All species of oak trees along the Bosque River receive an environmental cue in the spring that coordinates their masting behavior. Have you noticed that oaks and pecans have heavy-bearing years and then several years in which they don’t produce at all. This is a trick they learned millions of years ago. If they produced a medium crop every year, the insect and animal predators would build their populations and wipe out each year’s crop. But if the tree do not bear a crop for several years, then those populations crash and are not present in large numbers when a heavy mast year arrives. Masting is the Old English term for forest foods, nuts and acorns that covered the forest floor in productive years. Acorn shells found in archeological sites along the Bosque show that Native Texans took advantage of mast years to process the acorns into flour to help them survive the winter. It’s thought that the far-ranging bands would gather in an oak grove during good years to meet and stir the gene pool, then share the work; collecting, shelling, crushing and then the acorn pulp had to be leached in water to remove the kidney-damaging tannins. After grinding on metates, the flour could be stored for winter soups, stews, and flatbread.

Dan Young, Unpublished manuscript, 2022.