Towards the end of March—to be accurate, on the 22nd—I see in a note in my squirrel diary that Laurence wakened and was busy over his breakfast at 6 a.m., and that Fritz came along, and, perching on the heather thatch of his house, swore fiercely at him, twisting his tail with rage. He heeded not my call, nor the rattle of nuts on my window sill; but burrowed his nose into the heather, in vain attempts to come to close quarters with his enemy. Laurence swished his tail too, and returned his compliments with interest; but, finding it impossible to fight, he presently turned his back on Fritz and resumed his nut cracking—with a lofty contempt for the other—and Fritz had to come up to me to be fed and consoled.
At last Laurence’s bride arrived, and as had happened before with the various pairs under observation, she soon took the best of everything. Laurence was turned out of his sleeping-box; she stole all his best nuts; and invariably made him wait till she had finished her meals, leaving only the refuse for him.
She arrived on the seventeenth of April, and I opened the cage door to set them both free after she had had a fortnight to get used to the sight of the house and the human beings in the garden, and to understand that food and water were always to be found in that particular place.
I also made a little hole in the thatched roof—as squirrels like to have two entrances to their abodes—and Laurence immediately set out to enjoy his liberty. I soon saw his little head emerging from the hole at the top, and I watched his furtive joy as he capered about among the foxgloves and periwinkles below, and finally was lost to my sight clambering up a cherry tree. Mrs. Laurence, on the contrary, was quite a week before she quitted the cage. She preferred to remain where food was abundant, and where her comfortable sleeping-box kept her snug at night.
When at length she did venture forth with her husband into the unknown, she still stole back for several nights to her safe shelter. But at last, I suppose, they built between them a nest in the wood, for I constantly saw Laurence very busily tearing strips of fibre from the trees just then, and the cage was finally deserted.
Squirrels are very busy in the spring stripping bark for making new nests, and in the summer this is sometimes carried on for remaking and mending the old.
They generally choose damp rainy days for doing this, when the material they gather is full of moisture. Once, however, in a spell of prolonged hot dry weather, I was much struck with a clever device on the part of one of them, probably Fritz.