What do squirrels do in winter? Many people picture them asleep until spring. But walk through a spruce forest on a cold January day and you may spot a red-brown tail leaping from branch to branch. Red squirrels stay awake all winter. In autumn they run a busy project: burying nuts and seeds in many small spots. Some of those spots they never find again. And that might be the most important thing a squirrel does for the whole forest.
What happens to a squirrel when winter comes?
The red squirrel is a small rodent that lives in forests across most of Norway. It does not hibernate. Instead its coat grows thicker and greyer, its ear tufts grow longer, and its tail, almost as long as its body, becomes a blanket inside a round nest of twigs and moss high in a tree.
Winter food comes mostly from spruce cones. The squirrel holds a cone like a corn cob, strips off the scales one by one and eats the tiny seeds underneath. What is left looks like an apple core.
In autumn the squirrel also hides food: nuts and seeds pushed into the ground or into cracks in bark.
Here is the surprise: the squirrel plants forests without knowing it.
It remembers roughly where it dug, and its nose helps with the last few centimetres, even through snow. But not every cache is collected. Mice take some. Some just stay buried. A hazelnut that lies safe in the soil all winter can sprout when spring comes.
Try it at home: be a squirrel for a week
Ages 4–10. You need ten nuts in their shells (or horse chestnuts if anyone has a nut allergy, but do not eat them), paper and a pencil, and a garden or patch of woods you can return to.
- The child hides the ten nuts in ten different places.
- An adult secretly draws a map of the hiding spots.
- The child guesses how many they will find in a week.
- Wait a whole week without looking.
- Go back, search, and count what you find.
- Compare with the map. Which spots were easiest to remember?
Which caches did the child find? Probably the ones next to something special, like a big rock or a stump. And did some nuts vanish because a bird or a mouse got there first? More autumn experiments are collected in Why is autumn the best laboratory a child can have?, and you can read how insects survive the cold in Where do insects go in winter?
What happens if you leave one forgotten nut in the ground until May?
Questions to wonder about
- Where would you hide your food if you were a squirrel?
- Why do you think squirrels hide food in many places instead of one big pile?
- If squirrels remembered every single cache, what would the forest look like in a hundred years?
Every child is made of good atoms, and every child can discover how a forgotten nut becomes a tree. Explore free content at goodatoms.com.