the Walnut Diary

Is it true that a grey squirrel is more territorial and will run red squirrels out of their area even to the point of chewing their nuts off?Rod Croskery, Rod has owned a lifetime of English springer spaniels.Answered Oct 22, 2020

Quite the opposite, from my observation over a few decades: in Eastern Ontario the red squirrels are so fast and aggressive that the greys avoid them, even allowing their smaller rivals possession of choice walnut trees, rather than confronting them.

Because the reds do not plant walnuts (broadcast hoarding) the way the greys do, and because the reds insist upon turning our attic into a larder for walnuts, I kill them off with my shotgun until the greys can resume their scatter-hoarding around our farm.75 viewsView 2 upvotesAnswer requested by Randy Steele22
Add CommentRod Croskery · June 12, 2021

Over the last year during a bumper nut crop I learned to raid the red squirrels’ caches of walnuts — substantial piles of green nuts heaped on the forest floor — overflowing from their usual log or den caches. My neighbour and I simply shovelled the nuts into the back of my Kioti Mechron and hauled them out to distribute to other land owners for planting to replace ash trees lost to the borers. Two hauls of four five-gallon pails full went to other woodlots, but I also enlisted the grays in other parts of the woodlot to plant some of the surplus nuts. I just left the pails of nuts on the ground and returned for the empty pails the next day.

Another update is in order. 6 January, 2022

Over a two-week period last fall I wanted the squirrels to plant walnuts over a ten-acre section of our woodlot after an improvement cut to remove diseased American beech trees which made up 40% of the tree population. My first effort involved dumping a five gallon pail of nuts next to a game camera to report the activity. A single red squirrel carried every nut fifty feet to a large maple, and up the same track to a hole halfway up the trunk. This went on from an hour before daylight until every nut was gone. The red tried to kill a Grey squirrel who ventured in for a nut.

Plan B: Kill the red squirrel. I went into Elmer Fudd mode and made a fool of myself for an hour before realizing that the vanished squirrel had been lying on a branch, silently watching me for the whole time I scanned the large tree.

Plan C: Spread nuts where that squirrel isn’t. I put the game camera to work again along our driveway. The first day a cache of nuts was ignored by three Greys, a gray and two blacks, which lived in an adjacent tree. On the second day the camera recorded many feints and quick runs by the nuts with much nervous tail twitching. Eventually the gray mother squirrel picked one up, examined it, but then dropped it and ran away. One of the black daughters was a little braver, and dashed in, grabbed a nut and retreated to a limb of the tree above. Eventually all three began to steal nuts from “the trap” and retreat to the tree with the nuts with hulls still intact. This was no better than the red squirrel’s headlong effort. I reset the camera to watch the trunk of the tree. The following day I have film of one of the black squirrels descending the tree with a hulled nut in her mouth. Then she tentatively made her way down a trail away from the tree. She went out of the camera view after a couple of hundred feet, but I observed her planting a nut (not necessarily the same one) near a fence row at the far end of our lawn 500 feet from the tree.I set up a feeding station for these three Greys where I could watch them from the breakfast table in the house. The gray lady is my favourite. She overthinks everything. A nut planted is not necessarily going to stay there. One day I watched her replant a nut two more times in different locations until she was apparently satisfied with its location.My take-away from the distribution of at least a dozen pails of nuts over a two week period: Grey squirrels will plant nuts. They work slowly, but with great deliberation and dedication. Red squirrels and chipmunks destroy walnuts by burying them too deeply in dens or packing them together in places where they can’t grow.

Plan D: I started distributing nuts in piles of about a dozen at a time, in many locations around the road in the woodlot. I drove my UTV on the route several times a day as I checked the many caches, looking for partial depletion as an indicator that the Greys were at work. If the nuts were all gone, I eliminated that site as a candidate for more nuts, assuming that a red or a chipmunk had found it. This seemed to work, but the Greys get tired easily. In some cases a couple of dozen nuts moved out right away, but then the cache was ignored for weeks.

My sources for the abundant walnuts were unharvested sections of road through the woodlot where no squirrels visited, for some reason. I used a nut wizard to roll the nuts into five gallon pails with amazing efficiency. Alternatively I raided a red squirrel nut cache where I filled five pails with a shovel in just a couple of minutes. This left a hole about the size of a bathtub in a gap between two rotting elm logs. There were still lots of nuts in the cache.

If you Google Rod Croskery on YouTube, the video For The Love of Black Walnuts will likely pop up. With over 800 hits so far, it is doing a lot better than my film on motorizing the rotation of the chute on my snow blower which has 32.

Update, 8:01 a.m., 6 Jan, ’22

Over my granola this morning I watched the Grey Lady deal with a cache of walnuts I had left in the feeding station four days ago. They have sat untouched through a balmy day yesterday, but today in 25 degrees F she decided to visit. While the red squirrel mentioned in this lengthy tome repeated the same activity at least fifty times in plundering a pailful of nuts on camera, this Grey is a true lateral thinker. I watched while she buried a nut in the snow on the other side of the pump, then returned rapidly for another, which she buried in the snow behind a parked truck. Next candidate went up to the very top of a small sugar maple, where she found a crotch where she jammed it securely. Next nut went out of sight into a tall cedar tree, but then I saw her coming down from the top of another young sugar maple, without a nut. And so it goes. From what I know of this lady, these initial placements will be revised over the coming days. Some may be fed to her nest mates, the two black-mutation offspring who nest with her. The Grey lady’s urgency makes sense to me now. I just looked out to see a red squirrel bouncing around all over the place. The walnuts have already been put away safely. In this case, the early Grey got the nuts.