looduskalender.ee

Squirrel

 

 

A spruce forest or mixed spruce forest comes alive when there is a good cone year. As written earlier, a good cone year repeats after every five or seven years.

 

The snow is falling from a spruce, and one’s eye catches a movement– there’s a squirrel in gray winter fur, with brushes on his eartops. He snaps the cone from the top of the branch and hastens back to near the trunk. Next comes the eating ritual – squirrel turns the cone’s pointed top down, with his front teeth he removes the covering scales, that hide seeds. So he does round and round, until only stub and top are left, which he drops from his front paws...  A squirrel has to husk over thirty cones in the short winter day to get his food ration filled. Spruce seeds are very light, a thousand seeds weigh only three to ten grams and one cone offers the squirrel about  one hundred seeds: all can work out even more figures on their own.

 

I used to live for years in Nõmme (garden part of Tallinn). There were many squirrels and one nice over a hundred years old spruce grew in themiddle of my view from my working room. I used to have always a binocular right there beside me. At the cone years there were over five hundred cones on the spruce like this.

 

Spruce cone worked by squirrel