Watched by Wild Animals

by Enos A. Mills

Most summer birds fly away from winter. Other birds and a few animals travel a short distance—go to a place where food is more abundant although the winter there may not be any milder than in the locality in which they summered. Birds that remain to winter in the locality in which they summered, and most of the animals, too, go about their affairs as usual. They do not store food for the winter or even for the following day. The getting of food in the land of snows does not appear to trouble them.

But a number of animals—squirrels, chipmunks, conies, and beavers—store food for the winter. Generally these supplies are placed where they are at all times readily reached by the owners; on the earth, in it, in the water; the place depending on the taste and the habits of the fellow.

Upon the mountain tops the cony, or Little Chief Hare, stacks hay each autumn. This tiny stack is placed in the shelter of a big boulder or by a big rock, close to the entrance of his den. While the beaver is eating green canned bark the cony is contentedly chewing dry, cured hay.

The beaver is one of the animals which solves the winter food and cold problem by storing a harvest of green aspen, birch, and willow. This is made during the autumn and is stored on the bottom of the pond below the ice-line. Being canned in cold water the bark remains fresh for months.

Squirrels store nuts and cones for winter food. Most squirrels have a regular storing place. This covers only a few square yards or less and usually is within fifty or sixty feet of the base of the tree in which the squirrel has a hole and a winter home.

Commonly, when dining, the squirrel goes to his granary or storage place and uses this for a dining room. A squirrel in a grove near my cabin sat on the same limb during each meal. He would take a cone, climb up to this limb, about six feet above the snow, back up against the tree and begin eating. One day an owl flew into the woods. The squirrel dropped his cone and scampered up into the treetop without a chirp.

Another day a coyote came walking through the grove without a sound. He had not seen me and I did not see him until the squirrel suddenly exploded with a sputtering rush of squirrel words. He denounced the coyote, called him a number of names. The coyote did not like it, but what could he do? He took one look at the squirrel and walked on. The squirrel, hanging to the cone in his right hand, waved it about and cussed the coyote as far as he could see him.

A number of species of chipmunks store quantities of food, mostly weed seed. But no one appears to know much of the winter life of chipmunks.

Chipmunks around my home remain under ground more than half of the year. Two near my cabin were out of their holes only four months one year. They were busy these four months gathering seeds and peanuts which they stored underground in their tunnels. Twice by digging I found the chipmunks in a sleep so heavy that I could not awaken them, and I believe they spend much of the eight months underground sleeping. Digging also revealed that they had eaten but little of their stored supplies.