Gathering Acorns to Renew River Forestland

RENO BOTTOMS/UPPER MISSISSIPPI RIVER – Jerry Boardman doesn’t remember exactly when he started collecting acorns in the fall.

But the thousands upon thousands of them he gathers to share with people working to improve habitat along the Mississippi River makes the 81-year-old a pretty big deal.

“It’s like a myth or a legend,” Andy Meier, a forester for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who receives a portion of Boardman’s bounty, said of the integral role it plays in his work. “It just has always been that way.”

In reality, Boardman began collecting around the time that the need for acorns — a nut that contains the seed that grows oak trees — was growing critical. For the past few decades, the trees that grow in the Mississippi River floodplain, known as floodplain forests, have been struggling. Although they’re named for their ability to withstand the river’s seasonal flooding, they’ve recently been overwhelmed by higher water and longer-lasting floods.

Overall, forest cover along both sides of the river from southeast Minnesota’s Houston County down to Clinton, Iowa decreased by roughly 6% between 1989 and 2010, according to a 2022 report on ecological trends on the upper Mississippi. In the years since, losses in some places have neared 20% — and were particularly acute following a massive flood event in 2019.

What exactly is driving the excess water isn’t fully fleshed out, but climate change and changes in land use that cause water to run off the landscape faster are likely factors.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Forester Andy Meier walks toward “the boneyard” at Reno Bottoms on the upper Mississippi River. High water, prolonged flooding, invasive species and tree diseases have been hard on the Mississippi River’s floodplain forests in recent years. (Photo by Jovanny Hernandez/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

The result is mass stretches of dead trees that can no longer perform their functions of providing wildlife habitat, sucking up pollutants that would otherwise run downriver and slowing water during floods.

Floodplain forests in the lower section of the river are also diminished. The Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, which stretches from where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers meet, in Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico was once almost entirely forest. Today, about 30% of that land is treed.

Government agencies and various nonprofits are attempting to reverse the forestland decline by planting new trees and volunteers like Boardman are key to the effort.

Local is best

Reno Bottoms, a sprawling river wetland habitat – sandwiched in between Minnesota and Wisconsin – is one place where tree die-off has been extensive. Boardman lives on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi near the southern-most tip of Reno Bottoms in the small village of De Soto. He has been a commercial fisherman, hunter and trapper on the river for most of his life.

Boardman calls the change in forest cover in recent years “shocking.” To combat it, he puts in about 100 hours a year between August and October gathering acorns from the area’s floodplain, stretching from La Crosse to Prairie du Chien.

Jerry Boardman’s acorns are helping in river bottom reforestation efforts underway from the Reno Bottoms (outlined in the map above) south to near Prairie du Chien. (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers map)

To maximize his time, Boardman uses a contraption not unlike ones used to pick up tennis balls to scoop up the acorns. One small variety, though, requires one to “get down on your hiney or your knees” to pick them up, he said. For those, he relies on a little grunt work.

The idea is that if the trees that produced the acorns were successful enough at warding off flood damage to drop seeds, those seeds might be similarly resilient if replanted.

Boardman looks for acorns from the bur oak, pin oak and swamp white oak, the latter of which is particularly well-suited to the floodplain forest. And the numbers he puts up are impressive — last year, he collected about 130,000; this year, 65,000.

He splits up the total to give to the Army Corps and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, both of which have foresters planting trees to restore floodplain habitat.

“Pretty much everything that Jerry collects, in one way or another, will return to the river,” said Meier, with the Corps.

Last fall, for example, they scattered between 20,000 and 30,000 of Boardman’s swamp white oak acorns near McGregor Lake, a river backwater near Prairie du Chien where the Corps is piloting an effort to protect trees from flood inundation by raising the forest floor a few inches.

This spring, Meier said, he was “blown away” by the approximately 1,000 seedlings that had taken root there and begun to sprout.

Acorns gathered by Jerry Boardman are planted in river backwater areas near Prairie du Chien. Boardman collects tens of thousands of acorns per year to give to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Fish and Wildlife Service, who plant them to take the place of dying trees in the floodplain. (Photo courtesy of Andy Meier, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)

Having access to Boardman’s acorns is important because it gives them the chance to experiment with direct seeding, instead of buying young trees and planting them. Direct seeding is both cheaper and more likely to result in a viable tree, because the seed is local.

“When we have an opportunity to get something we know came from the river, we know that it’s adapted to growing there,” Meier said.

Not every community has a Boardman, though, and many organizations doing reforestation work have to shell out for seed or look for options from further afield.

For example, M&C Forest Seeds, based in Clarendon, Arkansas, pays seed collectors cash for acorns and then re-sells sorted seed to government agencies or nonprofits. M&C contracts with collectors to gather acorns at particular latitudes along the river, which they then market to replanting efforts at similar geographic locations.

Living Lands and Waters, an Illinois-based environmental organization uses nurseries to cultivate oaks from the region and distributes more than 150,000 trees annually in three-gallon pots to volunteers or individuals.

Little by little, through the efforts of various government agencies and nonprofits, it all ends up in the ground.

For instance, since 2007, Living Lands and Waters has planted more than two million trees along waterways in the Mississippi River Basin. The Nature Conservancy, using U.S. Department of Agriculture and other program funds, has reforested about a million acres across Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas in the last 30 years. Much of that acreage was on low-lying farmland prone to flooding that had once been forest.

Volunteers key to planting efforts

Whether collecting seeds or planting them, volunteers like Boardman are key to making the work happen.

Ev Wick, a fifth grade teacher at De Soto’s Prairie View Elementary, has taken his students out for an acorn-gathering day with Boardman for the past several years. Boardman scouts the best trees ahead of time, Wick said, then the kids get to work. They can pick up between 5,000 and 6,000 in a day, propelled by friendly competitions to see who can collect the most or fill their bucket quickest.

When not collecting acorns, Jerry Boardman can be found fishing the Mississippi River backwaters. (Photo provided Jerry Boardman)

They’re interested when Boardman tells them all the acorns they collect will eventually be planted on the islands they see in the river, Wick said.

Last October, Living Lands and Water brought together people from groups like the Clean River Advisory Council and the Rock Island County Soil and Water Conservation District to plant oak trees near the Quad Cities. Volunteers planted 85 oak trees in a park by the Mississippi River, in Illinois City, Illinois. This event helped restore forests but also provided opportunities for people to learn and connect with nature.

“We get individuals that may have never planted a tree before but want to come out because it sounds like a cool, fun thing,” said Dan Breidenstein, Vice President of Living Lands and Water.

“Not only did they learn how to plant a tree, but they also learned about these different species that we were doing,” said Breidenstein. “Every time they visit that area or drive past that building, they’re connected to the area around them, and that tree’s not going anywhere.”

Organizers are particularly tickled when young people show up.

“My favorite part of today is being outside and in the environment because I don’t go outside much,” said Brooklyn Wilson, a high school junior who volunteered at the October event. “The most important thing to understand is that as a community we need to be able to come together and help and pick up and do what we need to do to better our environment and neighborhoods.”

Perhaps some of the young volunteers will follow in Boardman’s footsteps.

As for Boardman, the chance to donate acorns or otherwise help out is a no brainer.

“That river has given me so much,” he said. “I’ve just got to give back all I can give.”