Topic summary
Mast year
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Mast seeding.
Consequences
Mast seeding provides an abundant food source not only for wildlife but also for domestic animals and animals prone to population explosions such as mice, rats, and stoats, whose populations can increase significantly during a mast year, having been reduced by a lack of food in previous non-mast years. In turn, this makes it more likely that birds subsequently will be targeted by the pests, or that rats will invade nearby fields in what is called a "rat flood".