Nebraska celebrates hunt for state's largest trees

The Nebraska Forest Service has been documenting the state's largest trees for decades, and this spring arboretum officials are racing against time to identify a potential new champion bur oak on a Burr, Nebraska property that could reshape the state's Champion Tree Register.

Don Antholz's sprawling rural property hosts a massive bur oak that his grandsons nicknamed the "Mother Oak." The tree stands 63 feet tall, stretches 88 feet across its canopy and measures 12.3 feet in circumference. Justin Evertson, a green infrastructure coordinator with the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum, measured the tree this spring and determined it ranks in the top five or six statewide contenders, though he must re-measure several other candidates to confirm a final winner.

"It's an old tree, likely around 200 years old," Evertson said, examining Antholz's property with its untouched prairie landscape. The original reporting from Flatwater Free Press documented Evertson's field work as he assessed whether the Mother Oak qualifies.

The Nebraska Champion Trees program, administered by the Nebraska Forest Service, is designed to identify and recognize the largest living specimen of all native and the most common introduced tree species in Nebraska. Over 80 species are listed in the Nebraska Champion Tree Register.

The Mother Oak's potential victory would be significant given that bur oak is considered by many to be the king of Great Plains native hardwoods. The trees grow best on rich, moist bottomlands and have a slow to moderate growth rate and are fairly drought tolerant. Antholz's tree likely benefited from its streambank location near Burr, which is named for groves of bur oaks in the area.

After measuring Antholz's tree, Evertson traveled to Nebraska City to evaluate another bur oak candidate at Arbor Day Farm, the historic property where J. Sterling Morton, a Nebraska newspaper editor and resident of Nebraska City, had an enthusiasm for trees and advocated strongly for individuals and civic groups to plant them. It was estimated that more than 1 million trees were planted in Nebraska on the first Arbor Day in 1872.

The work comes at a critical time for the species. Bur oak trees are dying en masse due to years of devastating drought in eastern Nebraska, with massive areas of tree mortality in at least seven Nebraska state parks along the state's eastern half. Still, bur oaks can support dozens of butterflies and moth species along with thousands of other insects, support the birds that eat those bugs all summer and winter, and drop edible acorns, a starvation food for Native Americans on the Great Plains hundreds of years ago.