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

Small city parks easily become overstocked with gray squirrels that are not adequately fed, and the result is,--complaints of "depredations." Of course hungry and half-starved squirrels will depredate,--on birds' nests, fruit and gardens. My answer to all inquirers for advice in such cases is--feed the squirrels, adequately, and constantly, on cracked corn and nuts, and send away the surplus squirrels. At this time many persons know that the wild animals and birds now living upon the earth are here solely because they have had sufficient sense to devise ways and means by which to survive. The ignorant, the incompetent, the slothful and the unlucky ones have passed from earth and joined the grand army of fossils. Take the case of the Rocky Mountain Pika, or little chief "hare," of British Columbia and elsewhere. It is not a hare at all, and it is so queer that it occupies a family all alone. I am now concerning myself with Ochotona princeps, of the Canadian Rockies. It is very small and weak, but by its wits it lives in a country reeking with hungry bears, wolverines and martens. The pika is so small and so weak that in the open he could not possibly dig down below the grizzly bear's ability to dig. And what does he do to save himself, and insure the survival of the fittest? He burrows far down in the slide-rock that falls from the cliffs, where he is protected by a great bed of broken stone so thick that no predatory animal can dig through it and catch him. There in those awful solitudes, enlivened only by the crack and rattle of falling slide-rock, the harsh cry of Clark's nut-cracker and the whistling wind sweeping over the storm-threshed summits and through the stunted cedar, the pika chooses to make his home. Over the slide-rock that protects him, the snows of the long and dreary winter pile up from six to ten feet deep, and lie unbroken for months. And how does the pika survive?