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A pile of acorns from an English oak. (Photo by W. Carter, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Critical Mast

October 22, 2025 by Guest User

Every so often, oak trees go into overdrive. During these so-called mast years, the gentle patter of falling acorns grows into a mighty downpour and ripples across and over ecosystems like a flood.

What happens when a small thing goes from scarce to plentiful? When a player usually hidden behind the scenes vaults onto the main stage?

From swimming squirrels and bug-infested weddings, to an explosion in babies named Oaklee, we investigate the myriad ways a sudden surge in abundance can trigger unexpected consequences.

This episode is part of a playful exercise in community podcasting, with 6 different shows each producing their own stories about or inspired by the mystery of masting, and releasing them at (approximately) the same time. 

Here's the other shows that are taking part...

  • Future Ecologies

  • Golden State Naturalist

  • Jumpstart Nature

  • Learning from Nature: The Biomimicry Podcast

  • Nature's Archive

We’ll populate this Spotify Playlist with all our stories as they come out!

Featuring Jim Salge, Dave Kelly, Lorén Spears, DeAnna Beasley, Claire Adas, David Wilson, Amelia Pruiett, and Cleveland Evans.

View fullsize  Claire Adas and David Wilson at their 1996 wedding. (Photo courtesy of Claire Adas)
View fullsize  A lone wedding crasher rests on a folding chair. (Photo courtesy of Claire Adas)
View fullsize  What else are young wedding attendees to do except fill a tupperware with insects? (Photo courtesy of Claire Adas)
View fullsize  Shortly after crawling above ground, cicadas molt. Their outer skins are often what are seen (or collected) en masse. (Photo courtesy of Claire Adas)

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS

The Social Security Administration keeps track of name popularity over time. Here, you can see a rise in the name “Oakley” over the past several years. (Data from Social Security Administration)

Check out the “Who remembers The Great Squirrel Apocalypse of 2018?” Reddit thread.

You can watch the home video from David and Claire’s wedding.

Nameberry’s 2024 list of the “Reddest and Bluest Baby Names”

NPR’s coverage of the “Oakley, Oakley, Oakleigh” trend.


View fullsize  Old NHPR coverage of the 2018 Squirrel Apocalpyse. (NHPR)
View fullsize  A vibrant reddit thread from 2018 on the massive influx of squirrels seen in New Hampshire. (Reddit)
View fullsize  Comments regarding the squirrel apocalypse range from the comical to the existential. (Reddit)

SUPPORT

The US Forest Service keeps a helpful map of active cicada broods in North America, and their expected emergences. (Map by USFS)

To share your questions and feedback with Outside/In, call the show’s hotline and leave us a voicemail. The number is 1-844-GO-OTTER. No question is too serious or too silly.

Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In. 

Follow Outside/In on Instagram or join our private discussion group on Facebook.

CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Reported, produced, and mixed by Felix Poon, Marina Henke, and Justine Paradis.

Special thanks to Maria Mircheva, Rebecca Rowe, and David Needle, and everyone who spoke with us about baby names – especially Emma Welch and Carl & Lera Keller.

Edited by Taylor Quimby

Our staff also includes Jessica Hunt

Executive producer: Taylor Quimby

Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio

Music by Music was from Blue Dot Sessions, OTE, Bomull, and Arthur Benson.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio


download a transcript

Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I’m Nate Hegyi. 

[ambient sound of forest, footsteps]

Nate Hegyi: Step into a forest alone, and it can feel like silence. 

[forest sound]

Nate Hegyi: Not that it’s actually devoid of noises. There’s the wind in the trees, birds, maybe the plunk of an acorn falling onto the trail. 

[plunk]

Nate Hegyi: But every so often…

[plunk]

Nate Hegyi: One of those quiet bits of atmosphere can grow louder… 

[plunk, plunk, plunk]

Nate Hegyi: Until you can’t help but notice that something very strange is going on around you

[growing number of multiplying plunks]

Nate Hegyi: Today on the show… What happens when a small thing – the humble acorn – goes from scarce to plentiful? This is an episode about, and inspired by a mysterious ecological phenomenon called “masting.” From baffling squirrel behavior…

Jason Moon: It was like the weather, except it was like flattened squirrel carcasses.

Nate Hegyi: … to an explosion in babies named Oaklee….

Cleveland Evans: The Mormons almost have this idea that now that they are people who give their kids unusual names. 

Nate Hegyi: We have three stories. All about the different ways a sudden surge in abundance can trigger unexpected consequences. 

Claire Adas: The thing that sticks out in my memory is seeing them crawling up my dress.You can’t really brush them off because…

David Wilson: Yeah it's like Velcro.

Claire Adas: …they cling.

Nate Hegyi: Stay tuned. 

BREAK

Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I’m Nate Hegyi. Today, we’ve got stories about and – inspired by – masting. Now if you don’t what masting is, don’t worry. Our first story, from producer Felix Poon, is one of the strangest, and most memorable introductions you could ask for. Here he is. 

Felix Poon: do you like, absolutely love talking about fall foliage or are you kind of, like, sick of it because you've been doing it for so long?

Jim Salge: Uh, so I've been doing this over a dozen years now, and it's really exciting because every year is different.

Felix Poon: Jim Salge is a high school science teacher. But he also has a side gig as one of New Hampshire’s go-to “foliage forecasters.” 

Felix Poon: As millions of visitors clog up the highways to go leaf-peeping, Jim drives around the state, snapping photos, and reporting conditions on TV.

Achorwoman: Jim, I’m so curious, based on everything you know, what is your forecast for this year?

Jim Salge: This year it’s going to be a little more of a patchwork. We’ve had a lot of drought…

Felix Poon: But a few years ago… just before the leaves began to turn… People started asking Jim about another… very different phenomenon. 

Jim Salge: so it was late summer and there was a very high squirrel population.

[MUX IN: The Crisper by Bluedot Sessions]

Felix Poon: Squirrels are incredibly common in New Hampshire. But in the summer of 2018… things were getting out of hand. 

Jim Salge: people were out kayaking or boating. And in the middle of Lake Winnipesaukee, there would be a squirrel trying to swim to an area where it had more food.

[MUX SWELL]

Felix Poon: It was so bad, people were calling into newsrooms. 

CLIP: What is with these swimming squirrels? Is it a sign of the apocalypse?

 Felix Poon: Mostly though… you saw them on the roads. 

Jim Salge: And we are talking dozens to hundreds every mile, every few feet. In some areas there was another carcass. It was just staggering numbers.

[MUX SWELL]

Felix Poon: So were your students asking you about it?

Jim Salge: Absolutely. Yeah.

Felix Poon: How would they ask you about it?

[MUX OUT]

Jim Salge: Mr. Salge, why are there so many dead squirrels. What is up with all these dead squirrels? Why are the squirrels everywhere right now?

Felix Poon: I wasn’t with NHPR then, but my colleagues who were all remember talking about it. 

Jason Moon: It was like the weather except it was flattened squirrel carcasses.

Felix Poon: I’ve tried to find exact numbers, or photos that verify the level of carnage. But it’s not like there’s a Department of Roadkill that was counting the victims. What I do have are lots of horrible – and probably exaggerated – anecdotes. Here are some comments on a Reddit post from a few years later. 

  • “The squirrel corpses were like little speed bumps, there were so many.”

  • “Ankle deep on the shoulders of the road.”

  • “My traction alarm went off…I [could] FEEL my tires slipping in squirrel entrails”

[MUX IN: Our Only Lark by Bluedot Sessions]

Felix Poon: Today, this story is legend in New Hampshire. And it’s even been dubbed The Great Squirrel Apocalypse, or sometimes Squirrel—maggedon. 

Jim Salge: It was it was a tragedy unfolding in front of us. But I think people respond to tragedy in a variety of ways. And there were jokes made. Um, a local brewery, deciduous brewery, had a pair of beers that they released. Uh, it's called Fast Cars and Dodging squirrels.

[MUX SWELL]

Felix Poon: For a lot of people who witnessed it, all these dead squirrels seemed to come out of nowhere. But the conditions that led to the Squirrel-pocalypse actually started long beforehand…With something called a mast year.

[MUX UNDER AND OUT]

Jim Salge: Evolutionarily, the trees have created this strategy where they go through cycles, where they stress the animals that would feast upon their seeds by producing low number of seeds. And so animals like squirrels populations would go way down.

Felix Poon: A mast year is just the opposite – when trees collectively go into a reproductive overdrive. Estimates vary, but in a mast year, a single oak tree can produce thousands of acorns. THOUSANDS, from a single tree! Imagine that – but across an entire forest. 

Jim Salge: And it overwhelms the current population of squirrels and mice and other animals so that the seeds can stay and germinate and reproduce the forest.

Felix Poon: Mast, by the way, is an old English word for the seeds of trees, so basically the fruits and nuts. These boom and bust cycles in the forest – they can ripple through ecosystems in dramatic ways.  Take beech trees in New Zealand. During a mast year, the beech trees put out more nuts… but also more flowers. 

Dave Kelly: the first thing that happens is you get a big increase in native caterpillars which are feeding on the flowers.

[MUX IN: None of My Business by Arthur Benson]

Felix Poon: This is Dave Kelly, a professor of biology at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. 

Dave Kelly: And the mice and rats start increasing in the spring because the feeding on caterpillars that are feeding on the flowers.

Felix Poon:From there, the predators take notice - like stoats, a type of weasel. And their populations start to rise. 

Dave Kelly: The rats are preying on the mice, the stoats are preying on the rats and the mice. The stoats and the rats both prey on birds

Felix Poon: Which is a big deal because a lot of the birds getting killed are endangered species.

Dave Kelly: I mean, not only eating adults of the smaller birds, but also they'll clean out all the eggs and chicks.

Felix Poon: These ripple effects of don’t just stop after one year. A research paper from Switzerland for example found a jump in lyme-infested ticks two years after a mast year. That’s because first there’s a boom in mice, then there’s a boom in ticks, and finally – as everything is settling back down – a higher risk of human Lyme disease. 

[MUX SWELL AND OUT]

Felix Poon: But just as the trees giveth nutrients during masting – they also taketh away. What led to the Squirrelpocalypse actually started with a rare double mast year. In both 2016, AND 2017, the forests of New Hampshire were littered with acorns. Squirrel populations exploded. And then in 2018? Tumbleweeds. Here’s Jim Salge again. 

Jim Salge: Every crop failed. There was no food in the forest. And that's when the squirrels really started to get desperate and crossing every imaginable barrier to try to find food.

Felix Poon: I mean, that really seems like a squirrel horror story.

[MUX IN: Laser Focus by Blue Dot Sessions]

Jim Salge: I could not imagine anything worse for the small animals in a forest than having a huge population. After two years of feasting and no food to be found anywhere.

[MUX SWELL AND OUT]

Felix Poon: When I first heard about the Great Squirrel Apocalypse, it seemed to expose this pretty brutal side of nature. Like, these trees starved an entire generation of squirrels—squirrels that only existed because those same trees fattened up their parents’ generation—and now they’re fated to dash across multi-lane highways, break into people’s homes, and swim across lakes just to survive. I mean what is this, the Hunger Games or Squid Game, or…Squirrel Game? But that doesn’t have to be how we look at it. Trees feed the squirrels. And the squirrels – when they bury nuts and forget about them – sometimes plant new trees. 

Lorén Spears: I would say that it's about balance and reciprocity

Felix Poon: This is Lorén Spears, executive director of the Tomaquag Museum and a citizen of the Narragansett Nation. And she says… Maybe this story is about us humans being brutal to the squirrels. 

Lorén Spears: The imbalance is the human influence, whether that's cars, whether that's construction and building and displacing the natural environments in which animals and plants grow.

Felix Poon: And then there’s the question of climate change. Research suggests that temperature is one important factor that signals to trees when it’s time for a mast year. But new studies show that rising global temperatures can cause what some scientists call a “masting breakdown.” While some trees are unaffected, other trees are masting too often – and some aren’t masting enough. We don’t know what ripple effects that might have… but as far as we can tell… it’s probably bad news for forests. So at the end of the day, all those dead squirrels weren’t a sign of the apocalypse.  It was just the opposite. They were a sign… that nature was working as intended.

Lorén Spears: Seeds come in abundance at times when there's a need to ensure that there are more of these plants growing, these trees and fruit trees and nut trees, etc. are in the ecosystem.

Lorén Spears: and to have these nut trees available for the future generations of our beloved relations – all people, all animals, you know, the plants themselves, the relationship with the earth, that keeps us in balance.

Felix Poon: So this fall… If you find yourself looking at the leaves, drinking a pumpkin spice latte, or a cold pint of Dodging Squirrels IPA… take a moment to meditate on masting. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” And as commenters put it on Reddit: Never forget…the Great Squirrel Apocalypse of 2018.

Nate Hegyi: That was producer Felix Poon. By the way… If you’re a big fan of nature-based podcasts, you might have noticed something strange going on in your feed. That’s because this episode is part of a playful exercise in community podcasting… or maybe we should say podmasting? Six different shows, each producing their own masting-inspired episodes, and “dropping them” all at the same time. If you want to crack open some of these other audio acorns you can find a Spotify playlist in the show notes – or just search “Critical Mast” wherever you get your podcasts. And stay tuned – we’ve got more nutty stories still to come, after a break. 

BREAK 

Nate Heygi: This is Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi, today with stories from the world of masting. But trees aren’t the only species that rely on overwhelming numbers to outmaneuver the opposition. And whereas some prey species might have a field day when food suddenly becomes abundant… Human beings have a habit of finding themselves flat-footed. This story comes to us from Marina Henke. 

Marina Henke: It’s been almost 30 years since David Wilson and Claire Adas got married. Long enough that a lot of details start to get fuzzy. But they can remember picking out the venue.

David Wilson: I don't know why we thought about inviting so many people.

Claire Adas: You have a big family (laughs)

David Wilson: But, uh, we were looking at all kinds of places that weren't really us.

Marina Henke: All the options were either too expensive or too stuffy. That was, until David’s cousin offered up his house in New Jersey. 

David Wilson: And it was kind of a… like a huge mansion kind of house like, like really just bonkers big.

Marina Henke: They made it a backyard wedding – bought a huge yellow tent, in case it rained, and rolled a basketball hoop onto the driveway where kids could play. 

(mux in, Corner at Cicero Alt, Blue Dot)

Marina Henke: The morning of the big day, David got there early. 

David: I think I brought the wedding cake over…

Marina Henke: And that’s when he saw them. Covering the pathway leading up to the house were hundreds of thick, winged insects. 

David Wilson: It was like snow, almost, there was that many.

Marina Henke: It was 1996 in Westfield, New Jersey and the cicadas of Brood II had just woken up from a 17-year-long nap. 

(mux pulse)

Claire Adas: The thing that sticks out in my memory is seeing them crawling up my dress.You can’t really brush them off because…

David Wilson: Yeah it's like Velcro.

Claire Adas: …they cling.

(mux fades under)

Marina Henke: In case you’ve never seen one… cicadas are a rather chunky bug, somewhere between a grasshopper and a fat dragonfly.

DeAnna Beasley: They are black in color… they have orange wings and they have red eyes, so they look like something out of a sci-fi movie.

Marina Henke: This is DeAnna Beasley, a biology professor at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. While most cicadas follow an annual lifecycle, a very special subset aren’t so regular. Periodical cicadas emerge every 13 or 17 years, depending on the species. Groups of those species are called broods – there’s 15 of them spread across mostly the eastern part of North America. Brood II, the one that David quickly began to sweep off the sidewalks, had already been busy for quite some time.

DeAnna Beasley: What's happening is the nymphs or, um, baby cicadas are underground. They're rooted onto the trees and feeding off of the trees, and that's pretty much it. They're just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. 

(mux in, LaNaranja Borriana Alt, Blue Dot)

Marina Henke: Weddings, graduations, whole CHILDHOODS happen inches above these feeding nymphs. Then… more than a dozen years later, those insects head to the surface. 

(scuttling insect sounds)

DeAnna Beasley: And then they climb into the canopy, if  there is a canopy for them, and it's the males that are singing

Marina Henke: Deanna is not talking about a few dozen bugs here. If conditions are right, 1.5 million cicadas can emerge from a singular acre. One of those acres was a mansion-like house in the suburbs of New Jersey. As David and Claire’s wedding came to a start, the insects were impossible to ignore. 

David Wilson: Yeah, I don't think we had any preparation for there being cicadas.

Marina Henke: Were they buzzing? Were they making noise?

David Wilson: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Claire Adas: I don't really remember cicadas singing, but they must have been.

David Wilson: We had like, a bagpiper. I mean, it was a noisy affair anyway.

[mux ducks under, video sound/ bagpipes]

Marina Henke: There’s home video from David and Claire’s wedding. It’s true that you can’t hear the cicadas over the bagpipes. But you can see a guest tilt back his head and eat one. 

(mux back in)

Marina Henke: Cicadas make their impressive hum by vibrating a hollow chamber at the tip of their bodies – a bit like beating the world's tiniest drum dozens of times a second. An emerging brood can hit more than 100 decibels – that’s louder than a lawnmower at full throttle. Cicadas also have a pretty instinctual drive to move upwards, all in pursuit of a tree’s canopy. 

David Wilson: They were like crawling up the chairs while the service was going on. 

Marina Henke: And during the toast, they started climbing in between the layers in Claire’s dress. Incredibly – they don’t exactly remember what they did about them. 

Claire Adas: I imagine I asked David to help me kind of pick them out because he's very gentle with animals and like wounded birds, will land on his hand… that's probably what happened. I probably asked him to help, you know, put them in a safe place.

(mux peak and out)

Marina Henke: This sudden influx of cicadas… really, it’s another form of masting. 

DeAnna Beasley: In terms of predator defense, they don't really have any… except to just emerge in these really large numbers.

Marina Henke: You see, cicadas are pretty bad fliers. They’re not fast. And they’re terrible at defending themselves, especially right after they get above ground as they squeeze their way out of their baby skin. So when the brood emerges, after all of these years, they’re gobbled up left and right by birds, rodents, family dogs. But…  

DeAnna Beasley: Eventually. You know, predators are just like I can't look at another cicada. It's just no more cicadas, please.

Marina Henke: This is a strategy called “predator satiation.” Enough cicadas  will survive to eventually reproduce.  Up in the treetops cicada females saw tiny slits into branches, and lay millions of eggs. 

DeAnna Beasley: And then when they hatch, they'll just fall out the branch and into the soil. It'll take them some time to actually make their way down to the roots of the tree. Um, but they have 17 years in some cases, so they have time.

Marina Henke: As you might imagine, this whole production – which lasts about 6 weeks – leaves a mark on the environment. It’s mostly a positive one. 

DeAnna Beasley: You could think of that cicada emergence as a huge nutrient pulse in the environment. Usually following a cicada emergence, you might see you know, fledglings are larger in size. Right. You may see overall nutrient quality of the soil is improved because when the cicadas die, they return to the earth.

(mux in, Mencher and Polk, Blue Dot)

Marina Henke: For David and Claire… it would make perfect sense to have less of a positive spin on cicada’s role in the environment. Maybe even some dread around these uninvited wedding guests. But… that was not the case. 

Marina Henke: I have to say, I haven't gotten married yet, but I know I'm going to kind of want everything to go well on that day. Was there a part of you that was like, this is not supposed to be happening right now?

Claire Adas: No, no, no, it just I mean, it's sort of perhaps a human instinct to think that everything is about us, but it almost felt like a blessing, honestly…. They’re lovely you know, and they’re not threatening,  they can’t hurt you. I don’t know, everything about that day kind of felt like magical and that just felt like a part of that. 

Marina Henke: These days, wedding planners actually advertise all kinds of tips to avoid cicada related interferences.But thirty years on David and Claire really remember Brood II as a joyful and curious side note to the day. And I believe it. 

CLIP: Kids laughter, squealing, wedding chatter 

Marina Henke: There’s another scene in their home video – a couple of girls, running around with a big plastic tub full of live cicadas. 

CLIP:  Can you put one that’s alive to crawl on my arm!! Me too! Me too!!”

Marina Henke: Maybe the bride and groom’s calmness about the bugs was a little contagious. Or maybe, there is something a bit magical about these irregularly appearing insects. After all their scientific name is Magicicada, straight from the Greek word… for magician. 

 Claire Adas: I've never felt a negative thing or heard a negative thing about them being there.

Marina Henke: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like that's what you're saying is you're like people, people don't remember it like that at all.

David Wilson: We're vegetarians. And the only complaint I heard that day was there was no meat. Really?

(mux pulse)

Nate Hegyi: That story was produced by Marina Henke… By the way, the most recent emergence of a cicada brood in New Jersey happened in 2021. But, David and Claire missed it. They had a wedding to go to. 

(pause and music bumper)

Nate Hegyi: Our last story, about a mysterious masting trend among humans, comes from producer Justine Paradis. 

Justine Paradis: This spring Amelia Pruiett became a mother.

Amelia Pruiett: Yeah. So I just had a little baby girl in June.

Justine Paradis: Congratulations!

Amelia Pruiett: Thank you. Yeah. It's been a fun entrance to parenthood.

Justine Paradis: Like so many, Amelia felt the gravity of the many choices involved in becoming a parent: among the first, selecting a name.

(MUSIC: Beignet, Blue Dot Sessions)

Amelia Pruiett: I mean, it's a weighty process because in some ways we as a society don't necessarily label you just based on your name, but that's also kind of the oftentimes only thing that you're… represented by. I mean, even thinking about like if you get a headstone someday you get a name and a date. [laughter]

Justine Paradis: Baby names are not only big decisions, but big business too – or, at least, big content generators. There are books you can buy, Instagram accounts populated with baby name carousels, and subreddits filled with indecisive parents, asking strangers on the internet to weigh in. But for Amelia, this one wasn’t actually a tough choice. 

Amelia Pruiett: So Lucile is my middle name, my grandmother's middle name, and then my great-grandmother's name.

Justine Paradis: By picking a family name for her daughter, Amelia was opting for a somewhat more traditional route. But Lucile was also appealing that it’s not a super common name. Although that can change.

MUSIC FADE

Amelia Pruiett: Yeah, I mean, I was born in 1994, and there were no Amelia's around at that point. I don't even know if it ranked on the name list. 

Justine Paradis: But, lately, something’s shifted. And that’s because Amelia, the name, has been steadily climbing the charts. 

MUSIC: Code Entry, Blue Dot Sessions

Amelia Pruiett: Oh, Amelia's top ten. Oh, Amelia's top three. Oh, Amelia's been top three for a long time now.

Like when  Amelia’s at the grocery store – she sometimes hears someone calling her name. She’ll look up and realize – they’re not talking to her.

Amelia Pruiett: It's a little sad… going from the loss of that kind of positive uniqueness… I always joke like, oh, I guess everybody will just think I'm 20 years younger than I actually am.    

Justine Paradis: You’ve probably noticed this yourself. An elementary school classroom full of Jadens, or suddenly, it seems  that every other celebrity is named Olivia. A mysterious synchronicity, reminiscent of, I don’t know, say, an extraordinary windfall of acorns in the forest. It can make someone wonder if something’s in the air for humans too. Why does this happen? Why does a name, dare I say, mast? 

MUSIC FADE

Cleveland Evans: Since I was about 8 or 9 years old, I'd been buying ‘what to name the baby’ books. 

Justine Paradis: This is Cleveland Evans. He’s a professor emeritus of psychology at Bellevue University in Kansas. He writes a newspaper column on the topic of names for the Omaha World Herald newspaper, every other Sunday.

Cleveland Evans: Keeping up with what babies are being named and trying to figure out why, you know?

Justine Paradis: Cleveland says that, in another era, naming babies was a little more systematic. Like in colonial New England – 

Cleveland Evans: First son is named after the father's father, the second son is named after the mother's father. [speaking quickly] You know, the third son is named after the father himself. And then they started into the mothers and fathers and brothers.

Justine Paradis: But today, American culture is much more colorful. A lot of people are having smaller families. And the country is more diverse in almost every way. So, what motivates parents when they’re picking a name now? After decades of study, here’s Cleveland’s theory.

Cleveland Evans: The general thing is that everybody's looking for a different but not too different name. 

 Justine Paradis: Different, but not too different. 

MUSIC: Beignet Interlude, Blue Dot Sessions

Justine Paradis: That can be challenging, because parents can inadvertently get inspiration from the same places, thinking they’ve found something unique. It could be a figure in pop culture. TV, movies, and, these days, video games. A hundred years ago, that might have more often meant novels or newspapers. 

Cleveland Evans: They were naming kids after presidents… When Herbert Hoover was first elected… the name Herbert is way more popular than it ever was before… in those two years of ‘28 and ‘29… and then the crash happens and the name crashes… so you have all of these Herberts who are 95 right now but very few younger.

Justine Paradis: But today, new parents have a source of information that previous generations did not have: the Social Security Administration database. In the 1990s, Michael Shackleford was an actuary working at the Administration. And he realized that they were just sitting on a huge amount of data, and maybe they should make it available to the public. 

He may have also had personal motivations here. His own name, Michael, had been the number one name for boys almost without interruption since the early 1950s.

Cleveland Evans: He hated having a common name and having, you know, ten other Mikes always in his neighborhood. And so he wanted to make the list so that people could avoid the common names… And I think his bosses at Social Security first thought he was crazy to take his time doing this. But when he finally finished the program… It quickly became, I think, about the most popular, you know, page on the Social Security website. 

MUSIC FADE

Justine Paradis: So, it’s not just baby books anymore. Now, parents can run their top contenders through this massive, easily accessible public data source. They can find inspiration there, perhaps from the less popular names on the list – or avoid the ones at the very top. And, by the way – in 1999, the year after the release of the first Social Security list, Michael dropped out of that #1 spot for the first time in over 30 years – edged out by Jacob.

MUSIC:  forgatmigej, bomull

Justine Paradis: In a forest, trees grow at different paces. Take the paper birch. A species which shoots up quickly at first, but then its growth rate declines as it ages. Meanwhile, the white oak grows slowly and gradually, and it can live for centuries. 

Maybe you can tell where I’m going here with this metaphor. A name trend can work the same way.

MUSIC FADE

Cleveland Evans: What does tend to happen is that the quicker something becomes popular also it tends to be, the quicker it goes down.

Justine Paradis: Two names came to mind: Natalie and Nevaeh.  

Cleveland Evans: Nevaeh… It's N-E-V-A-E-H, um, is the most common spelling, and it's the word heaven spelled backwards. 

Justine Paradis: Before the year 2000, Nevaeh was quite uncommon.

Cleveland Evans: There were like eight girls named Nevaeh in the whole country… And then one of them happened to be a girl who was born to a rock singer named Sonny Sandoval... And he was on the MTV show… "Cribs".  

Sonny Sandoval on Cribs: This is Nevaeh right here.  That’s “heaven” spelled backwards. She’s my first. She’s six months old. [fade]

Cleveland Evans: And it just absolutely exploded… definitely well into the top 100. And then it started going down again really quickly. And Natalie… was a very long, slow rise, you know, and ended up in the top 25, and I think a lot of people never even quite realized it had gotten as common as it was, because its rise was so long and slow, and then it stayed, you know, at the top for several years longer than Neveah did.

Justine Paradis: But there’s another name trend that’s made headlines recently. And this is actually what got me thinking about this story in the first place. I’m talking about Oaklee phenomenon. 

MUSIC: The Curse on Dr. Marchel, Blue Dot Sessions

Justine Paradis: Last year, the baby name website Nameberry published an article titled “The Reddest and Bluest Baby Names.” Gracing their list of the top 25 “reddest” girls names of 2023, were several variations of “Oak”-based names. Different spellings of the name “Oaklee” – one ending in L-E-Y; another like the jeans, L-E-E. There was also Oaklynn, coming in at #2. This list got a spate of news coverage. Cleveland got interviewed by NPR because he’d noticed the trend in his research over a decade ago. He thinks the origin has to do with a specific and powerful force in baby naming culture: Mormons – or, more formally, the Church of Latter Day Saints.

Cleveland Evans: As often happens, the LDS people are like an early warning system for things that are going to get popular.

Justine Paradis: Brooklyn. Brittany. Jayden. And now, Oaklee and Oaklynn.

Cleveland Evans: Mormons all almost have this idea now that they are people who give their kids unusual names. 

Justine Paradis: There are a few reasons that Mormon families might be on the leading edge of baby name trends. It might have to do with the fact that historically, they often had big families: lots of kids – lots of names.

Cleveland Evans: Even though they're on the lookout for unusual names, they're usually on the lookout for things that will appeal to the culture as a whole. So what it means is that they're going to find things first.

MUSIC SWELL AND FADE

Justine Paradis: The inspiration for Oakley might have come from a couple different places: maybe Annie Oakley, a famous American sharpshooter. Or maybe it’s a riff on a top 5 name from the ‘90s, Ashley. Because that wave of Ashleys are at the point where they’re starting families. Ashley, of course, is also a name rooted in the name of a tree.

MUSIC: Germaine, Blue Dot Sessions

Justine Paradis: And Cleveland says the roots of both go way back to medieval England. The word “leigh” – spelled l-e-i-g-h –  is actually an old English word for “woodland clearing.” So, a person who lived by the meadow with ash trees might have become William Ashley; the guy near the glade of oaks, William Oakley. 

Justine Paradis: Whether that is the intent of 21st century parents is, I imagine, doubtful—but regardless, the meaning is there. It’s kind of amazing that a relationship that some of our ancestors might have had to a far-away landscape, can cast such a long shadow, almost imperceptibly in our language.

MUSIC FADE

Justine Paradis: But, back to the “reddest and bluest” baby names, Cleveland is a bit skeptical of that framing. He says there are a lot of factors at play here: education, religion, history, geography, you name it. It’s easy to see a correlation but a lot harder to prove causation. And even when you think the reason behind a name is obvious, you might be surprised.

MUSIC

Cleveland Evans: This is years ago now. I was on an airplane on a cross-country flight, happened to be sitting next to a woman who's had a little girl named Trinity… and I asked her if she named the child that because of the religious meaning. And she said, ‘oh no, we're Mormons. We don't believe in the Trinity, you know? So it's, uh, it just sounds cool. You know.’ 

Justine Paradis: Maybe it was The Matrix. [laughs]

Cleveland Evans: Yes… there's also all sorts of ways people find the different-but-not-too-different thing we're looking for, yes. [laughs]

MUSIC: Fainting Goats, OTE

Nate Hegyi: Producer Justine Paradis. That’s it for our masting-inspired stories today. If you want to check out some of the other podcasts also dropping their masting episodes this week, check out the Spotify playlist – there’s a link in the show notes – or just type in the name of this episode – “critical mast” wherever you get your podcasts. 

CREDITS 

Nate Hegyi: I’m Nate Hegyi. This episode was reported, produced, and mixed by Felix Poon, Marina Henke, and Justine Paradis. It was edited by our Executive Producer, Taylor Quimby. Our staff also includes Jessica Hunt. Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR's Director of On-Demand Audio. Voiceovers in this episode were by Nick Capodice, Rebecca Lavoie, and Kate Dario. Special thanks to Maria Mircheva, Rebecca Rowe, and David Needle, and everyone who spoke with us about baby names – especially Emma Welch, and Carl and Lera Keller. Music was from Blue Dot Sessions, OTE, Bomull, and Arthur Benson. Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio. 

October 22, 2025 /Guest User
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