More Burr Oak P*rn

This Burr Oak (tree on left) is not notable for its size, it is only 42 inches in diameter.  It is notable because it is a remnant of the Eaton Rapids plains.  It is within a rock's throw of the Smithville dam or approximately 1/2 mile east of the high school.

Nope, this is not a picture of a hobbit.  This is a picture of the Kentucky champion Burr Oak and a full sized human.  This is the tree that keeps trading the National Champion (Burr Oak) crown with the McBain oak in Missouri.  Picture provided by Lucky Pittman.

And this is a picture of the McBain oak in Missouri.  Image from HERE.

And, as a special treat...

Lucias Macias sent this link to an essay about Oak Savannas in Europe.

Extremadura is in southwestern Spain and eastern Portugal.

One intriguing sidelight on dehesa is the trouble we have in classifying exactly what kind of landscape it is. It’s often thought of as a type of park woodland but just as often it is treated as savanna or steppe ‘with trees’. These taxonomic difficulties may well reflect our modern concern that landscapes should be a single entity rather than two, or even three simultaneously. What is indisputable is dehesa’s extraordinary richness for birds.

At any one moment almost anywhere in Extremadura the sky is full of raptors. Hundreds of birds of at least ten species are barely even noteworthy.

Yet what seals dehesa as the ultimate habitat is that this is not some carefully preserved national park barricaded behind a fortress of acronyms and official designations. It’s a working landscape and as devoted to human products as the worst arable monoculture. In fact, dehesa yields six principal harvests. It is cattle or sheep pasture as well as cropland and a source of charcoal or firewood. Its key speciality results from those billions of acorns, which fatten the region’s breed of black pigs. It is their exquisite hams and smoked meats that are savoured by all Iberian people. Finally the cork oaks produce that bottle stopper which makes the wonderful sound when the bottle of Spanish Rioja is first opened.