The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

The beautiful little Desert Kangaroo Rat (Dipodomys deserti) has worked out quite a different system of home protection. It inhabits deserts of loose sand and creosote bushes, where it digs burrows innumerable, always located amid the roots of the bushes, and each one provided with three or four entrances,--or exits, as the occasion may require. Each burrow is a bewildering labyrinth of galleries and tunnels, and in attempting to lay bare an interior the loose sand caved in, and the little sprite that lived there either escaped at a distant point or was lost in the shuffle of sand. The Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis).--This beautiful and sprightly animal quickly recognizes man's protection and friendship, and meets him half way. Go into the woods, sit still, make a noise like a nut, and if any grays are there very soon you will see them. The friendships between our Park visitors and the Park's wild squirrels are one of the interesting features of our daily life. We have an excellent picture of Mrs. Russell Sage sitting on a park bench with a wild gray squirrel in her lap. I have never seen red or fox squirrels that even approached the confidence of the gray squirrel in the truce with Man, the Destroyer, but no doubt generous treatment would produce in the former the gray squirrel's degree of confidence. I never knew an observer of the home life of the gray squirrel who was not profoundly impressed by the habit of that animal in burying nuts in the autumn, and digging them up for food in the winter and spring. From my office window I have seen our silver- gray friends come hopping through eight or ten inches of snow, carefully select a spot, then quickly bore a hole down through the snow to Mother Earth, and emerge with a nut. Thousands of people have seen this remarkable performance and I think that the majority of them still ask the question: "How does the squirrel know precisely where to dig?" That question cannot be answered until we have learned how to read the squirrel mind.