No More Learning

I frequently see a red or gray squirrel cast down a green chestnut
bur, as I am going through the woods, and I used to think, sometimes,
that they were cast at me. In fact, they are so busy about it, in the
midst of the chestnut season, that you cannot stand long in the woods
without hearing one fall. A sportsman told me that he had, the day
before,--that was in the middle of October,--seen a green chestnut bur
dropped on our great river meadow, fifty rods from the nearest wood,
and much further from the nearest chestnut tree, and he could not tell
how it came there. Occasionally, when chestnutting in midwinter, I
find thirty or forty nuts in a pile, left in its gallery, just under
the leaves, by the common wood mouse (_Mus leucopus_).

But especially, in the winter, the extent to which this transportation
and planting of nuts is carried on is made apparent by the snow. In
almost every wood, you will see where the red or gray squirrels have
pawed down through the snow in a hundred places, sometimes two feet
deep, and almost always directly to a nut or a pine cone, as directly
as if they had started from it and bored upward,--which you and I
could not have done. It would be difficult for us to find one before
the snow falls. Commonly, no doubt, they had deposited them there in
the fall. You wonder if they remember the localities, or discover them
by the scent. The red squirrel commonly has its winter abode in the
earth under a thicket of evergreens, frequently under a small clump of
evergreens in the midst of a deciduous wood. If there are any nut
trees which still retain their nuts standing at a distance without the
wood, their paths often lead directly to and from them. We therefore
need not suppose an oak standing here and there _in_ the wood in order
to seed it, but if a few stand within twenty or thirty rods of it, it
is sufficient.

I think that I may venture to say that every white pine cone that
falls to the earth naturally in this town, before opening and losing
its seeds, and almost every pitch pine one that falls at all, is cut
off by a squirrel, and they begin to pluck them long before they are
ripe, so that when the crop of white pine cones is a small one, as it
commonly is, they cut off thus almost every one of these before it
fairly ripens. I think, moreover, that their design, if I may so
speak, in cutting them off green, is, partly, to prevent their opening
and losing their seeds, for these are the ones for which they dig
through the snow, and the only white pine cones which contain anything
then. I have counted in one heap, within a diameter of four feet, the
cores of 239 pitch pine cones which had been cut off and stripped by
the red squirrel the previous winter.
The nuts thus left on the surface, or buried just beneath it, are
placed in the most favorable circumstances for germinating. I have
sometimes wondered how those which merely fell on the surface of the
earth got planted; but, by the end of December, I find the chestnut of
the same year partially mixed with the mould, as it were, under the
decaying and mouldy leaves, where there is all the moisture and manure
they want, for the nuts fall fast. In a plentiful year, a large
proportion of the nuts are thus covered loosely an inch deep, and are,
of course, somewhat concealed from squirrels. One winter, when the
crop had been abundant, I got, with the aid of a rake, many quarts of
these nuts as late as the tenth of January, and though some bought at
the store the same day were more than half of them mouldy, I did not
find a single mouldy one among these which I picked from under the wet
and mouldy leaves, where they had been snowed on once or twice. Nature
knows how to pack them best. They were still plump and tender.
Apparently, they do not heat there, though wet. In the spring they
were all sprouting.

Loudon says that "when the nut [of the common walnut of Europe] is to
be preserved through the winter for the purpose of planting in the
following spring, it should be laid in a rot-heap, as soon as
gathered, with the husk on, and the heap should be turned over
frequently in the course of the winter. "

Here, again, he is stealing Nature's "thunder. " How can a poor mortal
do otherwise? for it is she that finds fingers to steal with, and the
treasure to be stolen. In the planting of the seeds of most trees, the
best gardeners do no more than follow Nature, though they may not know
it. Generally, both large and small ones are most sure to germinate,
and succeed best, when only beaten into the earth with the back of a
spade, and then covered with leaves or straw. These results to which
planters have arrived remind us of the experience of Kane and his
companions at the north, who, when learning to live in that climate,
were surprised to find themselves steadily adopting the customs of the
natives, simply becoming Esquimaux. So, when we experiment in planting
forests, we find ourselves at last doing as Nature does.