THE RED SQUIEREL — KLUGH 513 



{C(mja alha) and chestnuts were taken from a hollow tree occupied 

 by a single pair of these industrious creatures." 



Paulmier (1904), referring to this species in the Adirondacks, 

 says : " Later still, when the beechnuts, which form his staple food, 

 are ripe, he collects immense quantities of them, biting off the yet 

 green nuts, so that they fall to the ground, where he afterwards col- 

 lects them in heaps and stores them away." 



Hahn (1909), speaking of S. h. loquax in Indiana, says: " Much of 

 its time is spent on the ground where it gathers acorns and nuts and 

 buries them under leaves and under the soil. Some supplies are stored 

 in hollow trees also, although snow is no hindrance to its finding and 

 securing buried treasure." 



Bailey (1918) thus refers to the harvesting of the cones of several 

 species of evergreens in the mountains of Montana : 



Before the seeds are fully matured in the cones they begin to serve as food for 

 the squirrels, and when well ripened the cones are cut from the pine, spruce, and 

 fir trees in such numbers that the woods often resound with their steady thump- 

 ing on ground and logs. During autumn great numbers of cones are cut off and 

 stored in little pockets or holes in the ground, under logs, rocks, or brush heaps, 

 or in the piles of old cone scales at the base of the feeding trees, where they can 

 be readily found under the deep snows of winter. 



Two friends of mine one evening found a red squirrel's hoard of 

 butternuts in a hollow tree in northern Frontenac County, Ontario, 

 and filled a bushel-and-a-half bag with the nuts from this single 

 hoard. They left the nuts in the bag some yards from the tree, and 

 returned with a wheelbarrow the next morning to fetch them. But 

 the squirrel had been there before them, chewed a hole in the sack, 

 and removed every nut to some other storehouse, which they were 

 unable to locate. 



The red squirrel buries single nuts and acorns here and there in 

 the soil. When it buries a nut it scratches out a hollow with its 

 fore paws, places the nut therein, shoves it is as far as possible with 

 its nose, and then covers it with a few swift strokes from the right 

 and left with its fore paws. It performs this operation with great 

 rapidity, but does it so well that when it has buried a nut in a location 

 where there is moss and dead leaves there is no trace of any disturb- 

 ance. In fact upon several occasions I have noted as nearly as 

 possible the exact spot at which I had seen a nut buried, but upon 

 going to the place I was unable to find the nut. 



Nuts are sometimes stored singly in the crotches of trees, or 

 wedged under a flange of bark of rough-barked trees. Gibson 

 (1903) has noted this habit, and saj^s. "The shell-bark hickory is 

 the squirrel's favorite storehouse. A quick stroke with axe or sledge 

 will often dislodge numbers of nuts which have been packed away 

 and wedged beneath the bark by these provident little fellows." 



