sutton023

An urgent note to all hazel growers- we're seeing increased nut theft this year, and it's accelerating. We're talking about rodents and birds, primarily.  In all years, there will be "theft"; but this year it seems to be exceptional to us.  The nuts are disappearing. In our experience, less experienced hazel growers tend to see hazel bushes with few nuts, and assume the bush simply never had many.  Often this is not the case- predators remove them; and very stealthily, so the gradual loss is not noticed. As a reminder; one of the papers I submitted for my Masters was an original piece of Ethology; a summer long field study of Black Tern social behavior- I basically minored in Animal Behavior, and am a trained observer. Which has turned out critically important on several occasions; in one, it took us weeks to discover that bluejays had deciphered our plant marking process- and were using it to harvest the best nuts, and best plants, before we actually got to them....

It's a basic part of the concept of woody agriculture that the biodiversity possible in a permanent hazel, or chestnut, etc., field is going to be far higher than in any row crop monoculture.  We just now had a truly spectacular demonstration of that. While serving as the "bagger" on the hazel picking machine in the Illinois field; I suddenly saw something odd come down the chute with the hazel clusters.  "MOUSE!" my brain yelled- I'd never seen one come through with the nuts, but in fact the deer mice ( Peromyscus sp.) not only climb up in the hazel bushes to eat nuts, but sometime build nests there, renovating old bird nests. I automatically grabbed it and threw it behind the harvester- and only then did my brain register- "wings."  That was a bat - not a mouse.  A bat?  In a hazel bush- at noon?  Oh, yes. We stopped the machine, got off and searched- I thought it likely the bat would be stunned; probably desperately hurt, going through a harves...