Backyard and Beyond

Starting out from Brooklyn, an amateur naturalist explores our world.

As John Burroughs said, “The place to observe nature is where you are.”

Red Squirrel

This red squirrel, Tamiasciurus hudsonicus, was chasing, or being chased — in a circle it’s hard to tell who’s on first — by a gray squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis, on a big ash tree in Bradford, MA. Meanwhile, a neighborhood cat was patrolling the nearby fence, hoping for a loser. We chased the cat off.

I’ve never seen a red squirrel in NYC. The Bronx might have some, nestled up there as it is to the rest of America (it’s the only one of the five boroughs that isn’t an island or part of an island). The gray squirrels, of course, are omnipresent, in the parks and also inside the innerblock zones, those under appreciated islands of green. I used to have the grays in my walls in a previous Brooklyn residence. A couple of years ago I had them coming into the Back 40 to bury treasures (“for later”) in my pots, the only available soil around. Long a student of the “American war” (as they call it in Vietnam), I set up wooden shish kabob skewers around the pots like punji sticks, and that turned out to work nicely.

An unfortunate speller, I had to look up “squirrel” to get it right, and thus wondered about its ent. Thusly, ME fr. MF fr. VL fr L, with many assumptions therein, all going to back to Gk words for shadow and tail (as in buttocks)….

mthew

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3 responses to “Red Squirrel”

  1. Out walking the dog

    I too have yet to see a red squirrel in the city, though I’d love to. When I visit Dallas in a week, it’ll be mostly fox squirrels, which are gigantic. Bigger and more laid-back than grays, they’d positively tower over little reds.

    Reply
  2. Mark Wilkinson

    Hi Matthew

    When your post came through I was fascinated. We have long been lamenting the greadual loss of our native Eurasian Red Squirrel in the UK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Squirrel) due to the pressure from American Grey Squirrels that were introduced many years ago. We are down to isolated populations on the Isle of White and Brownsea Island in the south of England, and slightly stronger populations in the Lake District and Scotland but the battle continues. For this reason I was amazed that Red Squirrels could be found in the US. A bit of a google made things clearer when I discovered that there are several squirrel species in the US and that your sighting was of the American Red Squirrel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Red_Squirrel) which I didn’t even know existed. Thanks for sharing.

    Regards

    Mark

    Reply
    1. mthew

      It does get more complicated, slightly, since there are two dozen subspecies of the American red, according to a taxonomic text cited by Wikipedia.

      Reply

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