Mia, Unfortunately there is not an invisible portion of the pecan life cycle. However, there is an "I love to eat green pecan" phase in the life of a squirrel. Just one squirrel can strip your tree of up to 14 or 15 lbs. of pecans in one month, so imagine what a handful of squirrels could do.

Later on in the season, once the green husks are splitting open, crows come to join the party. Some of the commercial pecan growers here use a noise-making canon that automatically goes off every so often to scare the crows out of the trees. I've heard that a single crow can do as much damage or even more damage than a squirrel, and you rarely get a single crow--you get flocks of them.

Given the time of the year, I expect it is most likely squirrels that are getting the pecans, and the crows will be disappointed when they come visit your tree and discover the squirrels didn't leave any pecans for them.

Squirrels are hard to control if you're inside the city limits where you can't shoot them. You can trap them but then you still have to do something with them after they've been trapped. Out in rural areas, people tend to shoot them. We don't shoot them because our dogs just chase them away often enough that the squirrels tend to stay in the pecan trees in the woods most of the time and leave the pecan trees in the yard alone.

With crows, control is even harder. They are very smart birds and the solutions that I know of would not be useful in a suburban setting. The noisemakers would irritate your neighbors and hanging dead crows in trees to discourage other crows to stay out of your trees would be even less welcome.

Maybe Scott will have some idea on how to keep the varmints from getting your pecans.

Dawn

Darn tree rats!

Either the pecans are still there underneath the leaves or there will be something on the ground telling you what happened.

Since by now the pecans are likely mature or at least at full weight, the branches are hanging very low in trees with nuts. On many trees this makes the leaves hang downward and now cover the clusters whereas a month ago the pecans might have been more visible. Look closely again to make sure this is not the case.

There will be shuck or shell parts on the ground if squirrels are the issue. There will be empty shucks in the tree and on the ground if crows are the issue, and there will be dried up little pecans (shucks and all) on the ground if it was an issue internal to the tree itself.

If all the pecans and shucks are totally gone then I would bet you can find the small remnants on the ground that resulted when the tree aborted them due to lack of water, some kind of late-season disease, or just a problem with the tree health itself. This happens with some trees when the first heavy rain occurs in late summer.

I have a dozen trees of so that always lose almost all of the crop during August for some reason.

I'm interested in what you find when you look more closely. It may be some combination of the above possibilities. Keep us updated.

Thanks for the insight, everyone. I had thought the squirrels were so full from eating the pears that they might leave the pecans alone... ha!

I will investigate using your tips tonight and see if I can find out anything else. Thanks again! BBL.

I heard from a couple of people around central oklahoma that their pecans were falling off the trees back in August because of the heat. All of the pecans on my tree dropped off early this year. Probably some mix of the heat and the tree just being really old and slowly dieing. I sadly need to cut it down before it falls over... I always grew up with lots of pecan trees around and will definitely be replacing my old dying one soon.

I can't speak to pecans, but the same thing has happened with my daughter's Walnuts. They just fell off the tree. They didn't produce as many as last year either. I don't know if they rest a year after a large bounty the year before, or if the drought, last year's followed by this year's, affected the amount of fruit produced. There are still a few in the tree, but Walnuts tend to lose their leaves long before pecans in my experience, and this one already has yellowing leaves. They're also very late to put on foliage in spring - very late.

The strange thing is that I haven't seen any squirrels collecting them this year. Not like last year. There were tons of them last year, and we had a good time laughing at their antics in collecting them - I think the cat had something to do with that! But squirrel population is very low to none this year. They also have pecan trees and same thing with them.

Susan

teach_math That's what happened to mine. The tiny undeveloped nuts fell off last month along with half the leaves.

A lot of black walnuts were knocked off the trees in our storm and got raked up with the limbs, leaves, and sticks. We couldn't burn them because of the burn ban, so we had several stacks around the yard. The squirrels have been digging down into these yard waste piles to get the walnuts. I usually just pick them up and leave them in a flower pot for the squirrels to eat in the winter. I like black walnuts, but they are a pain to pick out and will stain your skin. I only use about one bag of black walnuts a year, and satisfy my cravings mostly with Braum's ice cream.

I grew up in southern Oklahoma so I am a pecan girl. My freezer ALWAYS has pecans, but I usually have many other kinds of nuts also.

Mia, It could have been the drought as others have mentioned. I've had some pecans abort in Aug. and Sept. but not a lot--probably 2-5%.

I did have another thought. Back when you had trouble with the gas leak and had all that work done, was there any excavation work done anywhere near the root zone of the tree?

Dawn

I found one clump of gnawed-on (old?) brown pecans and a single greenie. And tons of chewed up pears. I thought if squirrels were the culprits I would find more evidence. This is exactly where they dug down to run the bore for our gas line. I remember looking at my huge potential crop when I talked to the bore operator, so sometime since then they all went away. I wonder if they aborted due to drought/trauma and then squirrels gathered and took away the evidence?

And nothing remaining in the tree that I could see, even using binoculars.

It appears to me that those are all aborted pecans that never reached maturity. One got close but still aborted.

I cannot say anything with certainty about your tree, but I can at least say that I had about 200 trees abort their crop due to the drought. Some of these lost the leaves first and the pecans then dried up, some dropped their pecans first and the leaves stayed partially on, etc. But I also have a dozen or so that abort for other reason and the pecans look like yours do. In some years I can also lose a total crop on individual trees to insects that come along in early August, but this year that is not much of a problem.

This was the most unusual year of the last 12 since I have been doing this as far as pecan trees go. I've certainly learned a lot, but not the way I would have wanted to learn it.

Mia, Since the gas line work did involve excavation near the tree, I expect that the root disturbance in combination with the drought did cause the pecans to abort. It is likely, too, that critters came along and took advantage and gathered up the nuts that were falling. Squirrels will eat green pecans. I don't know if anything else eats them while they are still green. Squirrels plant a lot of pecans in our flowerbeds and veggie gardens, and even in my large containers, every year and I pull them out every spring. It is a battle that will go on forever and forever.

Scott, I learn something from every drought, and all of them are what I consider "hard lessons". I try to learn from the repetitive lessons in terms of what to plant or not to plant. Many, many ornamentals that I started with in 1999 or 2000 or 2001 did not survive the droughts in 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008-09, 2011 and 2012. So, every year, when we lose something new to drought that we haven't lost before, I cross that off my list and replace it with something tougher and more drought-tolerant. Eventually I won't be growing anything permanent/ornamental that cannot tolerate recurring droughts. The list of plants that cannot survive recurring droughts here in south-central OK is heartbreakingly long, but at least I am learning what plants really are strong, tough survivors and what ones are not.

You have to wonder, though, what would happen if we had a 7-year drought like the Drought of the 1950s in Texas. What could survive 7 consecutive years of consistently well-below-average rainfall? I hope we never have to find out.

We have a heavy load of pecans on our pecan trees, but since I never spray them, we won't know until we harvest them if the nuts are any good or not. I have noticed some of our oak trees are dropping acorns now, and it seems kinda early for that, so I assume it too is drought-related.

Dawn

And nothing remaining in the tree that I could see, even using binoculars.

Sorry for the duplicate post, I refreshed my phone's browser and I guess it resent.

We did not spray any of our trees, either, so was going to just see what happened. I will know for next year to look at them more frequently and earlier. I'll do some research to see how to know when they're ripe, too.

I might swing by our rental property with a pecan tree and see how it's done. It's only about a mile away so similar rainfall, drought, etc.

If not for this thread, I'd have never noticed what I saw when I arrived home from work this evening.

Out in the front part of our acreage where our 5 pecans trees normally thrive - were a dozen or so crows, in the trees and everywhere on the ground. At least I now know not to blame my MIL if we don't get any pecans this year. LOL!!

Paula

Get the red ryder bb gun, Paula! Sounds like crow for supper.

You'll likely only get one shot at those crows. They don't forget. I picked off 1 scout crow for each of the 4 packs that are around our place. This was using a crow call. Now the calls are met with immediate fleeing of the area.

Here are some interesting notes about pecan maturity. A few of these might be off a tad. There are a couple of true, professional pecan experts that have been around various garden forums in the last few years that might happen to do a search and find this, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong about anything:

First, remember that this is almost a miracle crop to start with for a lot of Oklahoma since almost all trees budded out about 15-20 days early and pollinated about the same amount early, so all the dates given here are the normal dates for my area in NE Oklahoma but happened 18 days earlier than this here in 2012.

The pecans normally go about their standard growing process until about Aug 20 and then leave the water stage and turn to dough stage in the last week or so in August. While still in water stage they will drop the pecans that are attacked by insects (weevil, shuckworm come out starting early Aug). Squirrels will not eat them (unless absolutely starving?) until they turn to dough inside near the end of Aug. These pecans dropped in the water stage look like the ones in the attached picture earlier in this thread.

Once the shell starts to harden and dough stage is reached then the pecans will stay on the tree with little weevils inside or shuckworms living in the shucks if these insects attack. Squirrels also can now consume them, but don't haul them away to store until they fully mature. (This gives you 2 weeks of prime squirrel hunting as they seek out and congregate near the few trees they can eat from.)The interesting part is that since every native pecan tree varies in when the pecans mature compared to each other, insect damage and squirrel damage will concentrate over time in the ones that mature the earliest. For me that is Peruque.

At some point when many trees have matured their nuts but before they can be harvested by us, the predators seek out the ones that taste best to them and have the thinnest shell so they don't have to work as hard. I have flickers, blue jays, some other birds I am not certain of, crows and squirrels all working my orchard all day long getting their harvest each year before I ever get my chance.

By mid-Sept in far south OK and early Oct in north OK there will be a lot of natives and some cultivars that start maturing and the shuck start splitting. For a given tree, after about 2 weeks from starting they will all normally be ready and will come out of the shuck with some work on our part. (It will take some more dry weather or a freeze before they can be harvest mechanically on a large scale though.) Now the crows get busy pulling the loose ones out of the shucks, and the squirrels start storing them in large numbers.

This year we harvested our first tree on Aug 29, and about 30%-40% of the trees have started shuck-split as of today. That is crazy early. That means if we wait for a hard freeze before large-scale harvesting, the predators will have 2 to 4 weeks more time than normal to get what they can before we can. On the positive side there is zero chance of an early freeze killing them before they are mature this year. It also means the trees will have some time after filling the nuts but with leaves still on the trees this year to build up some reserves for a possible small crop next year.

Those are some of the things that went through my mind today looking over the trees. That doesn't take into account what the drought has done this year. I have lost many trees and the entire crop on many other trees in areas with margnial soil. The crop left will all be smaller than normal but quality appears really good because there was no scab this year (too dry) and because we got just enough rain at the end of Aug to fill the nuts out. If there are buyers for small natives, then we could actually have a great year. If not we will have a fair to good year still.

You'll likely only get one shot at those crows. They don't forget. I picked off 1 scout crow for each of the 4 packs that are around our place. This was using a crow call. Now the calls are met with immediate fleeing of the area.

Here are some interesting notes about pecan maturity. A few of these might be off a tad. There are a couple of true, professional pecan experts that have been around various garden forums in the last few years that might happen to do a search and find this, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong about anything:

First, remember that this is almost a miracle crop to start with for a lot of Oklahoma since almost all trees budded out about 15-20 days early and pollinated about the same amount early, so all the dates given here are the normal dates for my area in NE Oklahoma but happened 18 days earlier than this here in 2012.

The pecans normally go about their standard growing process until about Aug 20 and then leave the water stage and turn to dough stage in the last week or so in August. While still in water stage they will drop the pecans that are attacked by insects (weevil, shuckworm come out starting early Aug). Squirrels will not eat them (unless absolutely starving?) until they turn to dough inside near the end of Aug. These pecans dropped in the water stage look like the ones in the attached picture earlier in this thread.

Once the shell starts to harden and dough stage is reached then the pecans will stay on the tree with little weevils inside or shuckworms living in the shucks if these insects attack. Squirrels also can now consume them, but don't haul them away to store until they fully mature. (This gives you 2 weeks of prime squirrel hunting as they seek out and congregate near the few trees they can eat from.)The interesting part is that since every native pecan tree varies in when the pecans mature compared to each other, insect damage and squirrel damage will concentrate over time in the ones that mature the earliest. For me that is Peruque.

At some point when many trees have matured their nuts but before they can be harvested by us, the predators seek out the ones that taste best to them and have the thinnest shell so they don't have to work as hard. I have flickers, blue jays, some other birds I am not certain of, crows and squirrels all working my orchard all day long getting their harvest each year before I ever get my chance.

By mid-Sept in far south OK and early Oct in north OK there will be a lot of natives and some cultivars that start maturing and the shuck start splitting. For a given tree, after about 2 weeks from starting they will all normally be ready and will come out of the shuck with some work on our part. (It will take some more dry weather or a freeze before they can be harvest mechanically on a large scale though.) Now the crows get busy pulling the loose ones out of the shucks, and the squirrels start storing them in large numbers.

This year we harvested our first tree on Aug 29, and about 30%-40% of the trees have started shuck-split as of today. That is crazy early. That means if we wait for a hard freeze before large-scale harvesting, the predators will have 2 to 4 weeks more time than normal to get what they can before we can. On the positive side there is zero chance of an early freeze killing them before they are mature this year. It also means the trees will have some time after filling the nuts but with leaves still on the trees this year to build up some reserves for a possible small crop next year.

Those are some of the things that went through my mind today looking over the trees. That doesn't take into account what the drought has done this year. I have lost many trees and the entire crop on many other trees in areas with margnial soil. The crop left will all be smaller than normal but quality appears really good because there was no scab this year (too dry) and because we got just enough rain at the end of Aug to fill the nuts out. If there are buyers for small natives, then we could actually have a great year. If not we will have a fair to good year still.

Sorry about the double post. My computer locked up when I hit the POST buttom. I decided it was better to refresh and risk a double post than possibly lose 30 minutes of typing.

Same thing happened to my peach tree. I was going to go out and pick them but some critter took them all the night before.

Scott,

Thanks for the info.

We have had shucks splitting on native pecans since at least mid-August. I thought I was losing my mind when I saw it. I wasn't sure exactly when it usually happens, but knew it was not normal for mid-August.

The big native pecan tree in the front yard has a huge crop. The limbs are so heavy, they are almost touching the ground. This tree hasn't lost much foliage because it gets watered occasionally when I am watering the lawn or nearby fruit trees and ornamentals. The pecan trees in the woods look a lot worse than the one in the yard. I am not sure all of them will make it. Some have dropped all their leaves, which they did not do last year. With two back-to-back years of exceptional heat and drought, they may not bounce back from this year's drought like they seemed to bounce back from last year's drought.

I hate the way the crows get into the pecan trees, but the crows do chase away the owls and hawks, so that keeps our chickens safer when they're out of their fenced run free-ranging. Squirrels aren't too much of a problem because our woods are full of native pecans, walnuts and oak trees. The dogs, and sometimes even the cats, tend to chase the squirrels away from the front yard tree.

Dawn

I'm somewhere in the middle....I don't have a huge crop, but I do think I'll have more than I've had the last couple of years.
On the other hand, I can tell where a squirrel (or more than one) must have sat up there for quite a long time shucking the pecans - there are no nuts, no young or mature shells, only intact green husk clusters in a couple of piles under my tree...very strange!

Sharon

Sharon, here at my house I have some young trees and a squirrel will bring them down and eat them in the same spot, leaving a pile of empty shucks under the tree or under a nearby tree.

The only small blessing this year is that I'm not seeing as many squirrels as in the past - and that's ok with me!

Sharon

At least you still have nuts, but blue jays are stealing or stole all my pecans this year! They must return every 15 minutes for another one. Multiply that by 30 trips a day by 14 birds that’s a potential of 300 nuts a day. I’ve seen 25 squirrels in a pecan tree a few years back. I have a pecan tree 87 feet high and all my life I thought it never produced. 8 years ago I noticed on Wed Aug 11th the tree was full of pecans. I said to my self this is a bumper crop, When I got off work Saturday to check the tree again the ground was full of green inedible nuts (green nuts can kill children because of hydrochloric acid). I can’t even say the next nightmare, the tree was empty. Blue jays can stash on average 3000 nuts a season.
After killing 30 squirrels, and 12 blue jays I had nothing to show for it. Squirrels are defiantly smarter than blue jays. Squirrels will learn to jump from neighboring tree, if he misses from 65 feet up he’s on his legs and gone in a second. Some will jump on the tree and in 20 seconds pick a nut and jump off tree if they know I have a crack in back door open. Blue jays will always holler to let the world know they are there (waiting for their friends to arrive).
After a while they will put there warning call out even across the street when I go out the front door to go to my shooting perch. Squirrels holler across street at me also (300 feet away). Crows are a little smarter and will catch a nut in flight so I have no chance of shooting at them. Blue jays will sometimes enter the tree from the bottom and work their way to the top. After a blue jay knows their worst nightmare is behind a trailer door, they will linger only a few seconds on the tree, before flying off with theirs now or was my precious cargo.
I do not understand why all these creatures risk their life for some nuts and so many other acorns or other trees around. I know my nuts are one of smallest and hardest to shell, but bear every year and definitely the nuts with most tasty with so much oil in them (maybe they know also-no other nut is as good as my nut tree). How does a squirrel know that August 15 every ear to show up on my pecan tree? I keep aluminum flashing wrapped on bottom 6 feet of tree to keep squirrels from easy access. Can they smell them, or do they have a build in “wish I had a pecan clock” build in them like a pregnant woman who wants some special treat!

Sharon,

We have squirrels that do the exact same thing that you and Scott have noticed. There is one squirrel in particular who is a creature of habit and I will see him in the same spot in the yard at the same time about 6 days out of 7. I'd never realized they were such creatures of habit until I started watching him the last couple of years. We used to have a dog that chased the squirrels endlessly and she kept them completely out of the yard and away from the garden. Since her death a few years back, the squirrels have returned in full force, and our other dogs are too old and lazy to chase them out of the yard.

8maryann, I had a neighbor in Fort Worth who fought the squirrels hard like you do, and he even wrapped flashing on 8' of the trunk (he started with 2' and when that didn't work, he just kept adding it higher up the trunk) and the squirrels still got all his pecans most years. I think he finally decided they were sitting on the roof of his house and jumping to the trees. Based on the distance, you wouldn't think they could have made that far of a jump but they did.

Blue jays are not as much of a problem for my pecan trees in the yard as they are for you, but we have about 10 acres of woodland to the north and west of the yard and there's a lot of native pecan trees in that woodland, so maybe the blue jays are eating those nuts.

Pecans used to be a major crop in our county and some of the orchards had those canons that set off a blast of noise every so often to keep the birds and varmints out of the trees. I'm not sure if the noise from the cannons annoyed the squirrels and birds enough to keep them out of the trees, but the sound certainly annoyed some of us humans who had to listen to it all day long. I haven't heard one of those in years now, and I'm not complaining!

I think the squirrels must just prefer the pecans to acorns because I won't see them gathering acorns in the fall until they've run out of pecans to find, eat and bury. With our fruit trees, the squirrels won't touch a plum at all until the peaches all have been harvested (by either us or the squirrels). Once the peaches are gone, it is open season on the plums. For whatever reason, squirrels seldom bother the figs, although various birds will eat the figs if they get a chance to do so.

I put out cracked corn for the doves, and the crows come to eat it. Consequently, the crows don't seem to bother the pecans much. My favorite thing, though, is that being fed cracked corn makes the crows very territorial. That works to our advantage, because we let our chickens out of the fenced/roofed chicken run to free range for a portion of every day, Hawks try to prey upon our chickens, but the crows will relentlessly chase away the hawks all day long. In our case, the crows are the lesser of two evils, and probably are the reason we rarely lose a chicken to a hawk.

Our native pecan trees produce relatively small nuts, but their flavor is superb, and I'd rather have them than larger nuts (with less flavor) from some of the commercial varieties of pecans.

Dawn

I have now lost almost every pecan from the small trees on the edge of my yard. Initially the squirrels would eat some in the tree, but now they grab a cluster and run back to the big oaks along the road. A few clusters that were dropped are the only sign there was ever anything there.

Blue jays are protected so I can't legally shoot them. They will clean me out of specific varieties that they can get into their beak, but this year the pecans were not mature when they came through.

All-in-all, I harvest about 60% of the pecans in the small trees in my yard, and the only way I get those is by ladder just when the shuck opens. Squirrels get 20%, crows 10% and blue jays 10%. Crows get the best and biggest, blue jays the smallest with thin shells, and squirrels everything near the edges along the brush.

I re-read my post from last year...ha! I got almost nothing last year. At least this year I have retrieved around 2-3 dozen nuts that the squirrels did not find in my yard (or I've gotten ones that they had buried but that I unearthed when turning over a couple of garden beds). Whatever it takes...!

Sharon

This year I am putting water bottles, lids off, cut open part of bottom and cut off some pecan leaves to get the bottle over the cluster of pecans and hope the squirrels can't get them this year. Search online for monks in Thailand that cover some tree fruits with plastic bottles for how I got the idea.

The same thing happened to my walnut, I went out one morning making a Facebook video, I showed my garden, and the trees, I ever commented on how many walnuts was on the tree, honest the very next day, everyone of them was gone, I went back on Facebook and reposted the video, I found 1 walnut on the ground, in front of the tree, this is More spiritual then peoples could imagine.