Nut Tree Identification for Fall Foraging

A handbook to use when foraging for nuts. The article includes nut and tree identification information for acorns, beechnuts, chestnuts and chinquapins, black walnuts, butternuts, hickory nuts, pecans and pine nuts.

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by Adobestock/Tatiana

Learn nut tree identification and nut identification for acorns, beechnuts, chestnuts and chinquapins, black walnuts, butternuts, hickory nuts, pecans, and pine nuts. 

For centuries we humans have joined the squirrels and the raccoons, the turkeys and the boars, the deer and the chipmunks in the harvest of fall nuts. Nutting was once serious business, a matter of survival, of storing sustenance for the coming winter. So it was with Native Americans and colonists, and with European peasants–and so it remains today among people still living a hand-to-mouth existence with the earth. Few foods offer nutrition as completely and as compactly as the nut. Botanically, it is a seed, the embryonic life of a tree. But in effect, it is a hermetically sealed energy capsule, packed with protein and fat; a nourishment concentrate.

Most people today go nutting for pleasure. The nuts remain the quarry, but nuts aplenty (though perhaps of less noble bearing) can be had in any grocery store. Nutting, (foraging for nuts), on the other hand, puts you inside the fall forest kaleidoscope, every step a crunch in leaves, the air crisp and laden with the musky scent of autumn. There is no better time to be in the woods, and no better excuse (whether or not you need one) than to be gathering tasty nuts.

Ah, there’s the crux of the matter: Not all nuts are tasty. Some are astonishingly bitter. Others, though toothsome, require extreme determination, if not demolition, if one is to crack them apart-and then they may yield little more than a smidgen of edible kernel. Most folks know a nut when they see one, but what kind of nut is it, and is it worth picking up?

black and white diagram of acorns and oak leaves
  • Updated on Jan 9, 2022
  • Originally Published on Sep 1, 1988
Tagged with: acorn, beechnut, black walnut, chestnut, chinquapin, hickory, oak, pinenut
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