Squirrels on campus

Squirrels! They are the cutest furry animals! Now is probably their feasting time because all the plants are making lots of seeds before the temperature drop and they don't have enough Sun to make food and carbon supply for their next generation. (Arghghg!! All I can think of is carbon this and carbon that these days! But finally submitted the abstract this morning!)

Want to know what the squirrels are eating? There are a few different types of tree seeds/nuts that they eat when they are not being fed by humans. This black one here was eating a tiny seed in a hard green shell that comes in bunches like grapes. It is from the plant 'flowering Dogwood'. I wanted to look for an intact shell but since this little squirrel was running all over the tree gathering all of it, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Plus, any of those seeds that are on the ground were already cracked open. This little squirrel clearly have no courtesy to people walking by. They don't look down to see if they were going to hit anyone when throwing the shells down. But it was also because one of its shell fell on me that I realized what the squirrels were eating.

By the way, I just found out that black squirrels are not native too Michigan but were introduced by W.K. Kellogg (the same guy who founded the Kellogg Manor House of Kellogg Biological Station!) to get rid of the more abundant red squirrels. Hmm, not sure if it was successful back then but there certainly is more black ones than the red ones now.

Another thing they eat is one that they are always associated with on cartoons...but Ping has forgotten what it is called. :P
It was this little brown squirrel who were looking for them, cracking them up and then throw them all over the ground. They seriously need a better table manners! Hehe. They seem to prefer the nuts with a certain ripeness because sometimes the squirrel throws down an intact one. No idea how they pick them but they sure are picky! They are really fast at picking them too because when they are running around the tree looking for and picking the nuts, it sounds like it is raining large raindrops and every time you pin point where they are throwing the nuts from, they would already be at another part of the tree.
Look at all the mess they make!