A friendly reminder, NOT to over feed them.
It might be nice, cute and even funny
to watch them work but,
that's not helping them.
You might be surprised but squirrels,
they can't count and any left out food,
takes 1st priority over anything else.
Which means that
preparing their nest/drey for winter,
takes 2nd place and they could
end up freezing to death,
due to over feeding them.
So if you put out 500 nuts,
they will basically work themselves
to the death in order to hide them
from other squirrels and they won't stop
till every single one of them is hidden.
They will even take much higher risks,
exposing themselves to predators,
just to hide them.
Despite them having more nuts
than they could possibly eat.
If you do this every single day,
their nests will be neglected,
even mating will be set aside
till the job is done, which it is never,
cause you keep filling the station.
So please, feed with caution!
A single squirrel can only eat
4 to 8 hazelnuts or 2 to 4 walnuts per day, that's it!
To make this perfectly clear,
if you put out 1 million nuts,
they will hide 1 million nuts
even if will kill them doing so.
Squirrels can't count, that's your job!
It is as they say:
'The road to hell, is paved with good intentions'
Make sure you intentions are truly good.
Dear Decan, you are a true expert on the life of squirrels! You have a lot of experience and you are lucky because you had the opportunity to take care of one of them, I am a big fan of these wonderful animals. Thank you very much for a very interesting e-mail and I will be grateful for the next ones, best regards, Dorota.
Thanks so much for posting this Decan, even though I’ve never seen squirrels where I live, it’s good to know what to do, just in case one finds an injured squirrel and how much to feed them.