Horse apples indeed! This thread is a request for help in identifying a type of apple that I found growing by a chert road while hiking. The Subject "Horse Apples" is to appease the pedancies of this group who don't approve of questions of flora on this forum of fauna. That done, here is my story...

While on a mid-July hike in Blount County I saw a copperhead sunning in the middle of the road and beyond him a slight green tree laden with green fruit. Ever cautious I tiptoed pass the snake and it slithered back into the brush and walked over to examine the tree. The fruit of the tree was the size and shape of a real, real, fat lemon. The skin covering the fruit was coarse to the touch and pale green. I surmised that it was a domesticated apple tree because the limbs drooped close to the ground under the weight of the heavy yield. I stufffed a few of the quasi-apples into my pack and continued on.

At a house down the road, I begged a drink of water from a quaint old farmer who was sitting on the front poarch with his granddaughter. I showed him the pseudo appllets and he said that he didn't know the name of them but they weren't apples and they weren't fit for human consumption. Even horses and pigs wouldn't eat them, he said. Then he escorted me into the house to serve me a cool glass of spring water that he said had never been tested, but had never killed. Afterwards , when we returned to the porch, his granddaughter was sitting on a table eating one of the false apples, and so far she wasn't dead. The girl was one of those sassy precocious older women of seven or nine or ten years of age that you sometimes meet in the back country.

Granddaddy sighed but said nothing to the brassy little girl, and so, after a polite while, I said good-bye and left. At home that night I summoned up courage and ate one of the apples myself. The apple tasted pretty bad; bland and pasty and juiceless, the texture was of a not-yet-ripe, not-yet-flavorful, pear. I only took two bites.
But then I understood why the ubiquitous maraiding wild deer hadn't stripped the lower branches of the faux apple tree bare.

But somehow the distasteful fruit further aroused my curiosity so I googled "apple" internet sources for help... without luck.

So if, Of Troy, Wordwind, wwh, or any other country folks here in Awadland, happen to know anything about a similar fruit, I would be thankful for a reply.

PS: wwh, I will e-mail the visuals of the nightbirds (as well as of this fruit) like I promised, but I haven't yet got the damn digital camera to work.