Recently, I have been taking lots of walks at Barfield Crescent Park, where the squirrel activity is abundant and I’m guaranteed to meet some of them along the way.
I love watching squirrels any time of year but the fall is my favorite. This is when they pull out all the stops and put on a such a great show. The forest drama that plays out has everything for any kind of viewer; there are high-speed chases, loud disapprovals with no holding back, intense how-to demonstrations on how to crack open a nut and—my personal favorite—the deceitful trickery.
In the fall, squirrels frantically gather and store food. They eat a wide range of foods such as tree buds, seeds, acorns and many other types of nuts. They gather these food items from the forests and bury them in small caches they make in the ground for later recovery. Using their very accurate spatial memory, they then use landmarks and smell to recover their caches. Thievery, however, is inevitable and many squirrels are opportunists, which can lead to high-speed chases up and down the trunks of trees. These chases are hard to keep up with as the squirrels climb from one tree to the next in the blink of an eye.
Squirrels are one of few mammals that can scale down a tree head-first. They do this by rotating their ankles 180 degrees and turn their hind paws backwards.
Photos by Ashleigh Newnes
Some squirrels that I come across don’t seem to mind my presence at all. As long as I keep sufficient distance between the two of us and don’t make any sudden movements, I get to be up close while they continue with whatever activity they are currently engaged in. This is when I most often get to see them breaking apart the husk of a nut using a combination of their teeth and their human-like fingers.
Other squirrels, however, won’t stand for the presence of a human visitor. They let me know loud and clear with continuous chirping that I am absolutely not wanted and they won’t stop until I am far enough away and they no longer feel their food or territory are being threatened.
My favorite of all squirrel behavior is their trickery. If they sense that they are being watched while storing their food, they will do their very best to mislead the onlooker. They will open up and prepare their small cache as they normally would, pretend to place the nut or piece of food into the ground, but in fact hide it in their mouths, then cover the cache back over and move onto the next spot. It is an incredible thing to witness, this type of calculated thinking from these creatures.
Squirrels sometimes get a bad rap and are often the reason property owners call upon exterminators. Sometimes squirrels can cause damage to homes when trying to find a suitable place to nest. Try to remember that squirrels, like many other creatures, are being dislodged from their natural homes due to overdevelopment and habitat loss. Squirrels are in fact “the most prodigious and ecologically essential natural forest regenerator” in North America (according to the Canadian Journal of Zoology) and that is exactly what we need right now.
Additionally, here in Murfreesboro, we have a local small mammal rehabilitator at Ziggy’s Tree Wildlife Rehabilitation Center (ziggystree.org) that can help with dislodged or injured squirrels, including newborns.
