On Sulphur Mountain I saw a curious phenomenon—clusters of baby acorns on one of the coast live oaks. This makes no sense to me, for multiple reasons:

1. It’s autumn, not spring. The year’s acorn crop is ending, not beginning.
2. Acorns don’t usually grow in thick clusters like this. They grow singly or in pairs.
3. There was no evidence of male flowers, whose dried catkins usually linger for quite a while after the female flowers are fertilised.

I know we’ve had a weird weather year, but I only observed this phenomenon in a single tree out of many hundreds I passed. Why would only one tree be affected, if weather was the cause? What’s going on here?