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Hi everyone and welcome back to Curious By Nature.
My name is Marjorie and I'll be your host on today's episode.
We've got a really fun topic today, an animal that I really love seeing around--squirrels!
Joining us today is Dr. Joel Brown, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University
of Illinois at Chicago and a Senior Member in the Department of Integrated Mathematical Oncology
at the Moffitt Cancer Center, and a great friend of the Nature Museum.
Today, Joel will be sharing his knowledge of squirrels, so let's go check in with him.
Thanks for joining us today, Joel.
Absolutely, thank you.
All right, so first off, what do squirrels eat?
So squirrels eat a whole variety of things.
They go under the name of being an omnivore, meaning that they like to eat a variety of things.
Kind of like a smorgasbord, but primarily their favorite food are nuts.
Acorns, walnuts, and in fact interestingly in their diet they prefer a high amount of vegetable oil.
So your standard bread or grains, they're actually not too keen on, but offer them a cashew,
a peanut, an oily sunflower seed, and those are their favorites.
So what can squirrels tell us about the world around us?
Well I think squirrels are awesome and there's a number of ways in which I think they're critical.
I think first and foremost the squirrels that we have here living in the city,
they provide a unique opportunity to engage with nature.
It's a chance to sort of see nature in action, they're easy to observe, they're observing you, too.
The second feature about squirrels more generally, is they provide a variety of ecosystem services.
Every time you see an oak tree, every oak tree got its beginning from an acorn that was buried
by a squirrel, or some other animal but usually a squirrel, and that it either forgot where it was
or it didn't need it.
And so in terms of advancing forests, they're a critical role
by their caching behavior burying seeds.
Another feature of squirrels is they're kind of an indicator of us,
they're a reflection of us.
If you have squirrels in your neighborhood
then that tells you that this is now an urban environment that is favorable to wildlife.
So, where do squirrels live in urban areas?
The cool thing is they live all around us.
Shall we go take a look? Yeah!
So the Chicago region is actually a biodiversity hot spot for squirrels.
There traditionally have actually been eight members of the squirrel family.
The two that are most conspicuous, the ones that people think about in their backyards,
that you'll see in your neighborhoods both in the city in the suburbs,
are the gray squirrel and the fox squirrel.
They both have very similar lifestyles.
They eat the same things, they live in pretty much the same places,
however they subdivide Chicago and its suburbs in an interesting way.
The gray squirrel's generally gray in color, sometimes they're all black in terms of their fur,
and they have the white tummies and their tail has the nice white frosting on the outside.
The fox squirrels, sometimes people refer to them as the brown ones, or the orange ones, or the red ones.
They will have a conspicuous orange fur, and their tail is tipped with a nice black outline, and their tummies will have an orange tinge to them.
The fox squirrels are a little bit bigger, the gray squirrel's a bit smaller.
Probably the best way to describe them comes from actual people of Chicago themselves.
They have been described as gray squirrels go to college, fox squirrels head for the burbs.
Why do squirrels bury their food and then how do they remember their caching sites or where they buried their food?
So some of the members of the squirrel family in the Chicago area,
they actually hibernate or go into sort of a deep sleep and torpor.
That would be like the chipmunks,
and the woodchucks, or groundhogs, will do that as well as the 13-line ground squirrel,
but the city fox squirrels and the city gray squirrels, to get through the winter,
they rely on a cache of food.
The joke is they rely on their 401 acorn plan.
What they do then is bury seeds, mostly acorns, nuts, black walnuts, and they will scatter hoard them.
What that means is they don't put them all in one place where something or somebody could steal them all.
Rather they bury them individually, sometimes oh a few feet apart, sometimes many feet apart,
and then what they do is they come and collect them during the winter time when they're short of food
and so the caching behavior then is a way then to be able to tide them through those long Chicago winters.
Well, thank you so much for sharing all this great information about squirrels with us today.
Thank you so much, I mean it's been wonderful to be able to talk about one of my favorite topics,
and I think being able to talk about the squirrels
provides us also to reflect a little bit on our relationship with nature.
Not that squirrels are a species of conservation concern, not that squirrels directly then require
our help or assistance.
In fact it's because the squirrels simply make a home around us,
they simply work around what we do and we often work around what they do in terms of
how we manage our yards and plant our gardens.
But I think squirrels are perhaps one of the best opportunities to have that kind of urban gateway into nature
and I think squirrels are one of the most wonderful opportunities to see sort of intertwined destinies.
The fact that they are a product of the way we manage our nature,
the way we engage with nature, the way we landscape,
and our feelings towards nature, but they too influence the way we think about nature
and influence some of the things we do.
So thank you so, so much for this opportunity.
I'm such a nut for squirrels and I hope you are now, too.
Thanks again to Dr. Joel Brown for sharing his knowledge with us today and thank you all for watching.
Be sure to leave any questions you have about squirrels in the comments below.
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channel so you never miss an episode, and we'll see you back here next time on Curious By Nature.