Photo by D. Sillman
(Click on this link to listen to an audio version of this blog … Backyard Fox Squirrels
I have a backyard full of fox squirrels that are great fun to watch. I have written about them several times in my emails and blogs (see Signs of Summer 15, September 10, 2020). We started out with just two squirrels in the yard, but, through the winter, that increased to seven or eight. If you feed them, they will multiply!
I have been very impressed by a number of aspects of fox squirrel behavior: first and foremost, they are incredibly tough and venture out on even the coldest winter day. They do, however, hate the snow! I watched one fox squirrel, clinging to the trunk of our honey locust tree, take a half an hour to get his nerve up to dive into the ten inches of fresh snow that covered the ten feet or so of open yard between him and the sunflower seed feeder. His first plunge buried him so deeply that only the tip of his tail was visible. He then leaped back into the tree and took two more “snow-dives” before he made it all the way to the feeder.
In the snow the fox squirrels are very attentive to their paws. They often run a few steps and then rub their front paws furiously against their chests and shake their back paws vigorously against their sides before they move any further. I wonder if their paws freeze or if they accumulate irritating crusts of ice or snow?
I have watched the squirrels trim off and consume honey locust seeds and hang precariously from extremely thin end-branches to reach clusters of ripe pods. I have watched them do the same up on the much higher branches of the ponderosa pines in order to reach mature pine cones.
Photo by D. Sillman
In the winter and spring, the squirrels shinny out to the very ends of the branches of the honey locust tree and very intently chew on something. Leaf and/or flower buds? I watched my Pennsylvania gray squirrels do this on my backyard red maple trees, too. The only part of the branches of those maples that grew leaves in the spring and summer were the branch sections too slender to support a squirrel!
This leaf trimming by the squirrels could be energetically beneficial to a tree. The very end branches of the limb sections are those guaranteed to get maximum sunlight. The leaves located more in the center of the tree crown (those on the thicker, inner branches that easily reached by the bud-eating squirrels) would be quite shaded. Those sun-lit, end-leaves, then, would be most productive in fixing energy. Trimming out the potentially less productive (but equally expensive to make!) inner leaves would allow the tree allocate its leaf making energy in a more efficient manner!
I have also been very impressed by how polite and tolerant the fox squirrels are to each other and how little intra-specific, physical aggression they display. The literature indicates that they are not a very territorial species, and compared to their cousin, the gray squirrel (whom I observed extensively back in Pennsylvania), they almost placidly accept the presence of each other in the yard. Possibly the abundance of food (sunflower seeds, locust seeds and pine seeds) explains the apparent lack of overt competitive behaviors). The only “arguments” I have observed between fox squirrel individuals in the yard have been over access to the sunflower feeder! Fights over junk food, as most of us who have ever had college roommates know, are not at all uncommon!
Photo by D. Sillman
I have also watched the fox squirrels go up and down the streets of our neighborhood looking for other foods (like black walnuts and planetree seed pods). I have not found the neighborhood black walnut tree, but I did locate the London planetree in the front yard of one of my neighbor’s about a block away. It is a long way to run to get these seed balls and necessitates the crossing of two streets. They must be an important resource.
At first the fox squirrels ignored the bird bath I had set up on the back patio. I speculated that they were “desert-adapted” out here on the dry plains of Colorado and might not know what liquid water was! Maybe they generated all of the their water requirements from their food? This winter, though, several of the squirrels have started to climb up into the bird bath to get drinks of water!
When we moved into our Greeley house a year and a half ago, our next-door neighbor pointed out a fox squirrel that only had one eye. The neighbor thought that a hawk had injured him during a failed hunt and grab. The one-eyed squirrel seemed to move pretty well for someone without any depth perception. Not being able to see potential predators on one whole side of your body was probably a difficulty, too. The one-eyed squirrel was around all last summer, but sometime in the fall, he disappeared. Another hawk? A car accident out on the street? A missed jump up in the ponderosa pine? Something happened.
Public Domain
Last December, I mentioned seeing a small squirrel with a very short tail. She was a very distinctive individual because of her tail and was easily recognized. I named her “Stubbs.” She is the only backyard squirrel that has a name! When Stubbs first showed up she always entered the yard very furtively and was quite jumpy and cautious around the larger squirrels. At first I thought that she was a different species (a pine squirrel or chickaree), but as I have watched her over the year, I have come to the conclusion that she is a fox squirrel who, last December, must have been the runt of a summer litter. She has since grown considerably (but still has a tail that is only 1/3 to ½ the length of a normal fox squirrel.
My grandson, Ari, loves Stubbs! He gets so excited when we see her in the backyard that he often goes running through the house to find Deborah or his mother or father yelling “it’s Stubbs, it’s Stubbs! Come and see!”
Stubbs feeds at different times from the other squirrels. She is often in the sunflower seed feeder right at dusk when all of the other squirrels have retreated to their leaf nests for the night. She is also often at the feeder during the mid-day hiatus and siesta for the other squirrels. My guess is that her tail was injured very early in her life possibly by another squirrel. Maybe her small size and then her oddly cropped tail made her a target for abuse? Maybe fox squirrels are not so placid as I have hypothesized.
Photo by J. Quinn, Wikimedia Commons
I had assumed that they only impediment that Stubbs’ short tail might cause is the absence of a warm covering wrap at night, but then a couple of months ago I noticed something else: Izzy and I went out in the backyard mid-morning. Our arrival scattered the squirrels who ran up the locust and pine trees and out across the tops of tall wooden fence that surrounds the yard. Three squirrels (including Stubbs) ran along the narrow fence top. The two, normal-tailed squirrels raced easily down the fence. Stubbs, though, stumbled every few feet and had to catch herself to keep from falling. The two normal-tailed squirrels easily out raced Stubbs to the cover of the backyard cedar tree.
I think that possibly Stubbs was not able to use her short tail to help her keep her balance on the fence top. Therefore, she stumbled and moved more slowly than her more normally-tailed companions. Running from Izzy and I, this slower escape would not matter, but if the escape was from a real predator, Stubbs would end up as some hawk’s or dog’s or even owl’s meal (Stubbs’ pattern of feeding at dusk just might overlap with the start of our neighborhood’s great horned owl’s hunting time)!
Photo by D. Sillman
In early March, I noticed that the number of squirrels in my yard had decreased by three. There were now just four squirrels racing up an down the locust tree and gorging themselves at the sunflower seed feeder. One of the missing squirrels, sadly, was Stubbs! My hope is that the yearling squirrels got pushed out of the backyard territory to make room for this spring’s litter. Maybe Stubbs is living down the block with some of her siblings. I will keep my eyes open for her short, stubby tail!