Acorns: a bountiful year for an amazing food

Jon Hammond.

Blue Oak acorns on a tree on Old Town Road.

This has been a banner year for one of the main wild food sources in the Tehachapi Mountains: acorns.

Acorns are the nuts produced by our various species of tree and shrub oaks. Our landscape is defined largely by our oaks, and acorns are their seeds, the source of all our past, present and future oak trees. Each acorn is an embryonic oak tree.

However, almost none of these will actually grow into a standing tree one day. There are many, many obstacles that an acorn, and the seedling that it may produce, must overcome to eventually become an oak tree.

Many acorns fall prey to weevils and other insects before they even fall off the tree. And if an acorn does manage to escape those threats and is still viable when it drops to the ground, having adequate moisture to germinate and sprout is the first and most pressing issue.

The acorn must also be able to reach soil that it can send its root down deep into, but not in the immediate vicinity of the parent tree – some form of seed dispersal should take place so that the acorn is not competing with its parent for sunlight and water.

There is also a whole host of animals that consume the acorns, so most will become eventual food for jays, squirrels, woodpeckers, wild pigeons, deer, bear, elk, and more.

Jon Hammond.

Valley Oak acorns litter the ground beneath a big tree in upper Brite Valley.

In response to these nearly insurmountable odds against successful recruitment, or production of new young trees, the old oaks produce huge quantities of acorns – a big oak can generate thousands of acorns in a bountiful year.

Biologists refers to these big production events as a "mast year," and mast is a name given to wild foods utilized by animals – typically various kinds of nuts like acorns, walnuts and pecans, but it can also be applied to berries and other wild fruits.

Mast years may represent the trees' attempt to overwhelm with such substantial numbers that some acorns are bound to escape being eaten, and eventually germinate and grow. In a similar fashion, perhaps, to little toadlets in a pond that all emerge about the same time, so that predators can't manage to catch them all and some of them escape.

So 2024 has been a mast year for many oaks in the Tehachapi Mountains. Many, but certainly not all. When someone says to me "All the oaks are loaded with acorns this year!" I know that they haven't actually gone out collecting them, for if they did, they would quickly realize that it's never the case that ALL trees have a big crop – the ground under one oak can be littered with acorns, and the oak tree next to it, of the same species, will have practically none.

Then there's the matter of different species of oaks, both trees and shrub forms. There have been six different tree oaks identified in the Tehachapi Mountains: Valley Oak, Blue Oak, Black Oak, Canyon Oak, Interior Live Oak and Oregon Oak. And also at least three shrub oak species, including Scrub Oak, Tucker Oak and a shrub form of Interior Live Oak.

These trees produce acorns of different sizes and shapes, and their most productive years vary from species to species, with some being bountiful on a given year and other species on different years.

Jon Hammond.

Valley Oak acorns with the outer hull or pericarp removed.

Not only the acorns themselves, but the size, texture and shape of their caps, also called cupules, varies widely, and is one of the most useful keys to identifying them. These are largely determined by which lineage an oak is in, for there are three oak lineages, each with their own qualities.

I don't want to get too botanical here, but the oak lineages are white oaks, black oaks (called red oaks in the East) and golden oaks. We have representatives of all three lineages growing in the Tehachapi Mountains. I'll go into that sometime in another column.

Jon Hammond.

Black Oak acorns from Bear Valley. These have caps with overlapping feathery scales, rather than having knobby caps.

So some of the oaks in our area have had an abundant mast year, and many animals are consuming them now or storing them away for later. While the nutritional levels vary, acorns can contain about 18% fat, 6% protein and 68% carbohydrates, as well as minerals and fiber. Acorns are one of the main strands of the interconnected food web in the Tehachapi Mountains.

Acorns have also been a vital food source for humans, especially in California, for thousands of years. Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber estimated that acorns provided the primary daily food for about three-quarters of California's Native peoples. I have detailed Native acorn preparation in the past, and will again.

This has been an abundant year, for acorns as well as for some species of pine nuts, so it should send a pulse of food energy through our local ecosystem. Good harvests are glad tidings.

Keep enjoying the beauty of life in the Tehachapi Mountains.

Jon Hammond is a fourth generation Kern County resident who has photographed and written about the Tehachapi Mountains for 38 years. He lives on a farm his family started in 1921, and is a speaker of Nuwä, the Tehachapi Indian language. He can be reached at [email protected].