During the following winter Bismarck looked to me for food. A loaf of bread was wired to a post near the cabin door, from which he could eat, while he could not carry it away. One cold, rainy day, he sat by the bread without eating, and whimpered like a little child. He was telling me in squirrel language that it was cold, rainy, and almost night, and that I ought to give him some bread to take home to his family. I understood his appeal, and passed him a biscuit. He scampered away chuckling over his good luck. After that, fair or foul, all through the winter days, he would beg for bread to take home, and always chuckled when he got it. Perhaps he was laughing at me for being an easy mark, or it may have been squirrel for "I thank you a thousand times." However that may be, he was welcome, for I thought of the baby squirrels starving along on a cone-seed diet.
Bismarck would eat all kinds of meat—even fat pork—but he preferred cooked meat to raw. While the famine was on he turned his attention to many kinds of food found in the woods. I made a record of each variety, and religiously tasted of everything he used. Frozen barberries and chokeberries were preferred to all others. I found the barberries had lost much of their usual sourness; the chokeberries were sweet and palatable. While the former remained on the bushes through the winter, the latter were soon exhausted, for they were food for quail, grouse, blue jays, and mice. The berries of the greenbrier, staghorn sumach, and rosehips were used sparingly. The greenbrier berries had a sweetish taste; the staghorn sumachs were sour and puckery, while the rosehips had a pleasant flavor at first, ending in a most disagreeable bitter. Many mushrooms were caught by an early frost, and remained frozen through the winter. These were food for Bismarck. He would gnaw out the under part, or gills, rejecting the rest. I tasted the food, but cannot say that I care for frozen mushroom.
In the spring pussy-willow buds formed a part of Bismarck's food. I found the buds nearly tasteless, but they crunched between the teeth like a crisp cucumber. As spring advanced, creeping wintergreen and partridge-berries appeared here and there where the sun had melted the snow, and Bismarck greedily devoured the bright red berries. Later berries formed the greater part of his food until the hazelnuts were ripe. Wild apple-trees abound on Cape Ann, and Bismarck attacked the fruit early in the fall. He destroyed great quantities for the seed, which was the only part stored for winter use. However, he seemed to relish an apple, if it was not too sour, and all through the winter he would eat a Baldwin apple, even to the seeds, at one sitting.
The history of Bismarck through a year of famine is the history of other red squirrels on Cape Ann. It is evident that the red squirrel is famine proof. If the nut crop is a failure, chickaree turns his attention to other food sources, and by perseverance and hard work is able to keep the wolf from the door.
For years Bismarck and the blue jays have matched wits. After nesting, the blue jays would flock to the cabin and impudently appropriate all the food found in the trees. Bismarck seemed to know that it was useless to store food longer in this way, so he would bury it beneath the pine-needles. The jays were soon on to this trick. When I threw a piece of bread to the squirrel he would start at once to hide it, while the jays would follow him, keeping in the trees, just out of reach. The moment he left, the jays would fly down, dig out the bread and carry it away. It often happened that Bismarck would fool the robbers by pretending to bury the bread. He would dig a hole, cover it over, pat down the pine-needles, but would run away with the bread in his mouth. While the jays were scratching the pine-needles right and left, in a useless search, Bismarck would hide the bit of bread, and return to the dooryard for more. He was not so particular if the food was wheat bread, but if it was his favorite food—doughnut—the jays were fooled every time.
Every spring Bismarck taps the trees around the cabin. He begins on the maples and ends later on the birches. If the tree is small, he taps the trunk; if large, he works on the limbs. He gnaws through the bark and into the wood, then clings to the limb or trunk, below the wound, while he laps the sweet sap. If there is a hollow in the bark into which the sap flows, Bismarck is sure to find it.
Did the red squirrel learn how to tap trees from the American Indian, or did the Indian learn from the squirrel?