254 THE GREAT NORTH-WEST 



fit to wait till I reached this chapter before giving a 

 detailed account of them. 



The trappers say that there are three species of 

 squirrel — the red, the grey, and the black ; the natu- 

 ralists acknowledge two — the red, Sciurus hudsonianus, 

 and the grey, Sciurus carolinensis. The black is an 

 abnormal, or erratic, colouration of individuals. All these 

 are met with in the forests of Michigan, but there is 

 great uncertainty as to where and in what numbers. 

 There used to be a great migration of these elegant 

 little mammals, or perhaps it would be better to say a 

 great invasion, occurring every few years, with an un- 

 certain interval. A district in which there were very 

 few squirrels would be invaded by countless thousands, 

 and the farmers would assemble in defence of their barns 

 and granaries, and have a week's squirrel-shooting. I 

 have heard of a party of a dozen guns shooting as many 

 as 20,000 squirrels in a week. These were of the species 

 termed grey by the people of the locality ; but they seem 

 to have been the >S'. hudsonianus of the naturalists ; for 

 they were the variety known as the chickaree, the most 

 abundant in the northern districts. Personally I doubt 

 if there is more than one distinct species ; I am quite 

 sure that there are more than half-a-dozen local varieties. 

 Books and naturalists cannot supersede my eyesight. 



It would be interesting to know from whence these 

 great hordes came. They always brought many enemies, 

 as owls, buzzards, and kites, in their train ; and in the 

 following years there would be a scarcity of squirrels in 

 the invested district. Man, and birds of prey, rapacious 

 as they were, could not account for the disappearance of 

 hundreds of thousands, perhaps of millions ; and my 

 opinion is, that the bulk of the horde failed to find 

 sufficient food to lay up a store for the winter, and 

 consequently were starved to death. But, apart from 

 this, great migrations of squirrels frequently took place 

 to my knowledge, for no discoverable cause; but I 



