CIRCUIT OF THE SUMMER HILLS 



A butternut-tree stands across the road in front 

 of Woodchuck Lodge. One season the red squirrels 

 stored the butternuts in the wall of one of the upper 

 rooms of the unoccupied house, to which they 

 gained access through a hole in the siding. When we 

 moved in, in the summer, the squirrels soon became 

 uneasy, and one day one of them began removing 

 the butternuts, not to some other granary or place 

 of safety, but to the grass and dry leaves on the 

 ground in the orchard. He was unwittingly planting 

 them by the act of hiding them. The automatic 

 character of much animal behavior, the extent to 

 which their lives flow in fixed channels, was well 

 seen in the behavior of this squirrel. His procedure 

 in transferring the nuts from his den in the house to 

 the ground in the orchard, a distance of probably 

 one hundred feet, was as definite and regular as the 

 movement of a piece of machinery. He would rush 

 up and over the roof of the house with a nut in his 

 mouth, by those sharp, spasmodic sallies so charac- 

 teristic of the movements of the red squirrel, down 

 the corner of the house to the ground by the same 

 jerky movements, across some rubbish and open 

 ground in the same manner, alert and cautious, up 

 the corner of a small building ten feet high and 

 eight long, over its roof, with arched tail and spread 

 feet, snickering and jerking, down to the ground on 

 the other side, dashing to the trunk of an apple-tree 

 ten feet away, up it a few feet to make an observa- 

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