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There are many different species of squirrel, and different species have different diets. Knowing nothing about where your parent's house is but guessing it is
by tzs 2y ago
There are many different species of squirrel, and different species have different diets.
Knowing nothing about where your parent's house is but guessing it is somewhere in the US if I had to bet I'd bet that the squirrels there are Eastern gray squirrels. They are native to the Eastern US but have taken up residence in much of the rest of the country. One of the reasons they do well outside of their native habitat is that they are not at all picky eaters. So yes it was common knowledge that they will sometimes kill other animals and eat them.
The article is about California ground squirrels. Until recently they were not known to eat meat.
BTW, how the Eastern gray squirrels spread so much is interesting. As cities grew people in them wanted to have some connection to nature, and as part of that a lot of places wanted to have some wild animals in their city parks. Tree squirrels were a common choice.
So how do you get squirrels to take up residence in your park? Your first thought is probably that you send some people out to the nearest wild forest, trap enough squirrels to form a viable breeding population, and release them in the parks.
The problem with that is that in many cities the parks don't have native trees. People want parks to have trees that aren't too tall, with reasonably wide canopies, and that don't grow too close together.
That's great if you are someplace where the native trees are like that. If you are someplace like say Seattle where the native trees are tall narrow Fir trees that close together what they did was import trees from the Eastern US.
The native squirrels wouldn't necessarily eat the nuts from those non-native trees. That was the case in Seattle. Western gray squirrels really only want to eat the nuts from native trees.
And so to get squirrels that would be happy in a park full of trees imported from the Eastern US cities then imported squirrels from the Eastern US. And since Eastern gray squirrels are not picky eaters they are also happy with native nuts, and quickly spread beyond the parks.
- Loughla 2y agoThey're mostly red squirrels.
- gazook89 2y agoIn Minneapolis, MN, there is a historical plaque that notes the day and location of the first gray squirrels introduced to the city as a gift from Seattle/Washington. It’s in Loring Park. So kind of opposite direction.
- tzs 2y agoThat's interesting, so I searched for more information. Does the plaque actually say Seattle or just Washington? What I found [1] suggests the squirrels were introduced around 1909 and came from Washington DC, bought from this guy [2]. Here's a summary, but read the article I linked. I'm leaving out lots of interesting details. Unlike Seattle, the problem in Minneapolis wasn't that the native squirrels didn't like the trees. The park had plenty of native red squirrels. The problem was that Theodore Wirth, the park supervisor, hated red squirrels. He thought they killed too many songbirds, and he loved songbirds. Red squirrels did occasionally eat songbird eggs but the actual main threat to songbirds in the park was humans. Red squirrels are also very territorial and aggressively defend that territory. They are happy to live off the food the trees provide so don't really warm up to humans. Instead they yell at humans to try to drive them away. Grays love to eat all kind of things, and so quickly come to see humans as friendly bringers of all kinds of food. To address this perceived red squirrel problem Thomas ordered park police to execute all the red squirrels and brought in the Eastern gray squirrels. The grays adapted so well that by the 1930s some people were complaining: > They adapted to city life so eagerly that by 1930, the Tribune was lamenting that Loring Park's squirrels had become spoiled "cream-puff squirrels" that bore little resemblance to their ancestral "true" gray squirrel of the American wilderness. > "Any day in Loring Park a squirrel may choose between ice cream cones, cake and a dozen kinds of sweetmeats, or enjoy all of them to his capacity," the Tribune reported. "Instinctively they still store acorns from the old oaks. But it is a lackadaisical effort." [1] https://www2.startribune.com/gray-red-squirrels-theodore-wirth-loring-park-birds-minneapolis/600245052/ https://www2.startribune.com/gray-red-squirrels-theodore-wir... [2] https://www.ebay.com/itm/395169313155 https://www.ebay.com/itm/395169313155