34 THE RING OF NATURE 



begins to live on salad and the sugary layer between 

 the outer bark and the wood of favoured trees like 

 the sycamore. Some of his digging in the floor of 

 the wood unearths such substantial succulents as 

 blue-bell bulbs and the richly-stored rhizomes of 

 anemone. Whenever he gets a chance he prefers 

 to take something substantial to stuffing his crop 

 with grass like a rabbit. 



It is inevitable that our friend should find many 

 a bird's nest in his arboreal capers. He is the soul 

 of curiosity, and it was not for a moment to be 

 expected that the first squirrel should fail to sample 

 these strangely-coloured acorns found three and 

 four in a cup, that we call eggs. Even our so-called 

 vegetarians eat eggs, and so does the squirrel. He 

 is not so particular about their freshness, and an 

 egg that has sprouted into a chick is no more amiss 

 to him than an acorn that has hatched into a young 

 oak. So the bird population owes a good deal of 

 its restraint to the patrolling of the squirrels. 



Last autumn I came upon a squirrel sitting 

 acanthus-tailed on a log, and very busily eating. 

 He was dining on the brown fungi that sprouted 

 from the decayed wood. An experienced mycolo- 

 gist would have taken home such fungi and eaten 

 them cooked, but the majority of people would 

 have called them ' nasty poisonous cankers.' I 

 think that the squirrel eats a good many fungi that 

 even the mycologist bars. At any rate, there is 

 among the edible ones a vast store of nourishing 

 food during the fungus season, and in what month 



