American Beech - the boys have done their job

Fellow naturalists found a beech flower on a recent ramble. I admit that I was a little bit envious, but also pretty excited to know that THIS is the time to look for them. American Beech (Fagus grandifolia) began leafing out a week or so ago, shedding it's soft orange bud scales as green unfolds - but I wasn't looking for flowers yet. Now alert, I have been scanning the ground beneath beech for a specimen to examine and to add to my ever expanding collection of all-things-tree.

Diligent observation pays off. I found a mother lode of beech flowers yesterday afternoon on a local trail, but only beneath a couple of the scores of trees I saw. I had to wonder, why did these trees drop so many flowers? 

The answer was obvious as soon as I looked closely with my hand lens - they were all staminate flowers with only male parts (anthers at the end of filaments). My mother lode had turned into a mac-daddy surprise. I'm guessing that these guys have released their pollen, done their job, and the tree no longer needs to expend its energy to maintain them. Energy will go toward the fertilized female flowers to develop into fruit. 

Now that I know where to look, you can bet that I'll be watching this set of trees for developments that will further my understanding of trees beyond the books. So exciting!

Oh, in case you're wondering how I got such a nice close-up of the anthers? I used my iPhone equipped with an Easy-Macro lens.

UPDATE: In addition to the strewn flowers, there were many short twigs with male flowers and a couple of leaves (shorter versions of the one pictured above. Upon closer inspection, the short twigs were broken at a 45-degree angle suggesting that some creature may have been responsible for the breakage. My engineer husband suggested the angle of the break could be to sheer stress. I haven't found any reference online for this phenomenon so I'm open to any ideas, dear readers.