Squirrels | Leslie Patten Books: Wild Places, Sacred Spaces

Tracking Footprints

Squirrels, Bears, and birds: What’s the connection?

Posted on October 18, 2010 by Leslie

The Clark’s Nutcrackers have been very busy over the last month. So have the squirrels. They’re both competing for the Limber Pine seeds that grow around here. The birds extract and stash seeds. The squirrels create middens with stored seeds and cones. The bears let these animals do their work, then rob the middens.

Clark's Nutcracker

It is really amazing to watch the Nutcrackers. They are so adept at using their beak to extract the seed. Limber pine cones are full of sap, really sticky. I’ve watched a bird work a cone, sometimes to just get sap or a bad seed. The bird cleans it’s beak quickly and works another seed hole.

Squirrels too can work a cone very quickly and efficiently. Both squirrels and Nutcrackers seem to know exactly which seed is viable or not. I’m sure it has something to do with its weight. Sometimes I find a cone on the ground with a few seeds left in it. Invariably those seeds are empty, either with worm holes or they just didn’t mature.

Meanwhile, after working hard on caching all these seeds, the bears are coming around robbing all the caches they can find.

There’s a black bear working my neighborhood intensely, day after day. His scat is everywhere, mostly full of pine shells. The scat even smells like pine nuts…you can smell the rich fatty odors.

Loaded with pine nut debris

Yesterday I drove down my driveway only to find a huge stump in the middle of the road. I got out to move it, I looked up the hillside where it had rolled down from, and saw that this bear had completely worked over an old middens. He’d turned over the soil so much that the chickadees were having a field day.