I spent a couple of summers working as a park naturalist in Yosemite Park.
On a day off I went with a local resource management historian to hike into
an old pioneer cabin site which had been restored in the 60's and then
seemed to have fallen off the parks radar. In fact we only had a hand
sketched map of how to find this cabin and it required quite a ways of off
trail hiking. It took us the entire day to find it and it was almost dark so
we choose not to enter the structure until the next day and camped nearby.
The next morning we opened the door and were astonished to find bushels upon
bushels of acorns covering the floor of the small 8X10 log cabin. They were
piled 3-4 feet deep in places. The bottom layers were well rotten and mice
had eating many. The roof was riddled with holes and as we took photos and
notes of the cabin, an acorn woodpecker flew up to the roof, acorn in beak,
shoved it in one of the holes, then flew off! We were stunned to think that
all that huge pile was the work of woodpeckers. Unfornately I have lost my
field notes for this year (1981) but I remember counting a sample and
esimating the number of acorns in the 100,000 range.


Rob Sandelin
Naturalist, Writer
The Environmental Science School
http://www.nonprofitpages.com/nica/SVE.htm
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