This is my second post in honor of Squirrel Appreciation Day. When I first asked myself,"What wild animals live in big cities?" Squirrels (and birds) were the first animals that came to mind.
Squirrels are rodents, so that means they are cousins to chipmunks, mice, rats, voles, and beavers. They are members of the Sciuridae family, which means 'bushy tail.' This is a perfect way to describe the many members of the squirrel family, which includetree squirrels, ground squirrels, even chipmunks and groundhogs. But my focus here is the typical tree squirrel. Throughout much of the Mid-west, Mid-South, and Eastern United States and Southeast Canada, the Eastern Gray Squirrel is a very common wildlife neighbor in cities and towns, big and small.
Eastern Gray Squirrels are arboreal (the live in trees) and are tied to forest or wooded ecosystems. They depend on trees for food (various types of seeds, nuts, berries, and fruits) and for shelter. For a long time I believed squirrels only lived in hollow trees. They do live in tree hollows, but they also build nests. I learned this in college when I completed a biology class research project on squirrel animal behavior. The nests are called dreys. Squirrels gather dead leaves and twigs. The dead leaves make great insulation and they wedge the materials in the forks of trees, at the higher parts of the tree.
Very large hollow in a Sycamore tree, that looks like it might be a great squirrel home.
Squirrels will make and live in several nests. As fleas and ticks become a problem in a single nest a squirrel will abandon its nest, and the female will transfer all of her babies of she has any.
Squirrel nest in a Sycamore tree in the summer time.
I'm standing under the tree to get this shot. Looking at the tree from a distance, the large green leaves of the tree make it hard to detect the nest. Now that it is winter time, dreys are much easier to spot.
Squirrel nests in a sweet gum tree.
Two squirrel nests in one tree. Very likely, these nests belong to the same squirrel.
Close-up of one of the nests. Notice how the drey is wedged in the fork of the tree.
The series of pictures below are of a squirrel I spied in my backyard with a mouth filled with nesting material. There are some squirrel nest in my backyard, but sometimes they will build nests in "artificial hollows," like an attic, as you will see in the video below.
I've been looking for an answer to my question and have found out a lot more about squirrels than I knew before, but not an answer to my specific question which is,
"I have seen dead squirrels in the road which have been run over by cars, but I have never seen a squirrel corpse in the wild, i.e. while I was walking in the woods and so on. What happens to squirrel corpses when they simply die of old age or some disease?
Do they die in the nests in the trees which are then never used again by other squirrels?"
Jessica Kincaid
I was reading through this section about squirrels and came across a part where you said squirrels makes their nests with dead leaves. I'm not saying your wrong but I watched 2 squirrels in my back yard make their nest in mid-april. As you can imagine the leaves were quite green. Could this have been some kind of temporary nest of some kind? Why I ask if it's temporary is because I haven't seen the little guys since they built that nest.
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Squirrel nests in a sweet gum tree.
Two squirrel nests in one tree. Very likely, these nests belong to the same squirrel.
Close-up of one of the nests. Notice how the drey is wedged in the fork of the tree.
