i OUR GRAY SQUIRRELS 1 9 



Step by step, impelled by a fatal desire to learn 

 more about that fascinating thing in the grass, 

 Bunny steals forward and is lost ! 



The male squirrels come back from their sum- 

 mer vagabondage looking very much the worse 

 for wear, the result of many a battle, no doubt, 

 for they are incorrigible fighters. In the season 

 of courtship the males are especially pugnacious, 

 and will bite one another severely, or hurl one 

 another from lofty limbs. 1 The red squirrels, or 

 chickarees, though hardly half as big, will whip 

 the grays in a running fight every time ; but when 

 it comes to a clinch, the superior size and weight 

 of the gray give him the victory. There is an 

 eternal feud between them because the gray squir- 

 rels are continually raiding the hoards of nuts and 

 acorns which the provident chickarees stow away 

 in odd corners against the coming of winter. The 

 holes in our long post-and-rail fence is a favorite 

 place of deposition, and in autumn this fence is 

 pretty regularly patrolled by a chickaree. If a 

 reconnoitring gray even approaches this fence, 

 the red will dash at him like wildfire. 



One day a pan of shelled corn stood outside the 



1 There is no truth in the long-lived supposition that the victor 

 in one of these knightly combats will emasculate his conquered foe. 

 The only explanation, apart from an anatomical one, seems to be 

 that the testicles of many squirrels are destroyed by a parasitic worm 

 that is peculiar to those organs in the sciuri. They are also much 

 troubled by subcutaneous parasites, particularly larvae of flesh-flies 

 of the genus (Estrus. 



