# Gray Squirrel Thermometer



## MrWhoopee (Sep 8, 2021)

As I drive down the road into our small mountain neighborhood in the comfort of my air-conditioned car, I get a pretty good picture of how hot it is outside by how many gray squirrels are sprawled on the pavement. They're not road-kill, they jump up and run as I approach. They're just lying on their bellies with their legs spread out, getting maximum contact with the asphalt. I assume that, much like a dog, they are dissipating heat into the relatively cool pavement. Unfortunately, the gray squirrels are programmed to execute evasive maneuvers as they flee. This may work when being pursued by a predator, but is not advisable when trying to avoid a car. Once clear of the road, they are likely to reverse direction and run right back in front of the car, thereby becoming that which they were trying to avoid. My favorites, the Douglas squirrels, are not similarly programmed and are rarely hit.  

Today is a five squirrel day, they all survived.


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## RJSakowski (Sep 8, 2021)

In the fall, we are just as likely to see snakes lying on the road, sucking up heat from the asphalt.


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## Tozguy (Sep 8, 2021)

There are so many grey squirrels that get squished on our road it makes me wonder how they survive as a species. Black squirrels are starting to show up more and more. We are rolling in acorns most of the year so there will always be squirrrels around. The crows do well eating roadkill. There are several crows nests in the big pines in the neighbourhood. At least the wild rabbits and snakes stay off the road.


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## Nutfarmer (Sep 9, 2021)

I am surprised the hawks aren't having a field day. A squirrel out in the open around the orchard is fair game for a hawk. It's the ground squirrels that cause most of the damage in the orchards. What is fun to watch is when we disc open ground in the spring. It's a feeding frenzy for all the hawks catching the critters the disc spooks. On a good day there can be as many as a dozen circling over head looking for an easy meal.  Sometimes there's even a coyote that will join in.


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## mmcmdl (Sep 9, 2021)

Not a squirrel gets by without the 3 Shelties seeing it and keeping me awake during the day . Our powerlines are the squirrels interstate highways , those little bistards !


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## rwm (Sep 9, 2021)

Kind of like a 3 dog night.
R


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## markba633csi (Sep 9, 2021)

Reminds me of the movie "Rat Race" 
"you should have bought a squirrel"


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## RJSakowski (Sep 9, 2021)

I have tremendous respect for gray squirrels.  As a teenager, I used to hunt them and a good portion of out fall  and winter diet was squirrel. They are wiley critters and maneuvering them to where you could get a clean shot took a great deal of patience.  They will run up a tree and down the back side and you can waste a lot of time waiting for one to show itself when in fact they are far away.

Studies have shown that they will recover up to 60% of the more than 5,000 nuts that they bury each year, locating them under six inches of snow.  I have trouble remembering where I put the wrench I was using five minutes ago.  If you watch them navigating the tree tops, they will take complex routes to get from point A to point B, very seldom having to backtrack.   They are quick to learn how to overcome obstacles, as anyone with a bird feeder will attest.

My only issue with them is that they have decided in recent years that my buildings were ideal places for their nests.  Before we reoofed our house, they managed to chew an entry hole in the soffit and had a raceway around the entire perimeter of the house.  Replacing the soffit and facia solved that problem.  They have nests on the barn though and the open structure of the barn makes it impossible to keep them out so we just deal with it.  
I have threatened to take up hunting them again.  My wife is from the UK and she has never had squirrel stew and is very reluctant to try it.  Apparently, hunting gray squirrels in the UK isn't done.  Funny,  because they are an exotic and are driving out the indigenous red squirrels. As a result, they tend to be very tame and my wife was surprised that I was able to call then up to  a few feet from us.

We will seldom see a dead squirrel on the road although that may be due to the ever present turkey vultures looking for a quick meal.  I have only hit one in the hundreds of thousands of back road driving.  I have had them run under the vehicle and reverse course while underneath.


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## Nogoingback (Sep 9, 2021)

RJSakowski said:


> Studies have shown that they will recover up to 60% of the more than 5,000 nuts that they bury each year, locating them under six inches of snow.  I have trouble remembering where I put the wrench I was using five minutes ago.


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## MrWhoopee (Sep 9, 2021)

Nutfarmer said:


> I am surprised the hawks aren't having a field day. A squirrel out in the open around the orchard is fair game for a hawk. It's the ground squirrels that cause most of the damage in the orchards. What is fun to watch is when we disc open ground in the spring. It's a feeding frenzy for all the hawks catching the critters the disc spooks. On a good day there can be as many as a dozen circling over head looking for an easy meal.  Sometimes there's even a coyote that will join in.


For some reason we don't have that many hawks up here. Ospreys and the occasional bald eagle, but few hawks. They seem to like it down lower where there is less tree cover. Down in the valley I've watched the frenzy after the alfalfa is mowed. The ground squirrels are used to having the cover and suddenly it's gone. Red-tails circling overhead like vultures with a few sitting on the ground, just making a quick hop when a victim pops up. Ground squirrels aren't true squirrels, they're rodents and deserve to be eaten.


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## graham-xrf (Sep 9, 2021)

I know this takes the thing a bit beyond squirrels and snakes, but consider - elephants!
On the road to Kariba (Zimbabwe side), for some reason, they like to hang around in little crowds on the tar road in the early evening. You can find yourself somewhat too close to them very easily. Some folk just hoot them out of the way, but I can say outright, that is _very_ risky!

My problem with these gatherings was not so much when they were there, but after they were gone. To hit a pile of elephant doo-doo in limited light at 50mph is not trivial! You gag on the appalling stench, and there is little choice but to find the nearest place where one can hose down the car, especially the underside and front suspension parts.

Here in UK, there are the squirrels, but the main roadkill risk seems to be suicidal pheasants.


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## mmcmdl (Sep 9, 2021)

RJSakowski said:


> Studies have shown that they will recover up to 60% of the more than 5,000 nuts that they bury each year, locating them under six inches of snow. I have trouble remembering where I put the wrench I was using five minutes ago.


I'll have to use that line in at work !  Very funny and true .


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## Janderso (Sep 9, 2021)

MrWhoopee said:


> Ospreys and the occasional bald eagle


I love watching Ospreys catch fish.
Klamath California is one of our favorite places to RV. There are plenty of bald eagles and Osprey. It seems the Ospreys fish and the bald eagles try to steal their catch. Fortunately the Osprey can out fly a bald eagle.
In my experience watching Baldies, they are scavengers.
Beautiful Birds!!
I'm sure glad they came back after the DDT use. It was very rare to see one back in the 60's and 70's as I recall.


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## FOMOGO (Sep 9, 2021)

Just relocated a pack-rat this morning. Ran into him while up in the attic of the shop yesterday, preparing to run some more conduit. Really have to finish up the soffit, but it's been so smokey I've been putting it off until it clears up. Setup the live trap, baited with a small piece of pork, and some shiny, and colored bits of hardware, which they seem to like better than food. The rattle snakes have been more plentiful this year also. Came out to the shop one morning and saw a swallow sitting on the ground by the garage door. Something I've never seen before. Started talking softly to him, and after a while he flew off. As I turned to enter the man door three feet in front of me, there sat a prairie rattler all coiled up and ready to strike. After dispatching him, I noticed he didn't have any rattles. I think he may have lost them in the junk pile next to the door. Now for the weird part. The next morning I came down to the closed up shop, and inside the first bay, sitting on the floor was what appeared to be the same swallow I met the day before. Thanked him for his intervention the day before, opened the big door, and off he went, never to be seen again. That same day the wife was out trimming trees, and after finishing one side of a big spruce, and going around to the other side, she spotted another rattler that she had apparently been standing right next to. She came and got me, and I killed him. If I see rattlers on the road, or off my property I leave them be, but on the property, they have to go.  Mike


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## cwilliamrose (Sep 9, 2021)

MrWhoopee said:


> ........ Ground squirrels aren't true squirrels, they're rodents and deserve to be eaten.


I believe all squirrels are rodents.

Our gray squirrels respond well to the car horn when they're foraging in the driveway but they only do that when the trees have nothing to offer.


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## Nutfarmer (Sep 10, 2021)

A squirrel can bury 5,000 nuts!  At  5 cents a piece that's 250 dollars per  squirrel .  This is all out war. I have been lax on keeping the squirrel population down. That ends tomorrow.  The rodinator  comes out. It pumps a mixture of propane and oxygen down the squirrel hole and then sets it off. Pictures to follow. No gray squirrels ( tree squirrels) are hurt only ground squirrels. It basically blows up the squirrel hole.


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## RJSakowski (Sep 11, 2021)

Nutfarmer said:


> A squirrel can bury 5,000 nuts!  At  5 cents a piece that's 250 dollars per  squirrel .  This is all out war. I have been lax on keeping the squirrel population down. That ends tomorrow.  The rodinator  comes out. It pumps a mixture of propane and oxygen down the squirrel hole and then sets it off. Pictures to follow. No gray squirrels ( tree squirrels) are hurt only ground squirrels. It basically blows up the squirrel hole.


I am interested in seeing your results. I don't have problem with ground squirrels but I do with moles.  Home Depot sells a concoction that gasses the critters. https://www.homedepot.com/p/AMDRO-Gopher-Gasser-6-Pack-100525532/203031283  Another brand is this: https://store.doyourownpestcontrol.com/giant-destroyer-smoke-bombs-gas
Looking at the ingredients, they are essentially black powder smoke bombs that fill the tunnels with a toxic gas.  

The gray squirrels are responsible for a proliferation of black walnut trees on the property. we don't collect the nuts so their harvesting them isn't a problem. Up on the hills above us, they collect a lot of acorns, competing with turkeys and deer.  They are also wiote efficient at collecting hickory nuts and if you want any, you have to be rather quick in order to get them.


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## Nutfarmer (Sep 11, 2021)

RJSakowski  I never have had any luck with the gas bombs like you describe. The flood irrigation keeps them out of the main part of the orchard,but they proliferate around the outside. The best control was inviting over a few friends for a day of shooting. We stopped that when lead ammunition was band. Most type of traps and poison are also band. So we will try the propane. The California University Extention advises that each squirrel does an estimated fifty dollars a year damage in a walnut orchard. Tree squirrels and crows are now game animals with seasons and limits. I wonder when rats will be a protected species.


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## RJSakowski (Sep 11, 2021)

Every day it seems there is another reason not to live tn California.   
AFAIK, there is no commercial farming of nuts in Wisconsin.  IMO, black walnut meat is superior to English walnut's  but it is very difficult to cleanly extract the nut meat.  Although the squirrels know how to do it.  When I was young, we had several butternut trees in the yard and we would harvest them.  The technique was to hit the end of the nut with a hammer.  If lucky, it would break cleanly and then we would extract the nut meat in pieces with a pick. The process usually took a day or so to extract a pound or two of nut meat for my Mom's baking.  Child labor was cheap back then.


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## RJSakowski (Sep 11, 2021)

BTW, we were able to harvest the nuts because my Dad kept a loaded .22 in the breezeway about forty feet from the trees and we ate a lot of squirrel in the fall.  We also had a dog loose on the property.


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## Nutfarmer (Sep 13, 2021)

I am totally amazed that a squirrel can chew through a small corner of a black walnut and remove the entire nut from the one place. If you have ever cracked black walnut you can understand .. The squirrels on the farm lastly will go after the black walnuts. Looking at their work I am impressed that they can remove the entire meat from a black walnut with only one small hole in the black walnut.


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