Shortly after meeting A.J. Hendershott at the International Hunter Education Association conference in Branson, he handed me a baked chinquapin nut.

It tasted like candy.

I'd never even heard of the Ozark chinquapin tree before that.

That led to inviting A.J. onto The Ozark Podcast and my new obsession with a nearly extinct tree species.

In today's newsletter:

Let's get into it.

00:00 — Why should outdoorsman care about this tree?
14:00 — History of The Ozark Chinquapin
22:00 — Working with Chinquapin wood
31:00 — Wildlife Benefits of Chinquapins

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I didn't know this tree existed before we started digging into this episode. I don’t know many people that do. But it wasn't always that way.

Pollen records show the Ozark chinquapin was once as common as white ash in our forests, making up about 2% of the Ozark canopy. That sounds like a small number until you think about how many millions of trees that actually is.

Apparently the nuts were so plentiful people collected them with flat blade shovels and loaded them onto wagons to feed livestock. During the Depression, kids took them to school in their pockets as their lunch.

Beyond the nutrition of the nut, the wood is rot resistant, easy to work with when green, and harder than oak once it dries. Its bark, burs, leaves, and wood produce natural dyes across a hundred different hues, and there's historic record of medicinal benefits too.

This tree could do it all.

But most of us have never seen one. Why?

A fungus native to China, probably carried over with Chinese chestnut trees in the early 1900s, spread like a slow wave across the country.

By the 1950s it reached the Ozarks, and within a single generation the chinquapin was gone.

The trees don't die cleanly either. They get blighted, die back, stump-sprout for 10 years, get hit again, die back again. Just cycling through a slow death over and over. Alive, but not really living.

And when they went, they took something real with it.

Compare 100 grams of white oak acorns to 100 grams of Ozark chinquapin nuts and the chinquapin has 4x the calories and 5x the protein.

The chinquapin blooms in May or June, past frost season, so it doesn't lose its crop the way oaks do. It starts producing nuts in five years, not fifteen or twenty. And it drops them in September, reliably, almost every single year.

Imagine how big the bears and bucks could grow with that kind of food source!

On bear den visits with AGFC, we learned that female bears who don't get adequate fall nutrition will naturally abort fetuses. And when you remove the most reliable, highest-protein mast crop from the landscape for 70 years, you make that outcome more common for every animal that depends on a fall food source: bear, deer, turkey, squirrel, all of it.

We've been hunting a hungrier woods than we realized.

Next week, we’ll get into the second part of our conversation where we talk about practical ways we can help bring this species back, but first, why should we care?

If you’ve been around the show for any amount of time, you’ve heard us make the case that hunters and anglers are primed to be some of the Ozark’s most committed conservationists.

The animals we harvest for food depend on their own food sources.

On a recent episode with Roy Pilgrim, we learned that our oak populations are in decline and facing the effects of decades of forest mismanagement. Fewer oaks means less food. Less food means less wildlife. Over time, that shrinks the carrying capacity of our land.

Similarly, the chinquapin was once a primary food source for wildlife across our region that delivered even more calories and nutrition to wildlife than an our oak acorns today.

We need to play defense and protect our oaks. But what if we could also play offense and bring back the chinquapin?

That’s what we’ll get into next week.

If you want to jump ahead, explore the website of the Ozark Chinquapin Foundation. They have resources on how to identify trees, historic range maps, etc.