There are so many acorns falling that I’m sweeping them off the porch in piles. The deer, birds, and squirrels are enjoying a feeding frenzy, as this manna from heaven keeps pouring down. Yesterday a doe and two older fawns were chowing down right outside our kitchen window in broad daylight. The abundance of deer yummies on the ground was making them even bolder than usual.

Such an unusually large crop of acorns piqued my curiosity. We’re coming off the worst drought in decades, which, I would have thought, would cause just the opposite effect. What the heck is going on?

Turns out, we’re experiencing what is known as a “mast” year. A mast year happens when the number of nuts that trees produce in a given year is exponentially higher than the usual. Apparently, masting occurs every four to seven years, but scientists are not sure exactly what triggers it. One reasonable-sounding theory is that the trees do it to ensure the survival of their species. In most years, not too many acorns are produced. All sorts of critters quickly eat those few before they ever reach the ground, so they never have a chance to germinate. In self-defense, the tree basically decides to overwhelm all the seedeaters so that some of the acorns can convert to seedlings. There’s an interesting article about all this in American Scientist by Walt Koenig and Jean Knops.

We have two kinds of oak trees at our place:  Black Jack Oaks and Post Oaks. They look a lot alike, but as I walked around looking at them I noticed that the Post Oaks were covered with acorns, while the Black Jacks had hardly any.  Another mystery to research!

I learned that all oak trees fall into two groups: red oaks and white oaks.  Black Jack Oaks are in the red oak group and Post Oaks are in the white oak group. White oak acorns typically mature in a single growing season and taste sweet. Red oak acorns take two growing seasons to mature and taste bitter.  Last year’s late freeze evidently killed most of the red oak acorn crop that would have matured this fall, so the Black Jacks didn’t produce much. Since the Post Oaks are in the white oak group and produce annually, they are able to inundate us with acorns this year. From the animals’ perspective, that’s a lucky thing, since the white oak acorns are, according to the experts, tastier.

The taste test was verified yesterday, as Alex was walking toward his office, which happens to be located in the garage next to our chicken enclosure. He heard a commotion and went to check it out.  Acorns were bouncing off the roof and into the yard and the girls were going after them like they were grasshoppers.

After years of drought, it is an amazing and wonderful thing to see the way nature rebounds, given a decent rain. Such resilience serves to remind us that regardless of how discouraging things can be, there’s always reason to be hopeful. Out of all those acorns falling to the ground, one of them is sure to take root.

Believe it or not, however, there are highly trained professionals whose job it is to do just that. I will spare you the details of the Chicken Sexer job description; it was actually featured on the Discovery Channel television program, Dirty Jobs. Suffice it to say that chicken sexing involves in-depth knowledge of baby chick anatomy and getting really up close and personal with our little feathered friends.

Chicken “vent” sexing originated in Japan in the 1920s and, since that time, most of the professionals are Japanese or were trained in Japan. There’s even an “All-Japan Chick Sexing Championship” that’s been held annually for decades. Usually, only the large hatcheries can afford to hire a pro, which means that most small poultry purchases come with the built-in suspense of not knowing exactly what you’re getting.

Until the Japanese perfected the art, chicken sexing was, shall we say, a less-than-scientific enterprise. One method claimed that a ring suspended by a piece of cotton and held over a fertile egg would swing one direction for a male and the other for a female (I’m not sure which way meant which one). Another method held that the shape of the egg could indicate whether a rooster or pullet would hatch. For a while, attempts to mechanize the process using a lighted telescopic tube were popular. And then there was the method presented to me personally, that of holding a chick upside down by its legs to see whether it fought to free itself (rooster) or passively submitted—oh, right— to the humiliation (pullet).

That was the case until someone came up with “feather” sexing, which requires that chickens be bred especially to show differences in their feathers as soon as they are hatched. These hybrid breeds are called sex-links. Sex-link females either have longer wing pinfeathers than the males or entirely different coloration, which means it’s fairly easy to tell who’s what.

The Golden Comet is one such hybrid, being a cross between a Rhode Island Red and a White Leghorn. From the get-go, the hens are red and the roosters are white, so when you buy Golden Comet pullets, you can be sure that you’re actually going to get a bunch of egg layers rather than a few guys (by mistake) who all think they are the most-perfect-rooster-in-the-entire-world. Our most recent batch of chickens is Golden Comets and we got them because we didn’t want any more surprise roosters. Big Red is our latest surprise, and one rooster is plenty in a small family flock operation like ours.

As you can imagine, the development of feather sexing has not been a happy turn of events for your rank-and-file Chicken Sexers. Business is down. The bright side from the “venters”’ perspective is that feather sexing works only with hybrid breeds, so if you’re wanting to buy pure-bred chicks such as Rhode Island Reds or Barred Rocks, for example, it’s still up to the experts to sort out the hims from the hers. In other words, unless a Chicken Sexer has examined your pure-bred flock, it’s a crapshoot.

As much as I appreciate the tidiness presented by the sex-link solution, I feel a twinge of guilt over our Golden Comets. Every feather-sexed bird contributes to the underutilization of an experienced Chicken Sexer’s years of training. It just seems wrong that those guys who have worked so hard to learn how to do something so undeniably disgusting aren’t getting to do their job. There aren’t a lot of other employment opportunities out there for that particular skill set, don’t you know. I’m thinking that we’ll go back to pure-breds for our next batch of chickens. Variety is the spice of life after all.