Free in-person and live-streamed lecture with Dr. Walt Koenig

Click here for the recording of the presentation: Acorn Boom or Bust

Please note: The presentation Q&A ends a few minutes prematurely because of a technical problem.

This program took place Wednesday, December 7, 2022,  7:00 to 8:30 p.m.
Solvang Library, 1745 Mission Dr., Solvang
Co-sponsored by Solvang Library

Join us for an evening with zoologist, researcher, and acorn woodpecker expert Walt Koenig, who will be discussing his work with the California Acorn Survey, a statewide effort to quantify patterns of acorn production by California oaks. Masting, which is a highly variable, synchronized seed production within a population of plants, is well known among oaks. How and why oaks mast, however, is poorly understood, despite the strong ecosystem effects that acorn crops have on populations of animals, both in California and elsewhere. The goals of the Survey are to gain an understanding about how trees synchronize their reproductive efforts and the interactions between acorn production and other life-history traits, both of the trees and the animals that depend on them.

Walt Koenig got interested in California oak woodlands as an undergraduate at Stanford, after which he moved across the Bay to UC Berkeley where he studied social behavior of the acorn woodpecker at UC’s Hastings Reserve in upper Carmel Valley.

After a year at Occidental College, he returned to Hastings as a Research Zoologist for UC’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology until 2008, when he followed his spouse to Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology as a Senior Scientist. He and his wife are now retired and back in upper Carmel Valley, where she studies Irish and Cape Breton Island fiddling while Walt hangs out in his old office at Hastings and heads the California Acorn Survey.