On an unusually warm day in late February at the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, the snow beneath the oak and nut trees is littered with squirrel and wild turkey tracks. It’s quiet evidence of a seasonal feast.
By late fall, most of the acorns are gone. What’s left scattered on the ground are the bitternut hickories.
“[The animals] don’t come and get them until the spring,” says Brandon Miller, an assistant professor in the university’s Department of Horticultural Science, “when they’ve already exhausted everything else.”…