Red Squirrel

(This column was published in the February 6, 1995 Buffalo News.)

   The woods are silent except for the hiss-hiss of my skis through soft 
powder. It is a cold morning and over a Niagara County hill to the east a 
heartless gray solar disk peeks above the horizon.

   Suddenly as I near several white pines, the silence is broken by a staccato 
churring cry. After screaming at me, a red squirrel dashes along a downed log 
and up onto a stump. There he turns and exhibits that apoplectic behavior so 
common to this little mammal. The angry squirrel flicks his tail and stomps 
his feet, chattering all the while.

   The timing of this incident is perfect. Just yesterday I listened to 
Geneseo College student and Beaver Meadow intern Michelle Cappellino's 
excellent talk about her experiences studying red squirrels.

   Ms. Cappellino told me why this squirrel is so upset. Somewhere nearby is 
his food cache, up to several bushels of nuts, cones and other fruit gathered 
in the fall and hidden under a brush pile or in an underground chamber. I have 
come too close to that important food store -- the diminutive rodent's 
lifeline through the winter -- and he is telling me to get lost!

   This behavior is quite unlike that of gray squirrels. The larger species 
stores food in many holes, a nut or two in each. For the gray squirrel then 
defense of territory is unnecessary: loss of a few nuts does not threaten its 
existence. The red squirrel's cache represents all it has.

   Despite this squirrel's continuing resentment, I look around. I can almost 
certainly not find the cache, but I may find the squirrel's feeding spot. 
Indeed there it is. Below a low horizontal pine limb is a mound in the snow. 
Scattered about on it are black walnut shells and pine cone lips. I dig down 
into the foot deep pile with my ski pole and turn up more shells. It is a 
typical red squirrel midden. For each meal he retrieves a single nut from his 
storehouse and carries it to that limb, where he shells and eats it, dropping 
the waste onto the pile.

   Now I examine the aggravated little beast through my binoculars. His back 
and tail are reddish, his sides and head gray, his belly and breast white. 
Like the gray squirrel his eye is also circled with white. In summer there 
would be a black line along his side, but he has no black in this pelage.

   Even including their tail red squirrels are only about a foot long and 
weigh just a half pound. They are scarcely a third the size of their gray 
cousins but still twice as big as chipmunks.

   I once saw a gray squirrel chase a red, but that was quite unlike their 
usual behavior: that gray was probably a female with nearby kits. More often 
the chase is reversed, the red driving the gray out of its territory. The real 
enemies of the red squirrel are house cats, weasels, foxes, the larger hawks 
and owls and human hunters. Young squirrels are occasionally taken by snakes.

   Returning to the snow covered log along which the squirrel had bounded, I 
inspect his tracks. The pattern groupings are in four inch squares and have, 
like those of rabbits, hind feet slightly ahead of and outside forefeet. 
Squirrels descend from a leap on those forefeet and bring their back legs 
forward in position to spring once again. Like other squirrels and the 
chipmunk, fore prints show four toes, hind five. The groupings are about ten 
inches apart.

   As I ski out of the squirrel's territory, the ratcheting calls cease. I 
wonder if he's back there angrily shaking his little fist at me.