Hunters could help bring back the American chestnut

“Hey, did you hear about . . .” comes up a lot.

It’s come up a lot recently. Probably because of similar reasons to the rambling of my last week’s prose. And it often involves deer and that leads to deer hunting and other things.

I started hearing about this several years ago and it intrigued me. This year, it seems, might be its year to shine.

When hunting deer, you hunt where they are. Hunting them in their bedding areas is almost impossible in Wisconsin’s wooded areas. Hunting them on travel routes is almost as hard, as they don’t always use the same routes. Hunting them by a food source, well, all animals need to eat.

Everyone from the native hunters to market hunters, settlers, and modern hunters, hunted deer at food sources but the coveted spots were salt licks. We don’t have a lot of naturally occurring salt licks in Wisconsin. People try to make their own, but that’s illegal. And the time of the year we hunt deer, they focus on food sources and putting on weight for the winter.

The latest “plan” gaining traction for attracting deer stems from planting hybrid American chestnut trees. They once dominated the eastern hardwood forest. They grew fast, resisted rot, at maturity reached 3 feet in diameter, grew to 80 feet tall, and they produced a large annual mast crop that didn’t fluctuate like acorn crops do. Due to their great size, they played an important ecological role in protecting the soil from excessive evaporation of water, nutrients management, and carbon sequestration.

They held great importance to settlers and farmers that sent their hogs out to feed on the chestnuts and fatten them up for slaughter. They provided those same people and Native Americans with an important food source, harvesting them by the bushel. Those uses disappeared with the American chestnut over a short period of time, less than 50 years.

In the late 1800’s and according to the American Chestnut Foundation, in 1904 non-native chestnut trees introduced a blight (fungus) to American forests. The blight claimed most of the American chestnuts in its range.

While native to the Appalachia, the America chestnut did grow in Wisconsin. Some survived since they were removed from the area of the blight, but I’ll say I’ve never seen a single one.

Deer sought out the mast from American chestnuts more than white oak acorns, so naturally modern day deer hunters take notice. The descriptions of those chestnuts said they were about the size to slightly larger than white oak acorns. If someone finds a wild American chestnut in a forest today, it’ll look like a shrub, never growing large enough to produce chestnuts.

The research I saw said the loss of the American chestnut trees in the eastern states represents one of the worst ecological disasters of our time.

The American Chestnut Foundation and arborists have been working to bring this important tree back to the landscape. Their working solution provided hybrid American chestnuts that can survive to maturity and produce mass. Those same methods are currently being experimented with to produce an ash tree resistant to emerald ash borers.

They hybridized the American chestnut with Chinese and Japanese chestnut trees that resist the blight that laid ravage to our native chestnut forest. Their work reached a point of growth that produces enough nursery stock to sell and distribute. They are listed as suitable for growing in zones 5 – 9, if that answers your question.

A lot of deer hunters jumped on this, including former Packer Clay Matthews who very recently appeared on the MeatEater podcast and spoke about planting a lot of hybrid American chestnut trees on his property in Tennessee. From that, an acquaintance of mine that concerns himself with the Packers more than deer hunting took notice and listened to the podcast because he heard Matthews appeared on it. Henceforth, bringing this all back to “Hey, did you hear about chestnut trees . . . . Clay Matthews.”

I responded by asking him to hand me the tool needed to affix the wood duck box I was holding up and trying to hang with a group of friends. The story of hunters bringing wood ducks back from the brink of extinction by building, hanging, and maintaining wood duck boxes is a huge part of our story. Hunters planting hybrid American chestnut trees today, when they could just plant corn, that’s part of the story too.

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