selection), but the poached salmon was exquisite and the intimate, home-style ambiance just the ticket after a long day of acorn counting. Be sure to make your reservations early because this trendy area is fast being discovered by the "in" Davis crowd. Expansion plans currently in the works may help alleviate the current somewhat crowded conditions, but whether the planned all-night disco and alligator wrestling pit will alter the serenity of the neighborhood remains to be seen. In any case, this little gem of a stop is worth every mile! Rating: a happy acorn face.

Café Raven, On the Village Green, Three Rivers, CA.

As I mentioned earlier, there was one real dog among the eating establishments sampled this year, and this was it. I should have been tipped off when our waiter explained that the side dish for the evening was mashed potatoes, but I thought I was covered when I asked whether they were "real" or not and was assured that they were. As it happens, they were indeed real: real instant mashed potatoes. Complemented perfectly by some disgusting kind of oversalted, canned gravy, uncooked vegetables, and, in my case, some overcooked chicken with the tiniest hint of mediocre teriyaki flavoring. I can’t remember what Jean had but I fear it wasn’t much of an improvement. The only redeeming features of this place was the ice tea and beer, which were fine, and the nice valley oak out by the patio where we dined.

So the question remains, is there a decent place to eat in Three Rivers? (Just in case you were wondering, this is why we’re sending this newsletter to you, Jon Keeley.) Please email any suggestions or recommendations to us so as to help us avert a similarly tragic culinary experience next year. Rating: 1 weevily acorn.

Things got back on the right track the next evening when we found ourselves wandering through the streets of Pasadena looking for old abandoned Rose Bowl Parade floats after counting acorns up in the San Gabriels. The concept of there being much of interest in downtown Pasadena besides a Trader Joe’s is still foreign to me, since when I lived there in the early 1980’s the area was a dump. Now "Old Pasadena" is a hopping place and teems with people only a few of whom appear overtly to be hookers and junkies. Along with this renaissance has come a lot of appealing restaurants, including Clearwater Seafood. I had an appetizer of nicely fried calamari, a fantastic bowl of spicy corn chowder, and shared some great Newfoundland oysters with Jean. Jean, meanwhile, downed two Anchor Steams and had an excellent seared ahi Nicoise salad. Indeed, it was all so good that we returned the next evening on our way back north. The second time, eating out in the courtyard instead of at the bar, Jean again had the Nicoise salad while I tried the seafood chowder (OK but not nearly as good as the corn chowder) and we shared a large plate of cold appetizers including more oysters (this time Coramandels from New Zealand), mussels, tabasco shrimp, and a couple large but not particularly great king crab legs. All in all, though, this place was very good, and they definitely deserve kudos for not flinching at the fact that both of us looked like, well, like we’d been counting acorns all day. Rating: 4 acorns.

McPhee's was originally recommended to us by Pam Williams, but we missed it last year when we arrived between lunch and dinner. This year we slowed down just enough to ensure that we’d get to eat dinner here the last night after finishing up Pozo. And I must say, eating here could very well make one conclude that having the world taken over by American culture might not be so bad after all. I don’t know how many of you have ever been to Templeton, which is just south of Paso Robles, but it’s definitely not the kind of place where one expects to find a restaurant serving outstanding California nouvelle cuisine. Jean, being his usual non-PC self, had veal in a chantrelle ragoût with snap peas that looked great (he ate it all before I had a chance to ask for a taste), while I had a perfectly cooked top sirloin with oak grilled pepper onions and marinated feta on (real) garlic mashed potatoes. Their ice tea was excellent, while the selection of SLO beers looked good, even to those of us for whom beer now means an automatic trip to the hospital. For all of you who are used to stopping nowhere on the way to LA except for a pit stop at the Madonna Inn, this place is worth adding to the itinerary. Rating: 5 acorns.

Here I am already nearing the end of the newsletter and I've only gotten to lunch on day 1 of the survey. But, the fact is, except for eating in a couple of good restaurants and visiting friends, the rest of the survey mostly involved an interminable amount of driving and a whole lot of dull conversations repeated ad nauseum including "I'm ready…", "time's up", "I think this is this one"; and the ever-popular "are we there yet?", none of which make for riveting reading. We can't even spend time discussing the fungal disease that's killing off California oaks that many of you may have read about recently, since the disease is (thus far) restricted to mostly coastal areas from Mendocino to Monterey Counties and has failed to impact any of our sites.

So instead, I'm going to digress for a minute to tout the survey itself. With a few additional wislizenii added this year, the total number of trees we now count (including the 250 trees at Hastings), is 991 of 7 species spread among 16 different sites. It includes all the tree oaks in California except for the Oregon oak and the non-Quercus tanbark oak, the latter of which is right up here in the Santa Lucias so there's a chance we may include it yet at some point.

This brings us, by the way, to part 2 of the California Acorn Survey Contest for 2000. Merely finish, in 2,500 words or less, the following sentence: "The most likely cause of a lot of clunking under the hood of a car is…". The deadline for this one is 1 August 2001, and the winner will receive a free lifetime subscription to The California Acorn Report. Beat the rush and submit your entry soon!

After lunch on day 1, we made our ceremonial stop at Trader Joe's in San Raphael and then clunked our way on to Hopland. Counting took longer there than usual, both because we added some interior live oaks to the survey and because we spent time picking pears at the orchard along the way. We finished at 1925, a mere 14 1/2 hours after we'd started that morning, and were fortunate enough to have dinner with Adina and Kerry on the station (see review above). We then crashed in the bunkhouse. Day 2 was also grueling, with a 0530 departure followed by the long drive up to Tower House Historic District near Whiskeytown (where, after all these years, we actually met a National Park person intersted in the survey: Gretchen Ring), down to Dye Creek, and the Sierra Foothills Station, and then down to Davis where we stayed with Brad and Louise (also reviewed above).

Day 4 found us doing Kaweah River and then heading south for Liebre Mountain and then going down (and partially back out of) the San Fernando Valley into the San Gabriels to Switzers just outside of Pasadena. That night we stayed with Marty Morton and Maria Pereyra, friends of mind from Occidental College, who were, as it happens, just about to move to Alaska. Day 5 took us down to the Santa Rosa Plateau and then to Palomar Mountain State Park in San Diego County, the furthest south we go. Finishing at 1500, we realized that we had to start heading back if we were to make it to McPhee's the next day, so we drove back through LA and stayed at my mother's house in the north end of the San Fernando Valley (not reviewed in this issue). Day 6 then found us driving up to Castaic Junction, over to the coast, and up to Sedgwick, after which we drove to Pozo, finishing around 1800. This left time for dinner at McPhee's and a 2200 photo finish back at Hastings.

For those of you who would like to check out the entire survey, here it is, in all its glory.

Actually, on this our 21^st year, we started worrying about what things will be like in another 20 years. I'll be a spritely 70 at that point, which may cause some unexpected difficulties in performing the survey. Are all our sites wheelchair accessible? Will we all be able to make it up those hills with our walkers? Even more worrisome are questions such as, Will we still be able to find all the trees? Will our counts slowly become lower and lower as our ability to count fast dimishes? Oddly enough, it's no longer particularly outrageous to imagine myself in a car somewhere in the central valley looking over at Jean in the front seat and asking "Which one are you?" Scary, to say the least.

Well, if you've made it this far, I suppose you deserve to actually get some information on the acorn crop. It's good. Actually, it's very good. How good, you ask? Well, in total, we counted 33,161 acorns. Heck, if you put all those acorns end to end, you'd end up with a line close to a mile long! OK, so it's not here to the moon, but you get the picture: there are lots of acorns out there. Not only does this correlate with the generally good crop observed in Minnesota, but it also coincides with the excellent grape harvest announced in the Monterey Herald, exhibited here by Bill. Who knows? The synchrony in crops may extend further, both geographically and taxonomically, than even we had imagined….

How does this compare to other years? At Hastings alone, we counted 10,338 acorns, up from 4,049 last year and the best year since 1987 when we counted 10,728 acorns. (The record was 1985 when we counted 12,144 acorns.) Specifically, it was the 2^nd best year for both valley and canyon live oaks, 3^rd best for coast live oaks, and 4^th best for blue oaks. The only species pretty much crapping out on us at Hastings was the California black oak, which was slightly better than last year but otherwise mediocre at best. And yes, as a matter of fact, we do have a couple of fall acorn woodpecker nests, one of which I just banded and another of which is due to be banded at the beginning of October. Kind of you to ask!

More or less as expected given the relatively high degree of spatial synchrony that's emerging in acorn production, this pattern was repeated throughout much of the state. Valley oaks were the best ever at Jasper Ridge and were otherwise good everywhere except Kaweah Oaks, where we only have 2 years of data so far anyway. Blue oaks were also the best ever at Jasper Ridge, the 3^rd best at Pozo, outstandingly loaded at Sedgwick, and otherwise good at the other sites except for the San Joaquin Experimental Range. (As an aside, Jerry Tecklin wins the bet he made with me at Sierra Foothills: the blue oak crop there was the best ever, beating the 1994 crop by a respectable margin.) Other duds included coast live oaks at the Santa Rosa Plateau and California black oaks in general, especially at Tower House where we failed to find any acorns at all.

What does all this mean, you ask? All sorts of things, but unfortunately I don't have a lot more space and anyway if I wanted to analyze data and interpret our results I wouldn't be here squandering my time writing the California Acorn Report. However, I realize that there are a few of you who have read this far hoping to find detailed information about the state's acorn crop. If you're one of these unfortunate souls, don't hesitate to get in touch.

Speaking of which, we published two papers involving the acorn survey and/or our associated interests in masting during the past year. First was "Spatial dynamics in the absence of dispersal: acorn production by oaks in central coastal California", in Ecography 22: 499-506 (1999). It analyzes spatial synchrony in acorn production among Jasper Ridge, Hastings, and Pozo, along with results from the predecessor of the California Acorn Survey, the Central California Acorn Transect, which we ran for five years between Carmel and Paso Robles before realizing that it was a total waste of time. Second was "Patterns of annual seed production by Northern Hemisphere trees: a global perspective", from American Naturalist 155: 59-69. (Note that we made up for the modest size of our bibliography this year with 100% colonicity.) The latter paper looks at masting in general and tests the hypothesis that variable seed production in boreal trees tracks environmental conditions. More papers are, hopefully, on the way, and would be here sooner if we could figure out a better way of bribing those picky reviewers….

Another notable activity in which we participated this year was a workshop on masting behavior organized by Vicky Sork and Dave Kelly at NCEAS (aka the National Data Recycling Center) in Santa Barbara. Among other things, the workshop introduced me to a lot of great people, several of whom have (despite their protestations) joined the elite ranks of subscribers to The California Acorn Report. Welcome Vicky, Dave, Sandy, Bob, Richard, and Joe! They helped boost this year's subscription base to over 50, right on track for the goal predicted last year of 100,000,000 subscribers by 2005.

I almost forgot about the fashion tips we promised last year. What is, you ask, the well-dressed acorn counter wearing this season? We decided that there's so much to say that we had best start from the top, so this issue we're going to restrict ourselves to hats. For a visual guide, please peruse the accompanying photo.

On the left, Walt sports his traditional blue terrycloth number that he's able to soak prior to long walks, thereby earning it the beloved title of "the mildew hat". Bill, on the right, has his highly collectible green and white Anderson's Pea Soup hat, found in the Ranch House just in time to make the survey. Last but not least, Jean, in the middle, has his Minnesota Special, made from genuine prairie dog pelts. For more details, catch us at your local supermarket on the cover of the latest GQ.

So that about wraps it up for this, the 4^th California Acorn Report. For those of you who were awaiting our IPO, Merrill Lynch scrapped our offering when the NASDAQ took it's dive in March. Keep your eyes on those acorn futures and with luck we'll get things set again before too long. In the meantime, you can, as always, reach us at either of our international offices:

As always, hope you have a great year and be sure to keep those acorns counted!

Ron Mumme (1980-1983)

Mark Stanback (1989, 1990, 1992)

Elizabeth Ross-Hooge (1991)

Bill Carmen (1981-1988, 1990-1992, 1994-1998, 2000)

Jean Knops (1993-2000)

Walt Koenig (1980, 1984-2000)