SETON — MIGRATIONS OF THE GRAYSQUIRREL 
57 
Dr. P. R. Hoy knew of “an Ohio hunter that killed 160 in one day 
in an ^off season.^ In parts of Michigan, Illinois, Southern Wisconsin 
and Indiana, they are no less numerous.” (Quad. 111., 1857, p. 63.) 
Doctor Bachman saw 130 miles of the Ohio “strewed” with them in 
1819; an old settler of Bay City, Michigan, records (Bay City Tribune, 
17 Feb., 1907) that in the migration of 1866, one of the last, he counted 
1400 squirrels while driving 2 miles. 
Finally if we recall, as the third dimension, that Doctor Hoy found 
it took a month for the army to pass, we have some basis for calculation. 
Allowing that the squirrels travelled 5 miles a day, we have an army, 
130 miles wide, 150 miles long, in which as many as 1400 might be seen 
by the road within 2 miles. That road must have been through the 
woods, therefore 20 yards on each side would be the limit of view. This 
would mean 30,000 to the square mile, or 450,000,000 squirrels in the 
dimensions recorded. Such numbers seem incredible, and yet that is 
what the old naturalists said they were, unbelievable , incredible, etc. 
Even if we largely discount these figures, we must remember that 
there are many such armies and that only a small section of the range 
was represented; not more than one-fortieth of it. 
A corroboration of these high rates is found in a recent occurrence. 
The graysquirrels in Central Park, New York, became over-many. It 
was decided to thin them out; 300 were shot in one week without 
making much perceptible difference. There were at least twice as 
many left in the woods which cover nearly half of this 800-acre park. 
That is, there were over 1000 to the 300 acres of timber. 
In my recollection of a squirrel woods in Ontario, 1887, the numbers 
in Central Park are not to be compared to those in the northern woods. 
They were at least three times as numerous in the latter and yet we 
knew that there were about 3 to the acre in the park. 
In western Texas there is, according to the Biological Survey, a 
prairiedog town of 25,000 square miles, with an estimated population 
of 400,000,000 or 25 to the acre. This is probably a higher rate than 
the graysquirrel ever attained to, but it shows the possibilities even 
with an animal of more than double the size. 
The range of the graysquirrel is about 1,000,000 square miles; allow- 
ing, that in half of this, they were scarce, and that in the teeming parts 
they were no more numerous than in Central Park, we have an estimate 
of 1,000,000,000 as the lowest guess at the primitive number that one 
can arrive at. But we have noted above one of several armies that 
totalled nearly half a billion. Who then can doubt, in view of this. 
