Squirrels at the Feeder

I sometimes wonder if the Gray and Fox Squirrels feasting on millions of pounds of sunflower seeds at America’s backyard bird feeders ever think about the “good ole days.” Do they remember burying acorns and other nuts throughout the forest, and scrounging all winter, using their fine noses to rediscover the vast majority of

their cache? (Or perhaps someone else’s cache – 85% of buried nuts are found and eaten, but not necessarily by the original owner.) Do they remember days on end of not having food because a thick layer of ice made digging through the snow impossible? Do Gray Squirrels in particular have family legends of the great emigrations, when thousands of them periodically deserted food-scarce forests, drowning by the hundreds as they tried to swim swollen rivers?

Squirrels have always eaten a varied diet, including not only the nuts they are famous for burying, but the buds, blooms, sap, and inner bark of trees, as well as fungi, insects, galls, bird eggs, and fruit. They know their resources well. Gray and Fox Squirrels, for instance, learn in just one season to snip out the seed embryo from a white oak acorn before burying it, else the acorn will germinate and grow a large taproot, which squirrels aren’t keen on eating. Red oak acorns, on the other hand, are buried “as is,” because they go dormant after falling from the tree, and will store nicely for the whole winter.

Fungi are stored for winter eats as well, though more commonly by Red Squirrels than by the two larger squirrel species. Fungi are not just buried; they are first snipped off at the base or in bite-sized chunks, and left to dry on a stump or in the fork of a tree.

The cynic in me sometimes believes squirrels no longer have need for these basic survival skills, because they simply eat at bird feeders on demand. In reality, though, I know this isn’t true. I get too many calls from people upset about squirrels stripping the bark from maple trees in the spring. (We aren’t the only ones who know about the sweetness of maple sap.) On nearly any walk in the fall woods, I find at least one mushroom drying on a stump. And just to prove how savvy they are (or how little I know), a young black squirrel ran by my window as I wrote this article -- carrying a walnut he was obviously intent on burying!

-Janea Little, Senior Naturalist