A mast year

It’s strange: the first 18 years of my life were spent in a house which had five yew trees at the bottom of the garden and for the last 21 years I’ve lived in a different house with five yew trees at the bottom of the garden – a hedge that grew out of control long before we arrived. So I’ve seen yew berries at different times of year in many different lights and I don’t think I’ve ever seen them as plentiful as they are this autumn.

I heard on the radio a few days ago that this is a ‘mast’ year. A new word for me, ‘mast’ means the fruit, especially when used by animals and birds for food, of woodland trees – acorns, beechnuts and chestnuts – and more generally also cobnuts, hips, haws, and the berries from holly and other plants. Tree and shrub species each have their own cycles for producing bumper crops – five to ten years for beech, six or seven for oak and four or five for a sweet chestnut – but it seems that in 2013 they are coinciding. Last year, 14 of the 16 species the Woodland Trust has monitored since 2001 had their worst recorded fruiting season; this year ‘pannage’ (another word I didn’t know – the 60 days starting tomorrow when commoners’ pigs are allowed to forage on 60,000 acres of the New Forest) is being granted to 500 lucky pigs rather than last year’s 280. (Or perhaps not so lucky, since it will fatten them up for pork.)

I don’t know whether these yew berries – not food for many animals because they are so toxic (hence yews traditionally being planted in churchyards away from cattle) – count as mast, but either way the birds that thrive on them are going to do very well this autumn.