Shagbark

You can recognize a mature Shagbark Hickory (Carya ovata) by its flaking bark. I’d never seen a Shagbark before we moved to our farm. These hardwood trees use to be very common in Kentucky, which is part of the Central U.S. Hardwood forests. When the Europeans first came to the Americas the old growth forests they found astounded them. They has never see forest so abundant and deep. The Central Hardwood oak-hickory forests consist of white and red oak, shagbark hickory, locus, poplar, flowering dogwood, sassafras and hop hornbeam.

If you ever visit Pleasant Hill (Shakertown) in Mercer county Kentucky make sure to stop by the cistern house. There you can see beams supporting the cistern reservoir that are four inches thick, twenty-five inches plus wide, and fifteen feet long. “Boards” of these dimensions were once common. The oak-hickory forest the boards came from were so vast that it was said “a squirrel could travel from the East Coast to the Mississippi River without touching the ground,” but no more. An amazing ninety-nine percent of the Central Hardwood Forests was destroyed by development and agriculture.

The Fox squirrel (Sciurus niger) is just one of the squirrels that populate the Central hardwood forest. They are larger than the Eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) that you see in towns and cities. The Fox squirrel also has a reddish color and stubby ears and they are very shy. When we first moved to our farm we couldn’t get within a hundred yards of one – the are now more tolerant, letting us get fifty yards away before they run for the safety of a tree. They love Shagbark Hickory nuts, which taste good but take too much work for me to bother. The nut has two layers – the outer later is inedible, and the hartnut is hard containing only a little meat.