Red-squirrel 311 



to it originally, may have had to cross half-a-mile of bare prairie. 

 But the Red-squirrel knows so well how to use a hole in the 

 ground that it can make these open journeys safely, when a 

 more strictly arboreal animal would surely come to grief. 



In a grove of thirty or forty oak trees, east of Carberry, 

 Willie Brodie and I, on November 26, 1882, ran down and capt- 

 ured a Red-squirrel, that might easily have escaped to thicker 

 woods farther away, but this small grove was evidently the 

 home region that it knew, and here it would stay. In Ontario 

 I have known one of the species to take up its abode in a 

 barnyard, and never leave this all winter to go even fifty 

 rods away. Many a one passes its whole life in an orchard 

 of from four to five acres. A family of Red-squirrels that I 

 watched for some months at Tappan, New York, never, so 

 far as I could learn, went a quarter of a mile from the central 

 home trees. In the woods about my Connecticut home is the 

 Red-squirrel family elsewhere referred to as the "Singers." 

 These I watch each summer, but I have never seen them one 

 hundred yards from the home tree. If they ventured so far 

 they would be trespassing on the occupant rights of the next 

 Squirrel family, and be forced to fight or run away. I have, 

 however, observed another family in northern New York that 

 habitually travel along the fence between a corn-crib and a 

 woods over a quarter of a mile ofT. 



At his country home (Woodstock, N. Y.) Paul Doherty 

 has, he tells me, a pair of Red-squirrels which are very easy 

 to observe, as both are albinos. Their nest for two or three 

 years has been in a hollow apple tree. They are usually seen 

 within fifty feet of this. Only once in four months did he see 

 them farther away; they were then at the next house, eighty 

 feet from their nesting tree. 



As sidelight I cite the case of a Fox-squirrel, a creature 

 larger and more active than the Red-squirrel, therefore needing 

 a larger stretch of woodland, and yet the evidence goes to 

 show that the home range of the Fox-squirrel is small. Of 

 half a dozen that I turned loose in Wyndygoul Park, in the 

 spring of 1901, but one was seen as far off as a half mile from 



