Of Bushy-Tails and Hedge Fruit
Are we provisioning for the future, or stockpiling to end it?
I let the late century Ford pickup purr at a set of battered stock gates, loosely tied to weather-worn hedge posts with baling wire, at the dead end of a gravel spur that runs along a ditch lined with honeysuckle that presses against a tangle of barbed wire and a torn up soybean field edged with herbicide-singed hemlock, a lone deer stand positioned between myself and a confinement hog barn that echoes with squealing pigs on the horizon. For safety’s sake, I pull a faded orange cap on, step out of the vehicle, and disentangle the bent and corroded gates, sliding the heavy, rusted chain through the dented steel tubing, and chug off up the roughhewn road towards an old hay barn and cattle sorting yard. For the past half a century, at least, this place has been cattle pasture, but before then, before it was common practice to hold swine indoors, there had been an open-air swine yard held on these grounds.
Our county is dotted with clues that hint at the former popularity of pig pasturing– old ground-sourced waterers that protrude through the dense stands of silver maple, abrupt rectangles of rich earth surrounded by concrete-rooted and time-worn hedge posts, and once in a while, conspicuously placed persimmon trees of an experienced age, still heavy with the burden of abundance and sugar. I have come here to find one such tree, and recover some seed for propagation.
In conversations with the old-timers down at Zimmerman’s Cafe, I have learned that it was once common to pasture hogs here, before cattle and hay were the economic engine of these lands. Many families kept a small herd out on pasture, in huts. These pigs, like our own, would graze and snooze on the hillsides, traipsing out to the field’s edge to glean acorns and persimmons and root around in the forest debris. Before the population of Rutledge dropped to double-digits (we’re now back around 109), there was a railroad depot, and folks would drive their hogs to it, on foot, guiding them with herding sticks and pails of cracked corn. If the sun was hot that day, the hogs would scamper for shade under the neighborhood porches for relief, and inevitably require some coaxing to make it on time for the train. A good hog yard would have had a few heavy-bearing persimmon trees on the edge to provide summertime shade and autumn fattening, and most homesteads would have had at least one.
Most of those old trees, like the hogs that slept in comfort beneath them, are gone now, cut to make way for open cattle pasture or hayfields, which is what makes them exciting to find. With production advances in row-cropping (petro-chemical agriculture), a glut of corn and beans supported confinement swine production, and generations of hogs farrowed in steel crates were relegated to concrete, climate-controlled barns located conveniently out in the broad, rich, flatlands along the channelized rivers, and further into Iowa corn country. The scrappy home-built pig sties and pasture huts were bulldozed into the draws to make way for a monotony of cattle and cool-season grass crops, which while not entirely inappropriate for our landform, often led to a loss of diversity, both of habitat and the wildlife within, not to mention a diversity of homestead income. Down in the draws, where the brambles are too thick and the landscape too steep for cattle to tread, the dented, rusting husks of hog feeders can still be found, their galvanized zinc coatings flaking, their thin steel bloody with oxidation.
My chats with old timers confirm that native persimmons were commonly planted for pigs in the early days, either by seed sourced from known, productive trees, or by manually transplanting abundant specimens. Most of the wild areas I walk now will have a few persimmons tucked into the edges, but they are too young to be the originals– nothing older than 30 years of age. But the particular tree I’m seeking out here appears to be a fair bit older, if not an original hog-tree, a direct descendant, outlining what is currently a cattle handling yard. It towers, pressed against a long-standing corral, and my gut instinct is that this particular plot had been host to hogs well-before the cattle came, a hypothesis I will attempt to confirm with my neighbors.
It is my experience that different trees drop fruit at different times. I’m personally interested in persimmons that hang on into December, providing some sweetness and nutrition in the bleak weeks of late autumn for livestock and myself, but it would appear this particular tree has already given up the sugary ghost. Beneath the bare-limbed canopy is a mosaic of cattle and deer tracks. The tree is barren. I dig around in the muck and among the veterinary waste of the sorting yard and unearth a few smashed, dry fruits, and then find a handful of potentially viable seeds. A rusted out trough sits crushed at the base of the grand old tree, and the creased and busted corners hold a small cache of seeds. I take a few and leave the rest, because I always enjoy the sight of trees sprouting up through agri-industrial waste. After some moments pawing through the middens, I recover plenty of seed for this year, and make my way back to the gate at the front of the pasture, returning to the present moment where hogs squeal on the darkening horizon.
I have a grudging admiration for squirrels, and while I generally advocate for a kind of immersion with our ecosystem and reciprocal cooperation with wildlife in our necessary agrarian activities as humans, I feel a certain sense of competition with the bushy-tails, as a human who is focused on nut-tree production. They are smart, fast, agile, open to taking more than they immediately need, and have all day long to figure out a better way to be sneaky. Folks do eat them, and suggest that the flavor is unsurpassed, but it seems like a lot of work, and they are objectively cute. Once our nut orchards reach full production, I wonder if there would be any way to harness their harvest labor to our benefit, perhaps by providing artificial nut-caches that could be summarily removed from the ground once the squirrels fill them up. I don’t have the time or intelligence to implement such a design, but a squirrel might.
I am simultaneously charmed, frustrated, and ambivalent about squirrels, but my otherwise sweet dog has some consternation, bordering on a seething dislike for them. A group of squirrels is often known as a scurry, and one particular scurrilous trio of bushy-tails has been mocking the both of us from up in the expansive limbs of Osage orange that stretch along our homestead yard, chattering with a wide-eyed fervor as they scratch their way up through the thorny boughs, shredding the volumes of yello-green hedge fruit that lie trapped in the crotches of trees to access the nutritious seeds contained within. The branches rain with a strong scented confetti of inedible green flesh that oozes with milky sap, littering every surface, and near daily I find hedge seeds, hazelnut, acorns, and even dried down wild fruits stashed in crevices in the toolshed, stuffed in forest floor caches, and stowed away in the unorganized piles of plant pots that litter the lean-to potting shed. This is where I admit my grudging admiration.
Perhaps unbeknownst to these squirrels themselves, this behavior, known as scatter-hoarding, is a key piece of forest regeneration in our ecosystem. On the surface, their behavior appears greedy, consumptive, even menacing, but this is a mere projection of our own human resource use patterns onto these seed-saving tree rats. Squirrels do not eat all they collect. Maintaining a light frame allows them to remain agile and evade predation, so instead of fattening up and hibernating like many temperate-climate mammals, they stockpile food, just like us. A squirrel has a pretty good memory, but not a perfect memory, and so inevitably, some of these stockpiles are forgotten or their caretakers become owl snacks, and remain buried at the perfect depth of soil for winter stratification and spring germination. While they are perhaps some threat to nut orchards in terms of net income, they do much of the same work as the orchardist and nursery operator. Forests cannot thrive without stewards, and these stewards are due some higher degree of appreciation than my dog affords them
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A group of squirrels (and we’re talking tree squirrels here, specifically Sciurus carolinensis, there’s a lot of squirrels) is also sometimes known as a dray (or drey), particularly a mother squirrel (a sow) and her young (kits, kittens, or pups). A squirrel’s nest is also referred to as a dray, and you can find them at the tippy top of trees, leaf-lined bowls that sway in the wind. Trees provide safety, shelter, and nutrition, so it is no wonder that squirrels are such skilled foresters. As synanthropes, organisms that benefit from civilization like rats, lice, pigeons and plantain, our world of human habitation will always play host to this waiting conservation corps of little foresters, their curated caches of germplasm prepared to sprout through the detritus of crumbling infrastructure long after our own activities of consumption have rendered us inert. I would venture to guess that the carbon credits squirrel activity might offer, if realistically calculated, would dwarf the often corrupt, economically-driven, human-derived schemes currently being hocked. Squirrels may be synanthropic, but chances are, they’ll do fine without us.
There currently is no scurry of squirrels on this old patch of Missouri fenceline populous enough to consume the sheer amount of hedge balls that lay scattered about our yard and walking paths. They are heavy to kick out of the way, and whenever the sun breaks through the autumn gloom, our whole homestead reeks of their sickly sweet vegetable odor. The three resident squirrels chip through them bit by bit, but if we are to make it through this week without comically slipping on the glut of heavy, round fruits and spraining an ankle, or worse, then I will once again need to perform the mildly Herculean task of collecting and hauling them off to a more appropriate location. Probably a couple few hundred pounds of them.
In years past, I have filled empty 60 gallon steel drums with hedge-fruit, allowing them to freeze and thaw and ferment into a seed-ridden slurry, and then poured this into trenches to sprout up as thick stands of hedgerow. In late winter, this mush attracts wild birds, and so once I felt that it would provide some beneficial wild nutrition if I dumped about 200 pounds of it in our winter poultry yard– the chickens did not care for it.
Maclura pomifera, the Osage orange, also known as hedge, also known as bodark or bois d’arc, is a supremely useful tree, excepting that the massive, strongly flavored fruits co-evolved with now extinct megafauna. Lacking mastodons and giant sloths, the fruit lays in wait as a tripping hazard for humans, which may be its greatest strength, while the spiny, dense, finely grained, rot resistant wood finds utility as fence-posts, bow staves, and firewood that can burn hot enough to make your stove glow. Over time and through the winter, squirrels will chip away at the bounty of fruits to extract the seed, and eventually, once they are sufficiently shredded up, white tail deer make a habit of nibbling the bite-sized pieces during the bleakest days of winter. Many a northeast Missouri cattle rancher, and at least two veterinarians, have told me tales of curious cows choking on the fruit, but unlike the oft-maligned honey locust, which is also armed with intimidating spines, yet produces a reliable crop of digestible mast in the form of sugary, fragrant pods, hedge is tolerated on pasture, mostly for it’s valuable pole and post wood. I’ve even met old cattlemen who saunter out to their fencelines each fall to pick up the abundance of fruit to keep their cows safe, and now and then you’ll see a box of them for sale, a quarter apiece, at out local dry goods grocery, no explanation provided as to why anyone would purchase them.
Some folks swear that they are a natural pest repellent- but I have seen them crawling with bugs. Once, a classified ad in our local paper, from a cosmetics company, offered to purchase hedge balls by the truckload, at a low price for such heavy fruits I might add. I myself am even guilty of trying to inflict human value on these biological anachronisms, encouraging the local kids to join in on an improvised version of bocce ball, or bobbing for hedge-apples. But ultimately, I suppose, not everything produced by the natural world has an inherent value for us humans, and this somehow gives me comfort as cart by cart, I haul it away to the draws for the squirrels and deer to glean from and plant for their own future, with or without us.
A pall of cold, gray gloom has been sitting over us for the past day or so. The house is still warm enough to encourage flies, but the chill of morning chores is stuck in my boots. The warm season grass has gone dormant, and the remaining paddocks of cool season grass have slowed their growth. In a month’s time, we will be feeding out hay, the pastures will be empty, and the fields and woods will belong solely to the coyotes and squirrels.
At the finish of a long year, I begin to long for the comforts of winter torpor. I’m ready to be put up for the season, locked safely in my stall to consume fodder and maintain condition. I’m creaky and tired, but unlike cows and goats, no responsible party will be directly tending to my physical needs this way, at least not for some time, so I must look up to the wind-whipped squirrel drays for inspiration to continue this ceaseless harvest. I begin to cache tree seeds for stratification, so that the work of re-rooting the plow-broken earth can continue. I sharpen knives and clean the implements of slaughter, so that I might provision some nourishment of fat and flesh in the coming cold. Row by row, we tuck garlic into winter garden beds and armor the vulnerable earth with layers of compost and mulch, and in stacks and bundles we tally the split and dissected corpses of trees to heat our dwelling.
Like squirrels, and like our human forebears, we scatter-hoard. It is as our work in this life is to amass and organize piles of resources, and hope like hell we can remember where they are when we need them most, after the leaves all drop and the ice piles thick. That may be as true for us simple folk pawing around in the cow-shit for a few seeds as it is for the prosperous few who hoard massive stockpiles of the stuff we all need, but up here on the old fencerow I’d like to think we’re a bit closer in values to the bushy-tailed rats that dance on thorny limbs than the ogres of industry who leave little more than scrap and waste in their compulsion to extract, consume, and hoard this planet’s resources, save for a lot of hedge balls, and the caches of seeds they’ll never find.