I would guess that many people who poke around in the woods like me have, upon entering a beech grove or passing an extraordinary beech tree, stopped out of curiosity to scratch at the ground searching for nuts to crack open looking for meat. I also imagine that these folks have come away as perplexed as me to discover that the nuts are typically hollow and quite useless.

I have repeated this exercise often over the years, alone or with someone, and have left scratching my head, wondering why I can’t find a fertile nut on a forest floor dense with immature beech trees of various sizes. Obviously some of the nuts that fall to the ground are good. The immature beeches tell me that. But why can’t I find any? It’s a mystery my friends and I have never solved. Then, this year, on my daily rambles with the dogs, I happened upon a lowland beech I’ve mentioned before, one full of good nuts from its bottom limbs to its crown. In fact, I have not yet picked one nut that wasn’t full of meat, very uncharacteristic in my experience.

By mentioning this discovery here and receiving feedback from foresters and wildlife biologists alike, the beechnut issue seems to be coming into better focus, although I must admit the massive beech I’ve been observing stands in a place where I’m not used to finding beech trees. I am accustomed to finding and sampling beechnuts along the upland ridges where deer and bears and turkey roam. Often these solitary beech trees or dense beech groves stand high and dry in ledgey terrain. Yes, such trees or groves may overlook a cedar or hemlock swamp, but I cannot recall finding beeches in upland swamps, which doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just seems to me that this is not where you’d expect to find them.

So, the fact that the bottomland beech I’ve been watching is rooted into the lip of a wetland could be the reason it produces so many nuts. According to a forester, beeches need lots of water for optimal nut production, and this tree gets plenty. Then again, maybe this is just a good year and it won’t be nearly as productive next year. We’ll have to wait and see. But at least this year, in my mind, the beech tree is fascinating. A factor that hints this could be an extraordinary year, though, is the absence of infant beeches surrounding the stately tree.

Former state Deer Project Leader John McDonald, now a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in Hadley, read about my beech and chimed in by e-mail about beechnut production and a survey he conducted years ago as part of a Massachusetts bear study. Focused on beechnut and acorn production that’s so important to a bear’s diet, McDonald put out seed traps to collect the nuts and did visual surveys of trees’ crowns to quantify the nut production in a study area. He remembers one year in particular when his visual assessment indicated an extraordinary year for beechnuts; however, examination of the nuts captured in the seed traps told an entirely different story. Upon opening his collected beechnuts, McDonald found almost every one empty.

“When I say ‘almost,’ I mean maybe one out of every couple hundred nuts actually contained meat,” he wrote. “The rest were empty. We would have totally overestimated how much food was available if all we did was the visual study or count the nuts in the traps.”

McDonald’s field research confirms my own observations from more than 40 years or traipsing through local forests and breaking open beechnuts with my worn teeth (Pssst. Don’t tell my buddy and dentist Dr. Mark). I don’t know how many nuts one mature beech tree produces, but apparently one fertile nut out of every couple hundred is enough to keep our beech groves alive and well.