More About Squirrels and Oaks

I decided to do an "Urban Hike" today and walked around Eden Park, roughly following the route I mapped out a couple of days ago. It was quite a nice walk, but I find I really prefer trails to sidewalks. People drive too fast through the park and I found myself wanting to shake my tiny fist at them and shout at them to slow down. And get off my lawn.

I was still thinking about squirrels and oaks today, probably because I live in close proximity to both. When I took my laundry to the basement this morning (I have to go outside to do this) there was a squirrel chattering at me from the security of a hundred year old oak tree.

Every few years, oak trees produce a synchronized bumper crop of acorns, a process known as masting. The abundance of food for the squirrels in turn causes a furry population boom the following year; well fed squirrels produce more squirrel pups. In colonial times, when the forests were more extensive and less fragmented, this often led to huge mass migrations during September as the squirrels left the area in search of new territories. In 1803 Lewis and Clark witnessed one of these mass emigrations, noting squirrels swimming across the Ohio River. Lewis assumed they were moving south for the winter. Other historical records report masses of gray squirrels so dense that it would take a month for the army to pass through.

The following text was copied from this website, but I can't find the author's name, else I would attribute:

During modern times, squirrel emigrations have not been as spectacular because of the cutting and fragmentation of the vast hardwood forest does not normally allow the build up of the same size squirrel mess as previous eras. But in 1964, millions of squirrels emigrated from the north of Georgia to the south. "One squirrel was reported swimming across the Allatoona Reservoir and encountered a boat in his path. It didn’t stop him. He just ran up an oar, jumped in the boat, ran across the man in the boat, and jumped back into the water continued his swim south. Normally wild squirrels in the woods are scared of man but during migration they lose their normal fear.

In 1968, a migration of squirrels occurred in most of the eastern United States; Alabama, the Carolinas, Georgia, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Virginia. In New York, one hundred thousand drowned squirrels were pulled out of one reservoir. The number of squirrels killed by automobiles was a thousand times as high as usual. Some estimates of the squirrels number went as high as eighty million.