November 16 Uk - the sun shines the colours ripen

Two pictures today. The big one shows the tree in context. The little one is the usual view. Other oaks around on the right or our tree have more leaves. The one on the left, close, is bare and the one behind that still almost green. Oaks show a lot of individuality in this but not, so I have read, in the size of the acorn harvest. With acorns it is either feast or famine and this applies to all the trees for many miles. The theory is oaks starve their acorn predators with lean years then suddenly overwhelm them with a huge harvest so some new oak seedlings are bound to succeed. This years acorn harvest around here was very small but there are lots of little seedlings under our oak so maybe last years was a bumper harvest. Click on the link for the article where I read about feast and famine in oak mast. http://www.hastingsreserve.org/OakStory/AmerSciMastKoenig_05.pdf
I've seen this myself but thought it was climatic rather than a strategy to maximise reproduction. The article has a nice picture from Les Tres Riche Heures of the Duc de Berry. Here's a link where you can see all the pictures http://humanities.uchicago.edu/images/heures/heures.html

Here are a few more pics I took this morning. First a shot looking out of the edge of the wood and then a picture of an amazing old beech tree not far from our oak. Last some lichen on the tree and buttercup leaves in the frost. There was quite a strong frost this morning. I thought frost brought down the leaves but it doesn't seem to have done.