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tae 
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a T See se eS a ee ee Ge. E E EEE 
ae See ee ee eB ee Sea ae ae E S ee S 
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Such 
bur 
ens frolic on a bur oak, and in leaving it for this place, each = 
“tried an acorn, as is their habit, Co 
1886. ] Causes of Forest Rotation, 527 
more than a mile distant. At length they get through, by finish- 
ing their work or tiring of it, and disperse. As they start to fly 
away many, if not all, will drop something. I have found these 
to be acorns, walnuts, hickory-nuts, buckeyes, sycamore-balls, 
sticks, egg-shells, pebbles, &c. As a crow leaves an oak he will 
pluck an acorn which he may carry five miles and light on a 
beech tree, where something else will attract his attention, when 
he will drop the acorn and may be pluck a pod of beech nuts and 
fly away somewhere else. ; 
The squirrel is also a nut-transporting agent. The hog will 
eat his nut where he finds it, but the squirrel must find some suit- 
able place to eat his nut, like some fastidious boarders I have 
known, who would not and could not eat if they failed to get 
their own conspicuous place at table. The squirrel will select his 
nut, take it in his mouth, skip along a few yards, pause a moment, 
then a few more skips and pause, preferring a fence or fallen tree 
to the ground for his roadway. He will sometimes carry his nut 
several hundred yards, not to his home, but to some conspicuous 
tall fence-stake or dead projecting limb of a tree, on which he sits 
on his haunches, his tail curled over his back, and in this striking 
attitude he complacently gnaws through the shell of his nut to 
Set the kernel. It will sometimes happen that just as he is ready 
to begin on his nut a hawk will swoop down after him, and His 
Complacency is glad to drop his nut and flirt down to the under 
Side of the limb for protection, This nut may fall on good 
Sround and make a future great forest tree. He will be chased 
by a dog, fox or hawk sometimes while on his way to his eating << 
Place, and involuntarily plant an oak, a walnut or hickory. The ed: 
Partition fences across our cleared farms and stumps out in the ss 
fields have many such planting of oak, walnut and hickory, far al" 
from the trees that bore the nuts, which I attribute to the crow 4 
or the squirrel, é 
I know a place about four miles south-west of here, where a 
‘Ow place in a field was too wet to be plowed, and has grown up 
full of young bur oaks, but there is no parent tree anywhere — 7 
near, not near enough even for high winds to carry such acorns. 
acorns sprout only in wet ground. I think this grove of 
Oaks is the result of a frolic of the crows, They had a pre- — 
