STODDARD — NESTS OF THE FOX SQUIRREL 
123 
These nests are entirely different from the loosely constructed sum- 
mer nests, and are so compactly built that they frequently remain in 
place many years, the squirrels using them a great deal even in coldest 
weather. From the ground they look something like hawks’ nests, 
piles of sticks being all that are visible. 
The three or four young, blind and nearly naked, are born in late 
February or March in this region, as the following records show. Nest 
containing three young near Millers, Indiana, March 8, 1914. Another 
nest located near-by the same day by my campanion, Mr. L. L. Walters, 
contained four young about two weeks old. Millers, March 17, 1914, 
four young, about two weeks old; Dune Park, Indiana, April 1, 1917, 
three young a week or ten days old. I have never found a second litter 
later in the season. 
Other nests of this type containing young, and dozens of empty 
nests examined by Mr. Walters and myself, have invariably been placed 
in pine trees, from twenty to forty or more feet above the ground. As 
a nest of this type must be built from the inside, a foundation of en- 
circling limbs such as is offered by the northern scrub pine is necessary 
and may explain the absence of domiciles of this nature in the greater 
part of the range of this squirrel. 
These winter nests are often placed in close proximity to some good 
old den tree, to which the squirrel can retire if disturbed, and the sur- 
rounding trees are likely to contain one or more of the temporary nests 
used in summer, simply twigs and leaves cut green and piled into a 
convenient crotch. 
Young squirrels were found on a number of occasions in Sauk County, 
Wisconsin, in nests identical with those found in the Indiana dunes, 
even to being built in- scrub pines, though the use of hollow trees is 
more general in that section, and the season later. On one occasion 
while examining a nest of this kind in a very small scrub pine the female 
squirrel jumped the sixteen or so feet to the ground, leaving one young 
one, just born, in the nest; proving that in this case at least the young 
had not been transferred from a hollow tree. 
