Everything about your pet
Today, I'm going to talk about feeding squirrels.
There are many different squirrels that you can have as a pet.
One of the most common is the Siberian chipmunk,
which will be accompanying me in the video today.
Chipmunks are animals with hibernation capacity.
This means that their feeding during the spring is quite different
from their feeding during the fall.
During spring squirrels consume foods that are not very fatty.
They feed rather on fruit, vegetables, fruits of the forest.
Very juicy foods, rich in vitamins and with low fat composition.
As summer passes and autumn and winter approaches
squirrels ingest much more fatty feed.
They accumulate reserves for the winter.
Although in winter we keep them indoors in good environmental conditions.
They genetically are going to eat much more fat
to get fat and survive the cold season that they would have in nature.
Here you have an example of squirrel feed.
It's basically composed of corn, nuts, berries, extruded feed, carob peas, almonds,
different cereals and corn also in the form of flakes.
You must supplement the feed with hay.
Hay in squirrels has two functions as in most of rodents.
They're going to use it as material for their nest.
Squirrels in nature builds their nest high in the trees,
sometimes they even steal the nest from birds.
They use different materials, including hay to build themselves
a kind of warm bed where they can take refuge and breed.
Here you have hay inside a ball, they can gnaw it and extract hay.
Or also in the form of cylinder that they love because they can play and hide in it.
As snacks you can use varied fruits and vegetables.
They love forest fruits for example blackberries.
Blackberries are one of their favorite fruits.
If you want to try the dehydrated snacks,
you can use the ones for hamsters or for the chinchillas.
They are made up of dehydrated fruits and vegetables so squirrels will like them.
A little advice at the end: although they are animals with a capacity to hibernate,
if we keep them inside the house it would be better to not allow them to hibernate.
To hibernate they need cold.
It's not necessary for them to hibernate and
what we should do is reduce a little the amount of fat, amount of seeds
so they don't get fat in winter.
But always put the heating on and allow them to be awake
and enjoy them as pets also in winter.