American red squirrel
Tamiasciurus hudsonicus
— Where the name comes from
Tamiasciurus puts together two Greek words: tamías, the “steward”, the servant who in ancient households kept the keys to the stores, and skíouros, the squirrel. It is an exact description of the behaviour — this animal does not scatter its food, it heaps it in a single warehouse and stands guard. Hudsonicus points to Hudson Bay, whence the pelts sent to Europe came.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Rodents
- Habitat
- Coniferous forest, mixed woodland, treed gardens
- Range
- Canada and the northern United States, from Alaska to the Appalachians
- Size
- 28–35 cm including tail, 200–250 g
- Diet
- Conifer seeds, fungi, buds, maple sap, eggs
- Lifespan
- 5 years in the wild
— Characteristics
- 01
It piles up to eighteen thousand cones in a single underground store.
- 02
It defends its territory with a continuous trill, audible hundreds of metres away.
- 03
It scores the bark of maples and returns to drink the syrup once the water has evaporated.
— What sets it apart
The store, which biologists call a midden, is an inheritable estate. A heap of cone scales built up over decades keeps the seed cool and damp, and is worth more than the territory itself: old females sometimes hand it to an offspring and move to poorer ground. It is one of the very few documented cases of a material possession being inherited in a mammal that is not a primate.
