The Secret Wisdom of Nature by Peter Wohlleben

Author:Peter Wohlleben
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2017-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

11

Fairy Tales, Myths, and

Species Diversity

WE’VE LOOKED AT some surprising natural connections. Yet I haven’t mentioned others that might seem much more obvious—for example, how events in fall predict the harshness of winter. And there’s a good reason: they don’t exist.

For example, since ancient times, the fruit set of beeches and oaks has been used to forecast the weather. An old German country saying goes something like this: “Many beechnuts and acorns and winter will be harsh.” Or “Many acorns in September, much snow in December.” To try to get to the truth behind these sayings, we first have to ask a few questions. Why would a tree do this? How could forming lots of seeds help a tree survive a harsh winter? What would the indirect consequences be for the tree?

Unfortunately, I don’t have the answers to these questions. All we know is that the trees in each species (oak or beech) agree on a time to bloom together so that every few years they produce an enormous amount of seed. As I mentioned earlier, they do this to regulate the size of the plant-eating population by ensuring that browsers can’t rely on a constant supply of food every year. But the strategy has nothing to do with winter.

There’s another point to be made here. Flower buds (just like leaf buds) are set the previous summer. If a tree matched its seed production to the winter temperature, it would have to know more than a year in advance what this was going to be and plan accordingly. Beeches and oaks, however, have no better ways to predict winter weather than we do. What trees can do is register shorter days and falling temperatures. They use this information to decide when to drop their leaves before the first heavy snowfall. And many years they don’t even get this short-term forecast right, as you can see when winter arrives early. When snow falls in October, as it often does, branches with green leaves still on them break under the heavy weight of fresh wet snow, which is a painful lesson for the trees. At least if this happens to them when they are young, they can learn from their experience and drop their leaves a little sooner in the future. But they only drop their leaves early as a precaution: their decision doesn’t have anything to do with improved forecasting. So there you have it: even beeches can’t forecast the weather a year in advance.

So much for representatives from the plant realm, but what about animals? There’s also folk wisdom that says squirrels can predict a harsh winter. If they are particularly busy gathering food and laying up large stores of acorns and beechnuts, that means the winter is going to be particularly harsh. Really? I think you could probably answer this one for yourself. Of course these pretty little creatures don’t have a sixth sense for what the weather will be like in the coming months any more than trees do. Their drive to collect nuts is simply a question of supply.

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