March 19th, 2006
the truce
It’s not exactly a great photo - shot through the window glass at dawn this morning, and with the squirrel turned away. However, the shot is significant for the content. It seems that the insanely aggressive Psycho-squirrel (a Red Squirrel - Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) has suddenly decided to call off his feud against the Eastern Cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus) that visits the bird feeder area in search of sunflower seeds. To read more about the long-standing war between the rabbit and the squirrel, see this earlier post from February. This morning, the squirrel sat eating sunflower seeds on the bird feeder log, while the rabbit hopped around looking for spilled seeds and probably waiting for his turn to hop up on the log (something which it does late in the evening and around dawn each morning). In the past, the squirrel would have raced down the tree to attack the rabbit, but this morning, it jumped up on the feeder log and began eating seeds instead. Eventually, the rabbit hopped away into the nearby spruce grove.
A recent observation of the Psycho-squirrel’s behaviour is that it doesn’t seem able to socialize with the rest of the Red Squirrels that frequent the garden. When they visit the feeder area, this squirrel hides behind its “home tree” - a nearby Sugar Maple, and then periodically rushes out while behaving aggressively, no doubt hoping to frighten the visitors away. When they fail to react, the squirrel becomes increasingly erratic, running about the feeder, hiding behind the feeder log, angrily twitching its tail while peering out at the visitors. It seems too nervous to actually attack them in the way that it would attack the rabbit and the birds that come to the feeder area.
Tags: Red Squirrel, Tamiasciurus hudsonicus, Eastern Cottontail, Sylvilagus floridanus
November 30th, 2006 at 7:12 pm
[…] At least one Red Squirrel has been busy caching away apples and pine cones as provisions to carry it through the coming winter months. Some years, I find caches of a half dozen or so apples packed into the highest branches of the maple trees. This year, the strategy seems to have changed somewhat. I believe the squirrel may be trying to spread its resources around a little more as the apples are distributed singly, here and there throughout the gardens. Last year, the larger apple caches caught the attention of the Blue Jays (Cyanocitta cristata). They would work in pairs or trios as they tore into the apple cache while the frantic squirrel raced from branch to branch trying to chase the birds away. For the most part, it was successful, but its behaviour seemed to become increasingly psychotic as the weeks rolled by. In time, the squirrel was seen flinging itself at the birds so recklessly, that it fell from the treetops to tumble to the ground below. Eventually, the squirrel became so obsessive about protecting its tree full of apples, that it began attacking an Eastern Cottontail rabbit (Sylvilagus floridanus) that came round to clean up sunflower seeds below the bird feeders. You can read more about the Psycho Squirrel and its war with the rabbit in this post which includes some video footage of one of the many skirmishes that I witnessed last winter (you’ll have to suffer through the spinning video clip title which was attached to the file for another purpose). The follow-up to that story appears in this post where the squirrel and rabbit finally established an uneasy truce that seemed to hold through to springtime. […]