Pennsylvania Game News - October 2013 - 55

also had been quiet. That’s because,
when there are only one or two of
them in widely spaced territories,
they have no need to defend their
turf.
Needless to say, I was sorry not to
have been in the blind and seen the
red squirrel. Eight days later, though,
on a lovely October morning, I
walked down First Field and paused
to watch a white-crowned sparrow
sitting on a weed head near the small
patch of “red squirrel” woods.
That’s when I noticed a movement near Paula’s blind. I remained
still, and the red squirrel climbed to a
low tree branch and sat there while I
watched it for several minutes before
it dashed down the tree trunk and
disappeared.
My next and, as it turned out, last
sighting of the red squirrel was on a
warm December 4. Walking past the
“red squirrel” woods, I noticed something atop an uprooted tree mound.
It was the red squirrel, sitting up, its
little paws folded across its chest.
Whether it was worried about me or
the gray squirrel running from First
Field into the woods, it remained still
and silent. Finally, I continued on my
walk.
It was 13-year-old Carl Engstrom,
who came up to participate in our
Christmas Bird Count on December
16, 2012, who was the last person to
see the red squirrel. He looked out
our bow window and glimpsed the
squirrel down the back slope. I was
making lunch in the kitchen, and by
the time I ran to the window, it was
gone.
Unfortunately, a muscle tear kept
me inside for most of the winter and
while I watched our feeder area that
OCTOBER 2013

was mobbed with gray squirrels from
far and near because of a mast failure,
I never saw the red squirrel there,
although Carl’s mother, Dr. Carolyn
Mahan, a squirrel expert at Penn
State/Altoona, says that red squirrels
don’t use birdfeeders. They also eat
such a wide variety of food that she
doubts that it starved. In fact, she
thinks it may have been attracted by
black walnut trees at the edge of the
grove, which had produced nuts.
Red squirrels are opportunistic,
and even though they may prefer the
food in boreal coniferous forests, they
will eat acorns, beechnuts, hickory
nuts, hemlock cones, tulip and
sycamore seeds, buds of maple and
elm trees, sumac fruits, fungi, insects,
and an occasional nestling or clutch
of birds’ eggs, all of which we have
somewhere on our mountain, except
for the sycamores.
They also “tap” sugar maple trees
in late winter for their sap by biting into the xylem of the trees and
coming back to those taps after the
sap has dried — when the sap has
gone from 2 percent sugar to 55 percent — and licking the maple sugar.
They store whatever food they
collect in late summer and autumn in
middens or caches that may be in a
hollow tree or burrow. Occasionally,
they scatter hoard and sometimes
they bury food in wet places where it
may stay fresh for several years. Fungi
are either dried in trees or in middens
along with nuts, hawthorn and sumac
fruits.
I never did ﬁnd a midden in the
couple hollow trees on the ground,
although in a study Mahan and
Richard Yahner did nearby back in
the early 1990s, they found that red
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Pennsylvania Game News - October 2013

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