Larderhoarding in the Home

Odds are you are more of a “larderhoarder,” like a Red Squirrel, than a “scatterhoarder,” like the Gray and Fox Squirrels. I say that assuming you store food in only a few locations, probably a refrigerator and nearby cabinets. That concentration is easy to protect, so you would take action against a stranger found pilfering your supplies. Similarly, Red Squirrels cache pine cones in just a few logs or tree cavities, and woe to another squirrel that approaches!

Gray and Fox Squirrels have a different system. Imagine storing soup in the yard, bread under the deck, and milk in the crawl space? Such scatterhoarding is impossible to defend. You might fight off a stranger in the yard, but by then the crawl space is emptied by someone else. Gray and Fox Squirrels bury acorns and nuts individually, but don’t defend them. They simply use their memory and fine sense of smell to search out between 85 – 99 percent of these buried treasures!

Thankfully for all of us human larderhoarders out there, storage has become vastly more energy efficient in recent years. To find out how much energy your fridge uses, check out this nifty database from Home Energy Magazine. If you have a refrigerator that was manufactured before 1993, it might be time to upgrade to an Energy Star model. Then you won't have to feel guilty at all when you visit your horde for that midnight snack!