THE EED SQUIRREL — KLUGH 505 



Cram (1901) says: 



On still winter days you may see^them springing about among the elastic 

 branches (of the hemlock), clinging to the very tips of the iinely divided sprays 

 at a perilous heiglit in their endeavors to reach the cones that are hung on such 

 exasperatingly slender twigs, hardly large enougli even for a squirrel's foot to 

 grasp ; and not infrequently a misstep will send one of them headlong down 

 toward tlie earth, usually to save himself by catching hold of one branch or 

 another on the way down. If there sliould chance to be no branches beneath 

 him, he spreads liimself out, like a flying squirrel, to a remarkable degree of 

 flatness and strikes so liglily as to escape all injury, even on hard snow crust 

 or ice. 



That the tail acts not only as a rudder in leaping, but to a certain 

 extent as a parachute in the case of a fall, is probably true. Seton 

 (1909) says that the loss of the tail " is a serious handicap, as is 

 proved by the fact that a tailless squirrel rarely survives. The loss 

 seems to limit its jumping power, and when it falls it suffers a heavy 

 jar, from which the tail w^ould have saved it " ; and speaking of a 

 squirrel which had its tail stripped off by a trout : " The animal was 

 not obviously crippled, and yet, as usual, the tailless one disap- 

 peared." He also mentions a red squirrel which was found dead 

 under a tree by Francis Dickie in Manitoba. " The tail was gone, 

 except half an inch of stub, which looked as if it had been chewed 

 off." 



ACTIVITY ON THE GROUND 



Though decidedly an arboreal species the red squirrel is quite at 

 home on the ground. Except under very unusual circumstances it 

 rarely gets very far out into the open, and its usual route in traveling 

 over the ground is from near the base of one tree to the proximity 

 of the base of another, the intervening space, if of any considerable 

 extent, usually being covered in a succession of long, rapid bounds. 

 Its activities on the ground are usually connected with food or 

 drink, or to get from one group of trees to another. Some of its 

 storehouses are holes in the ground, usually beneath a tree or stump, 

 and it buries nuts here and there in the soil. 



TUNNELLING IN SNOW 



In winter the red squirrel makes extensive tunnels under the snow. 

 These tunnels are made sometimes to connect one storehouse with 

 another, sometimes to get at food material which is lying on the 

 ground. One year, when my sugar maple had produced a very large 

 crop of keys, the squirrel constructed a system of interconnecting 

 tunnels with several entrances and exits to reach his food supply. 

 Cram (1901) says, " Often, instead of burrowing down repeatedly to 

 each little pile of cones, they dig radiating tunnels along the surface 

 of the ground, from the first one opened to the others near it, drag- 



