Animals, too, can have their eccentricities. A Mr Spencer of Ealing, London wrote to the magazine The Country- man telling how all last summer "the grey squirrels were busy down our road burying hens' eggs (from an unknown source) in gardens, window-boxes, flowerpots and anywhere they could find a bit of earth. Later, in October, they planted a lot of horse chestnuts, but why they took the skins off first, I do not know. They are very neat workers and sometimes the ground does not look disturbed." We have all been told that squirrels store up hazel nuts, walnuts, beech mast, acorns and what not for the hard times to come, but hens' eggs must be a historic first.
The man at the magazine who deals with queries, Brian Martin, puts us right on one fact from the start. With both grey and red squirrels, he replies, the stimulus to store food has to do with surplus and a reaction to that state of affairs. It has nothing to do with prescience about future weather, as is commonly supposed. Indeed, when there is a lot of food, squirrels will hoard at any time of the year. But naturally, the big opportunity occurs in the autumn. . .season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and all that. And burying has been shown by experiments to be an innate skill rather than something learned. Moreover, retrieval of food is chiefly by scent in damp conditions. He does concede that memory may be an aid. He goes into some detail as to why the squirrels should peel the chestnuts before burying them, but not a word about those hens' eggs. On peeling, he suggests that this process may be a method of inspection, though it is bound to make the chestnuts more likely to rot when buried.
An interesting point: while buried, chestnuts, acorns and hazelnuts may survive to the following spring; the beech mast will survive until summer. Another correspondent, who once worked with young children in a pre-school programme in Vancouver, was happy to see a robin building a nest just outside the classroom window. But, as one day they watched the parent birds feed the nestlings, a black squirrel ran up to the nest and ate the baby birds one by one. The teachers were horrified but the children were fascinated.
A friend said he had never got over a remark, read in a French magazine, that the red squirrel doesn't need official protection, though it has it: Nature has already looked after its protection, for it is a veritable bag of lice and fleas. Oh, come on; leave us some illusions.