Around 27 per cent of the European beech trees on the Veluwe flowered this year and are producing nuts for the thirteenth consecutive year. Photo: ImageSelect.
European beeches yield a great deal of food, though this year’s harvest is disappointing.
No fewer than 5.4 million kilograms of acorns and beech nuts fell on the Veluwe this year, according to estimates by Vereniging Wildbeheer Veluwe and Faunabeheereenheid Gelderland (Nature Today, 27 September). A respectable mast year, then, although in 2000 nearly twice as many nuts lay on the forest floor. This year it is above all the contribution of pedunculate and sessile oaks that is substantial, at 4.7 million kilograms; only 27 per cent of the European beech (Fagus sylvatica) trees flowered this year. The yield in beech nuts from the trees that did flower is reasonable, but the total remains a relatively small quantity.
Even so, the beech nuts that have fallen are noteworthy. Whereas European beeches traditionally dropped nuts every other year – or even at longer intervals – they have now done so for thirteen consecutive years, most likely as a result of climate warming. Various woodland animals can therefore make use of this food source annually, rather than only in good mast years.
COMMON NAMES
Besides beech nuts, a European beech also provides bark that is reasonably well suited to writing on. This may be why many common names for this tree – beuk, beech, Buche – resemble the word for book. Anyone who delves deep into the etymological origins of these words ultimately arrives at the Proto-Indo-European root phegos. From that root there probably also arose the Ancient Greek word φάγω or fago, meaning to eat. In antiquity, the European beech was already known as fagus on account of its nutritious nuts. Linnaeus adopted the name in 1753 in Species Plantarum, as the genus name for the beech. Incidentally, beech nuts contain the toxic compound fagin, so people who eat them would do well to roast them briefly and keep the quantity limited. That also leaves more for squirrels, mice, wild boar and other woodland residents. Beech nuts are, after all, inextricably linked to the forest: the species epithet sylvatica, loosely translated from Latin, means ‘growing in the forest’.