Posted by jqkluft • 1 week 3 days ago
Hi everyone,
This has been a tricky summer in Boston area with the drought causing a lot of fruits to abort off the trees by the 1000's in some of our oaks.
Our flowering dogwoods were looking relatively normal despite widespread early reddening of leaves from the tremendous heat. However, the last few weeks, we've had many fruits taken off the trees by birds and chipmunks squirrels prematurely. I imagine the animals are hungry and thirsty. If we have many green dogwood fruits removed from the tree, should we still count that as fruit drop? I just want to be clear that they are unripe when they are knocked down and were not removed by wind.
Jacqui
Hello Jacqui,
Thank you for documenting this interesting summer phenology! Since the fruits are unripe when the animals are harvesting them, they should not be counted for the "Recent fruit or seed drop" phenophase. The records of "Fruits" and "Ripe Fruits" observations should be enough to represent this situation in the data. Thank you again for reaching out and for keeping track of these changes.
Happy observing,
Oskar
Plant Specialist, USA-NPN