Cute brother and sister gray squirrels have an energetic play session on their oak tree platforms. This is typical playful squirrel activity consisting of soft biting, grooming and wrestling of a non-sexual nature. It will be some month before they are sexually mature, for now its all fun and play and plenty of food!
The three squirrels born in early October and raised in a Woodpecker nest box now live together in the Backyard Oak tree. Their mother has recently passed away. The story of their life in the nest box is at:
They have been inseparable since leaving the nest, but it wont be long before they break up and spread out with the young males likely chased off to find new territory, but not very far away in the woods, perhaps only an acre or so away.
Gray Squirrels urine mark profusely over four days on a wooden tabletop in the Backyard which has become a new territorial boundary marker. Setting up a camera trap for Blue Jays I have been training resulted in an unexpected amazing discovery of just how much territory marking Gray Squirrels do - and how critical their sense of smell is to communication. You will learn perhaps more than you ever wanted to know about how Gray Squirrels use their sense of smell to communicate. The large oak tree seen in the background of all the videos has been their traditional territorial boundary marker - but after the wooden table was in the Backyard for about a week for the Blue Jays the Gray Squirrels apparently adopted it as a new key position marker and checkpoint in their territorial geography database. Watch in amazement - BTW this is not just a male thing - the females can mark with the best of them!
Squirrels mark territory with scent and may actively defend that territory in direct interactions. Gray squirrels have two main scent marking tools, urine and scent glands near the mouth. They will frequently urinate as they move along travel routes and they often stop and rub their oral scent glands as well. When two squirrels meet they will greet each other by sniffing these oral scent glands, sometimes placing their hands on the other squirrels shoulders, which gives the appearance of kissing and hugging and has given rise to many a novelty greeting card photo.
The second main territorial marking method gray squirrels is chewing a large vertical stripe on a large dominant tree in their territory and using this visual marking as a scent marking post. All squirrels passing by this stripe will stop and smell who has been around and add marks of their own. These marks are often maintained for generations (squirrel generations that is).
Pine Nuts are tasty! Squirrels are excited about a bumper crop of Longleaf and Slash Pine Cones this Fall. It takes much hard work, but under each "leaf" of the giant cones is a tasty pine nut that squirrels - and humans - love. The Longleaf Pine's cones are huge up to a foot long and heavy - weighing more than the squirrel. Once the squirrel has chewed a skinny "handle" it will try and drag the cone to a safe place to finish them off. This is also great food for humans. Stands of Longleaf pines once covered much of the southeastern US, but today they are becoming rare due to past timber harvesting and rampant development as they take many decades to reach up to 60-100 feet tall. Even the more common in this area Slash Pine's are getting rarer. They are both a critical part of the natural habitat and the conservation area behind the Backyard has a rare stand of original native longleaf pines exceeding 60 feet. Toward the end of the video you will see another squirrel in a slash pine eating pine nuts and note the difference in the cones.
